Dev Pile: Emergence
I was first introduced to the idea of emergence by listening to my father tell one of the small subset of jokes he repeats. These are what we would later come to know as memes, but in my home life it was simply that I was used to seeing my father move through a lot of different social environments, and in those environments he was often telling a joke for the first time to people who’d never heard it before.
What had happened — I can’t remember the specifics too well — was that someone had opened a box or crate, pulled something out to get what was inside, and then had difficulty getting everything back in, despite the fact that it had all fit before, along with even more stuff. My father said, “Ah, you’ve discovered Zymergsy’s Law of Emergent System Dynamics. That is, you’ve opened a can of worms, and now you need a bigger can to put them back.”
This aphorism is one of many things my father has said that is stamped on the back of my brain. I can quote it at will, reasonably confident I’m getting it exactly right, even with the cadence — though of course you can’t hear that when I’m reading it into a microphone to later transcribe into text. The idea of emergence was largely left alone at that point. To me, it was literally a joke. I often wonder whether powerful or dangerous ideas in closed environments get unwittingly turned into punchlines so the people around us never have to contend with what those ideas actually mean.
In the context of game making, philosophy, and a whole bunch of other fields, I use the term emergence to refer to when a complex object has properties that are not inherent to any of its components, and that only become present through the interaction of those components. “Complex” is doing some heavy lifting there, too, because even something like the color red is an emergent property. There is not a single red atom in the universe, but everything I’ve ever seen that’s red is made of atoms. I think I got that quote from Daniel Dennett — who, as I understand it, was a bit of a bozo when it came to women and trans people, which is a shame, but he’s dead and doesn’t care.
The notion of emergence has all sorts of powerful ramifications for big, difficult topics. It solves a lot of things that seem too hard. In biology, the question of where consciousness comes from isn’t terribly hard once you consider how much you can get out of emergence. Societies, cultures, art, and science are all emergent properties that ultimately go back to the fact that, at some point, a slightly larger brain case was advantageous to survival. That’s just how things shook out. There are also emergent properties that themselves have emergent properties, which can be even stranger.
Evolution is an incredibly well‑understood, well‑attested theory of how the world works. It’s so fundamental that aspects of evolution are now just observable facts of how other systems behave. Natural selection will happen in any system where there is variation and reproduction. We can tell because natural selection applies to language. It applies to computer software. It’s why rocks take on the forms they do. It’s such a powerful system once you zoom out far enough, but understanding it in one area first lets you see how its effects emerge from interactions of otherwise unconcerned actors.
When we talk about game design and emergent game states, we’re bringing in some very big ideas in a way that can feel like you’re chaining them into a tiny box. No economic game ships with economic theory built in. Most economic theory either emerges from players playing the game or from players bringing outside knowledge into the game. It’s common for someone who understands the movement of money to have an advantage, but just as often they misunderstand things because they’re applying value incorrectly.
Economics is an entire field that emerges from humans attaching value to things. You can use economic tools to analyze animal behavior, but as best we understand, animal valuation doesn’t work the same way as human valuation. The only times we see something similar are with animals close to humans, like orangutans or monkeys. These ideas mean that while we can analyze their behavior economically, no orangutan has a single atom of economics in them.
Similarly, the game Chinatown and its evolution Waterfall Park, while being incredibly cutthroat economic games, are not games where anyone had to design economics into the system. When you assign values to things, close a system so players only have access to its internal resources, and tie victory directly to those interactions, economics will emerge as a natural byproduct.
Another fun emergent property in game design is ritual. Players will engage in behaviors they don’t necessarily know will succeed or fail. In religious studies, a ritual is a practice where the outcome is opaque. If you know exactly what inputs produce what outputs, it’s no longer a ritual. Part of ritual is not knowing which parts matter. You ring the bell, move the cloth, lift the candle — you don’t know which action is significant, only that the whole process is how you get the outcome you want.
Players do this all the time. They develop habits not because those habits are good play, but because those habits were present in past experiences that led to good outcomes. If you want a good example in a game with a huge data set, look at how people play Magic: The Gathering. The game has strict rules, but players still develop rituals they think are rules, or treat optional behaviors as mandatory, or they think the game requires them to behave in some way to ‘make it work,’ and don’t consider the levels of information present around them, which is often the boundary between players who make a lot of mistakes (me) and players who make a lot of mistakes but less often and less disastrously. Some players always play a land as soon as they can, even when it’s strategically unnecessary, because it feels like progress.
You can call this a bad heuristic, but thinking of it as ritual behavior gets at the heart of player enrollment. In my thesis, enrollment is the idea that the game deliberately makes the interaction between your wants and your actions opaque. You want to win. The game is a system of systems designed to keep you from knowing exactly how to do that. You have a general idea, but if the game simply let you do it, there’d be nothing left of the game. This brings us back to Bernard Suits’ definition of a game: the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.
With those parameters in place, how you interact with the obstacles is necessarily emergent. I don’t have to tell you exactly how to roll a die or move a piece. You may have your own ways of doing it. I can tell you what the rules require, but the game part is the opacity.
When I talk about game systems, I’m often not thinking about what they will do or can do, but what I hope they do. It’s not hard to put up guardrails to make something impossible, but it’s a lot harder to put out incentives to make something guaranteed. And sometimes that goes badly. Last year, I reflected on an old game of mine called Crowdfund This, and I ultimately think it’s a very weak game. The design is, for lack of a better word, sloppy. I didn’t have a good handle on interface design, and I didn’t know how to prevent players from making mistakes in how they played.
But the fixed version I devised in December 2025 — much as I like it — does not make my partner Fox happy. She prefers the original’s opaque play experience: pushing your luck, drawing more cards, piling onto a ridiculous prompt. I think that’s bad design now, because I’ve seen so many players struggle with it. But Fox doesn’t have to think about all those players. She gets to think about her own experience. She’s enrolled in the uncertainty, and the ritual feels like it gets her closer to the result, so she does it.
And to return to the story at the start: my dad is one of those people who can pack a truck like it’s Tetris. I wonder how long he’s had that joke ready while fixing things that were unpacked improperly.
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