The personal blog of game designer, programmer and Cand. Scient. Informatics, Jimmy Marcus Larsen. Currently working as a game designer at Cego ApS.
April 13, 2007 at 22:30
A few years ago an often used buzz word among game reviewers was non-linearity. Games were supposed to allow for a multiple, amount of ways to go for the player. This was in contrast to linearity, where the games only allowed for one way to go. In reality, the word was often used about what should have been called multi-linearity, as the games gave nothing more than several linear ways to go.
Today the word non-linearity feels abused and is prone to cause confusion. What we want now is emergence. This phenomenon occurs when a set of simple rules collaborate to form complex or unexpected systems or events - true non-linearity. Creating games for emergence should be the new goal for game designers, and game programmers better get ready. It is not trivial to code for emergence, and it is certainly not trivial to test emergent systems either.
Our semester game is actually beginning to show some emergent properties. This makes play testing a lot of fun… and debugging less fun. Hopefully we can complete the demo next week, and finish writing our report.
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