With "emergent gameplay" being a thing...

What would be the line between "allowing the player to play the game they want it" and "overall broken game"?

Because (at the risk of sounding like an old fart) it used to be that allowing the players to go outside the boundaries of what's intended meant broken, unfinished game design.

What?

That's never been true. Or at least, it's never been a rule.

Games that allowed you to go outside of their intended design have existed since Zelda, maybe even earlier.

Well it's certainly considered so by quite a few people that see all those speedruns involving glitches that make the player fly through the game faster, leading to acccusations of "cheater" and such.

Those are speedruns, of course they're considered cheating. When you think Emergent Gameplay you think doing crazy awesome shit, not "Her der der I beat the game faster." Why the heck would you WANT to cut parts of the game out unless they're boring cruddy slogs?

But apparently there's a line between, say, Sonic 06 glitching through and Dark Souls exploration of mechanics.

edited 23rd Feb '15 1:57:55 PM by WaxingName

Glitches are not emergent gameplay. Emergent gameplay is the interaction of AI behaviors and the player resulting in something unexpected/unscripted. It is not being able to walk through a wall when you approach at this angle and use this weapon.

Combos in Street Fighter and Strafejumping and Rocket jumping in some FPSes are glitches that resulted in being accepted as emergent gameplay.

Emergent Gameplay is more like using clever portal placements to bypass an entire puzzle because you understand the game's concept flawlessly. Its taking the lessons that the game is teaching you and taking it a step further.

I know this is hard to swallow, but some people like taking games to their limits and twisting them to see what insanity results.

Glitch speedruns and sequence breaking are fun to watch because they utterly snap the game in half and often require high amounts of skill. Those speedrunners know every single part of the game they're running.

Not to mention speedrunners in general, even ones who dont use glitches, tend to come from people who love a specific game or multiple specific games so damned much they want to play them over and over and over and over while trying to get better at it every time.

Almost every speedrunner whos halfway famous got their start via 'I loved so and so game and realized I could learn to speedrun it"

Implication that no other game has included "exploration of mechanics" before Dark Souls (and by "exploration of mechanics", what that really means for Dark Souls is "hardcore" gameplay + a complete refusal to explain basic gameplay mechanics).

Dark Souls has fake difficulty? I'd say it's one of the few games which manages to be really hard without being bullshit. I rarely feel like the devs just wanted me to die, rather I feel like I made some critical error.

But apparently there's a line between, say, Sonic 06 glitching through and Dark Souls exploration of mechanics.

The first is flat-out breaking the game by exploiting things the developers did not intend.

The second is using mechanics the devs intended to be used in a way they didn't expect. There's a difference.

Regular speedrunning is fine, but glitched speed running should be part of bug testing and used to close those glitches, not kept around for people to break the game. Unless it's a crappy game no one wanted to make in the first place, the programmers worked hard on every little bit. It's rather silly to let people just skip huge parts.

Well, depends on whether or not those glitches can be cool or not. Something like wall jumping in the Mario series would not exist if not for that frame-perfect wall-jump technique in the original SMB, for instance.

I thought Emergent Gameplay meant random occurrences that there is no script for, or so well randomized the same thing occurring again is unlikely, leading to a unique experience for each player and each play through.

Super Metroid.

Your argument is invalid.

Didn't say it was bad. Just said it was unfinished.

It got delayed a lot while they were working on it and perfecting it. The producer got pissed with the devlopment staff because of how much effort they put into it trying to make it perfect.

Super Metroid is a masterpiece and a triumph of game design.

Your argument is invalid.

"I don't like it, therefore it shouldn't exist!"

Why do you hate other people having fun? The point of a speedrun, unless it's 100%/noglitch is to beat the game as fast as possible no matter what. If a glitch lets you skip massive portions, then do it!

I love watching glitch any% speedruns, thank you very much. Seeing the players break the game is fun as hell, precisely because it both takes immense skill and provides a whole new look into the game. One of the things I miss from the days of the N64 and Playstation 1 is the lack of major glitches in games now. These days there's nothing on the level of Ocarina Of Time stuff, for instance.

Not to mention glitching and exploiting often make the game far more fun. I could not imagine F-Zero GX without Momentum Throttle, Momentum-Turbo Slides, Momentum-Turbo Rail Slides, Side-Attack Dives, and Shift Boosting, or F-Zero X without floating and Double-Tap Dives.

People break games because they love them. They love these games so much that they want to explore every single inch of them for whatever they can find. People don't do glitch runs because they don't like the game, they do them because they love it and want to push it to its limits.

And completely ignore the hard work that went into the game. Devs don't INTEND on you glitch-skipping parts of their games. So they close the damn holes so you can't. It's a good thing, since it means fewer people wasting stuff they poured their damn blood sweat and tears into. If you love the game so much and want to push it to its limits, there's nothing bad about having to do more of the game itself.

Besides, glitches and whatnot aren't even what this thread is about. Emergent's about what the program does with you and with itself that nobody saw coming.

The intentions of the developer are completely irrelevant. Once we have the game in our hands, we can do whatever the hell we want with it.

Death of the Author, baby. The beauty of media is that you bring your own interpretations into it. For games, that means playing it in whatever way you wish.

edited 24th Feb '15 2:17:35 PM by Frostav

I don't agree with Death of the Author at all. If that were the case, Copyright should go completely out the window so everyone can get fucking rich off the same characters. Devs clamping down and erasing big glitches is 100% a good thing for them. People who like games that much should work for the companies producing them.

Eh. I've watched any% speed runs. It's not skill, it's root memorization of specific bugs and such.

Death of the author just means making your own interpretations about someone else's work, which is ridiculous. They meant what they meant. You're free to make up fanfiction and such but changing the meaning of someone else's work is a bit insane.

That being said, that doesn't really count for "playing games how you want to play them". That's the point of games. It's not death of the author at all. If they didn't want something to be done they'd have prevented it.

edited 24th Feb '15 2:29:04 PM by Joesolo

Exactly, and an actual "glitch" as opposed to an Easter Egg, is something the devs didn't want done but didn't catch before release. Speedrunning is okay, but abusing glitches to do it is just slapping the devs in the face and saying, "you forgot to close this, now I broke your game you punk."

I agree, that is what should happen.

All meaning is socially constructed. Intent isn't magic. It's still there, yes, but whether that intent actually gets across is something else entirely.

I mean. Hmm.

"For the writer to give what he considers the one true interpretation of a song is to limit what could otherwise be poetry, or at least somewhat confusing. And the real crime is that the audience believes the writer unquestioningly because he wrote the damn thing."