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I have a confession to make: I have not played Viva Piñata.

I hear tell it's a great game, I dunno if that's true or not, but I'll take my friends at their word when they say it. None-the-less, it is that ignorance of the game that brought me to the topic I want to discuss, so bear with me.

You see, two people who I have a great deal of respect for have extolled the virtues of the game to me. They say its emergent and explain the gameplay in breathless tones that tell me just as much about how compelling the game is as their stories... But, here's what I found interesting: They both told the same stories.

Case in point, to illustrate the emergent nature of the game, they both tell the tale of how these little worm guys moved into their gardens, which attracted the birds, but the birds eat the worms... The problem is, if you can't just beat the birds into goodies to save the worms because you need the birds.

Sounds awesome, I gotta admit, but it made me think: How emergent is it, really? And does that really matter?

What's important, that the game's system create emergent scenarios or that you feel that it does? Is this game really that emergent? Or did they set up the scenarios ahead of time and then feed them to you in such a way as to feel that way?

You know, to tell you the truth, they may not know themselves. So much of what we designers and game developers do is smoke and mirrors that it's very easy to fall into the trap of buying your own hype.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard someone tell me about a cool moment that "just happened" in the game they were playing, only to realize precisely how you could (and how they likely did) do that without any actual randomness at all. Half life was the king of this back in the day, but the technology was so crude that you could tell it was all scripted because you could "feel" when you were about to trigger one. Now a days things are a lot more subtle, but I'd still bet dollars to doughnuts that most of the "emergent behavior" we perceive in games is anything but.

Though, I'm not necessarily saying that's a bad thing. The artist, no the craftsman, in me says it is bad, but the story teller and GM side of me says that's bullshit; it doesn't matter how you pull it off, only how it feels to the player matters.

The thing is though; I can't help thinking that every time we fake it we hold the whole damned industry back, just a little bit. Games borrow heavily on the ones that came before them, and if all we're doing is faking it - using tricks to make you think something amazing is happening instead of actually making something amazing - aren't we just teaching those that come after us to do the same? How does the craft of game design/development advance when that's the lesson we teach?

Well, there's something to be learned in faking it, too... so maybe I'm just over thinking it. Still, I wonder. When I was younger, I learned a lot from games; from moral lessons to math and a ton of critical thinking skills. Now that I'm older, I don't see the games I play now teaching any of that. Except that MMOs are really good at teaching min/max types math.

My point is, now-a-days the games out there feel a lot more like the rides at Disneyland: They may be marvels of technology on the inside, but to the outside they are merely harmless, incredibly simple, diversions. I think part of this may be due to the way we make the games. Most of us don't make sophisticated, maybe even complex, systems that create emergent mechanics through their interactions... Instead we create scripted "gotcha" moments and detailed scenarios that make you feel like that sophisticated, complex engine is running in the background.

Maybe we've lost sight of what our games really are. Maybe our games aren't as big as we think. Maybe they just feel big because they're being reflected between two mirrors, in a showy wreath of volumetric smoke.

- Snipehunter