My latest column is up on the WarCry Network. This one is about emergent gaming – as the title says. Effectively, I can sum up the basic point of t his column rather quickly: Players have a tendency to do things in your game that you did not necessarily design gameplay systems for. Whether that is creating a bank, or hosting cliff diving events, players will find many ways of entertaining themselves in your game. This isn’t a bad thing. This doesn’t mean that your gameplay systems have failed in some ways, and people hate them, so they are doing something else. However, you need to be aware of what players are doing for fun, and start to acknowledge that. Highlight player events like these, encourage players to partake in this emergent gaming.
Why? Because its fun. Because it brings players together. Because it provides your game with neat events. Because its free content that you don’t have to directly build.
This column felt like a fairly ‘duh’ statement to me when I wrote it. Yet, then I thought about how many games I’ve played where the community team actually did anything like that. Suffice to say, the number could have been much higher.
