Your first "emergent" experience? :)

edited in General
Been thinking lately a lot about emergent mechanics and how to build and design for it, and had thought back to... When was the first time I experienced it without having a name for it?

I think for me it was when I cast heal on undead enemies and damaged them in final fantasy 6. Or at least first time I remember :) one could argue that that's not "emergent" but I think for those days that was pretty damn "ooooooh" :)

Yours? :)

Comments

  • I think it's kinda difficult to judge, as the player which experiences are truly emergent. How do you know weather or not the developer just designed it that way? It would however also be interesting to hear about emergent gameplay while people were busy developing games. I'm sure games like Desktop dungeons must have plenty of that going on.
  • Yeah of course, thats what I meant by its not black and white. I guess what I meant was truly surprising combinations, like healing an enemy. I think that these must've been quite off the chart in those days, yes the ff guys probably meant it to work that way, but it must've come from some emergent line of thinking...

    Well, just a thought, I was interested in knowing whether there were such thing as emergent gameplay in the "olden days" :)

    The million 1UP tricks in super Mario maybe counted, but that wasn't that interesting.
  • I don't know if this was my first, but I remember playing Counter-strike to the point where we weren't really playing CT vs. T any more, but instead jumping on one another's heads, and trying to get everyone to run at the same time, at the same angle, so that we could have a whole tower of players moving around the map.

    Kiiiiind of something like this:
  • Haaa! I remember that. Ooooh that reminds me - ROCKET JUMPING in Quake :) Don't remember if it started in Quake 1 and 2 - but Quake 3 definitely was rocketjumping like a bauss :)
  • Tau cannon jumping in half life! Sooooo much fun! We use to play this game to death at school.
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    Two football players having an emergent experiences in Fifa 2012.

    Though I'd have to say enemy in-fighting in Doom was the first time I can recall being truly enthralled by emergence.

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    Enemies fought each other in Doom? The first one? Wow I never remembered seeing that. Very cool :)

    OMFG these Fifa12 moments are TOO FUNNY. I wonder if the devs knew this kind of stuff were happening and if they decided not to fix them "too much" :)
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    Jarred just had an emergent experience.

    We were all fighting Cacodemon's in Death Smashers multiplayer and we discovered that it was possible to stand on top of the Cacodemon's head and surf them!!! (omg). But while surfing his Cacodemo the beast tried to ram him and so flew upwards incredibly fast and so far that both the Cacodemon and Jarred (who had merged to occupy the same space) almost immediately disappeared. Jarred's screen was filled with a crazy spinning view of the level far bellow, until that too disappeared.

    They transcended their differences and entered Cacodemon heaven (is what we, left watching from below, assumed). He never return.
    Thanked by 3Nandrew edg3 Tuism
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