Emergent Gameplay

According to the wikipedia definition, emergent gameplay is:

Emergent gameplay is the creative use of a game in ways unexpected by the game designer's original intent. It commonly appears as complex behaviors that emerge from the interaction of simple game mechanisms.

I've always been keen on developing truly original game ideas. The idea of emergent gameplay hit me really hard. The originality of the game doesn't always have to come from the game designer. If the game is structured in special ways, it can be played in ways which have never been thought of before. Now that's emergent gameplay. Not only does it bring originality to the game, it also tremendously adds to the replay value of the game.

But now I'm beginning to wonder. How do we develop games that allow the rise of emergent gameplay. Is it through a complex AI system that changes unpredictably yet intelligibly with time? Or is through exploitation of a new combination of a lot of simple rules of a game?

The question is worth exploring...

Utopia-RSS: Proof of Concept

Utopia-RSS

An Rss-based content creation and subscription system that will help manage school events, announcements, and reminders.

The basic idea is separate the emails you get into a variety of different feeds which you can choose to subscribe to. For example, if you want to receive event updates from Student Affairs. Subscribe to it. Don't want to receive weekly emails from the library? Don't subscribe to the library feed. Though you can still check it out if you need to. What all of this aims to accomplish is the reclamation of your inbox.

Here are the main categories of feed items that I plan to use:

1. General Announcement
- Title
- Description (Optional)
- Post Date
2. Event
- Title
- Who
- When
- Where
- Food
- Description (Optional)
- Post Date

3. Deadline Reminders
- Title
- When
- Post Date

There will be 2 different interfaces for the users. The front end is what the students will use and will basically be a customized feed reader.

The feed reader will load all the feeds the user subscribed to and filter them as following:

1. Today
2. Yesterday
3. Earlier this Week

The feed items will also be categorized by their type (i.e. event/announcement/deadline) Different type of items will be displayed differently.

The back-end of the system will be mostly for staff members and club officials. They'll be able to add new items based on their type. They will never have to access the feeds directly, all of it will be managed by a user-friendly interface provided by the back-end.

Some spin-offs of this idea:

1. A weekly planner that shows all the different events and deadlines for a week.
2. A reminder service that sends you an email reminder to all the events you agreed to attend.
3. A calendar service that lists all the assignments and tests for all the courses a student is taking.
4. A free-food finder. Based on all the feeds that have event items. List the ones that promise free food and inform you where and when to find it.
5. Integration to Google Calendar, Remember the Milk, Facebook.