Emergent Play in Minecraft

The assigned articles for today’s class in Game Culture elaborated upon the somewhat controversial topic of emergent play and control within computer games such as World of Warcraft, Lineage as well as Super Smash Bros. Melee. In the article Games of Emergence and Games of Progression Jesper Juul has for instance defined emergent play as computer games that “[…] feature huge amounts of variation even though they are based on simple rules, and how this variation is not just random or supplied by the user, but is a non-obvious consequence of the rules of a game.” Emergent play will therefore arise somewhere inside the negotiating spaces between the designer’s original intention and the player’s subsequent interpretation, and in the article The Mangle of Play Constance Steinkuehler has for instance pointed out that computer games often can become so-called mangles of production and consumption. Steinkuehler demonstrated that the different player communities within the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Lineage 2 often chose to subvert or renegotiate the designer’s original mechanics on a number of areas such as playing killing as well as gold farming, which is why the academic researchers not just must understand the “[…] formal rule systems designed into them but also the full range of human practices through which players actively inhabit their worlds and render them meaningful.” In the article Communication, Coordination, and Camaraderie in World of Warcraft Mark Chen likewise tried to emphasize the sociocultural importance of emergent play, since he went on to argue that the different ad-hoc rules as well as norms in his personal raid-group had enhanced the collaborative coordination in World of Warcraft.  

One could therefore argue that the game studies discipline has started to recognise the importance of emergent play in computer games, since researchers such as Chen and Steinkuehler attempted to frame the player as a more active human being that utilised his creative imagination in order to enhance the designer’s original intentions in different ways. In his PHD-dissertation from 2006 Jonas Heidi Smith argued that the game studies discipline has tried to encapsulate the role of player inside one of the four meta-categories called the susceptible player model, the selective player model, the active player model as well as the rational player model. Furthermore, the game studies discipline has for the last decade been favouring the so-called active player model, in which the player is regarded “[…] as actively engaged with the game or gamespace in ways often not prescribed or predicted by the game designers”, and the recent focus on emergent play must therefore be understood as a counter reaction to the outdated susceptible player model that dominated the discussion surrounding computer games and violence in the eighties. And the recent focus on emergent play has also spread to the game design communities, where the reviewers often praise the more emergent computer game titles that encourage the player to utilise his creative imagination in order to build different objects or buildings.

The emergent indie-phenomenon Minecraft has for instance encouraged the player to use the building materials or resources from the procedurally generated environments in order to construct different buildings, tools and objects. One can therefore argue that Minecraft personifies Juul’s ideas about emergent play in computer games, since the dedicated player communities have managed to use the simple building mechanics in order to construct impressive objects such the Enterprise as well as the Reichtag. For instance, I once talked to some players from a private Minecraft community, which had decided to turn the emergent building mechanics into performative utterances. The players inside the community therefore took turns in creating a monumental building, which either could be based upon their own imagination or a pre-existing building out in the real world. While creating the building the player furthermore needed to conform to both the predetermined temporal cycle within the Minecraft universe as well as the player-imposed or emergent challenge of completing the architectural project within less than week.

Emergent Play in Minecraft.

More Emergent Play in Minecraft.