The five pillars of emergent gameplay

gamesindustry.biz:

Players expect more from their games, now more than ever before. Over the past twenty years, the scope, budget and audience expectations of games have inflated, and smaller studios are left seemingly locked in a cycle of diminishing returns on increasingly ambitious productions.

While tools have improved dramatically, allowing smaller teams to produce more graphically and mechanically complex games than ever before, producing equivalent experiences to AAA mega-studios is still prohibitively expensive. Savvy studios seeking more immediate return on their investments might seek other, more cost-effective approaches to game design.

Thrilling as a solo ten-hour-long campaign can be, linear content is expensive to produce. Telemetry and achievements also tell us that many players will stop playing long before the end, or even the halfway point. That's a lot of development hours with increasingly diminishing returns. While your core audience will stick around to the end, and want DLC, sequels and more, there's no guarantee that they'll stick around year upon year for the same kind of experience. It takes additional time and manpower to market these authored experiences to bring in fresh audiences.

One potential solution is emergent design. Rather than devoting time, budget and talent on single-use setpieces and cinematics that most players will only see once, some of the most compelling experiences in games can be produced on a comparatively small budget by shifting the focus to the player, and giving them richer options to interact with the world.

From survival sandboxes like Minecraft, Subnautica and Ark: Survival Evolved, to extraction shooters like Escape From Tarkov, to construction sandboxes like Space Engineers,