Defining emergent narrative
A look at how emergent narratives are formed, and the human need to create meaning.
Humans have been telling themselves stories, big and small, for thousands of years. We tell ourselves stories to simulate hypothetical situations, to re-live our most horrendous fuckups in hindsight, and to exaggerate just how big it was for a nice ego boost (don’t lie to yourself, hon).
To get a handle on emergent narrative, we first need to understand that nothing exists in a vacuum. Narratives don’t come fully formed in our brains. They are generated from, and evolve through layers of experience and cultural context. Inspiration has to come from somewhere and, importantly, it doesn’t have to start with something big. For those who are able to think abstractly, anything can spark a story. From the tiniest environmental cues, to a valiant play by their most treasured meeple.
There are a few prerequisites for your average brain-haver to be able to extrapolate something worthwhile from a board or video game, however. According to Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman1 , in order to facilitate meaningful play there a few different ways to look at games. One of the lenses, or schemas, that they suggest involves looking at games as emergent systems which are able to arise, they say, thanks to a system’s complexity.
Essentially, if there are no connections to be drawn the brain has less to feed off creatively. In other words it’s important to have a certain level of interactivity — whether that’s between players, or the system itself — for narratives to emerge.
One of the best ways to illustrate how any old thing can give rise to emergent narrative is to experience Conway’s Game of Life for yourself. Just search it on Google. Conway’s super simple ruleset sees pixels (originally counters on a board) that are ‘born’ and ‘die’ depending on the number of others that surround them.
As is generally the case with emergent narratives, Conway’s Game of Life2 was never designed as a way to create stories. He started off with a far smaller board than you’ll see in online simulations, but players quickly began to recognise common patterns that emerged. Especially when the board started to expand and digital simulations started to speed things up a little. Watch closely, and you’ll start to see little entities appear and move across the board, and fleeting pixel clusters form colonies, expand, meld and die away in a fantastic blinking light show.
It’s these patterns that we — as creatures primed to notice such things — identify, causing s to relate to the little, colour-flipping dots in front of us. It doesn’t take long for humans to become emotionally attached to entities waddling across the board, picked out from what is ostensibly a few simple rules, or lines of code.
We are beings that benefit from relating to things, not just people, and to relate is to draw meaning from something. In other words we tell ourselves stories about the things we relate to, hence the Google employee who claimed it’s AI was alive.
Just as a collection of dots might be assigned a personality when it interacts with others to form patterns, a single meeple might start to feel important to a player when it’s endured a lot and survived, or died a true heroes death. All these meaningful moments stack up to form collections of emergent stories that can make gameplay more memorable.
Although these stories may not be explicitly intended by the game’s design, we can work to facilitate emergent narratives in order for creative players to evoke them, and bring deeper meaning to our game design.
Thanks for reading! Next time on MythClass we’ll be taking a deep dive into randomness, and how it encourages emergent narratives to form.
Rules of Play | £55.88 at Amazon
by Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman
Conway’s Game of Life | £59.99 at Amazon
by Nathaniel Johnston, Dave Greene