Emerging

After some thinking on What isn’t emersive?, I’m tempted to say “I guess there’s actually no such thing as emersive design.” It’s more about what the player chooses to do. The other side of an emersive work is an emerging player, which is to some degree outside of our control.

As some result of playing Cruel World, Berv reflected upon it and applied his experiences in the game to his self and the real world around him. The game never names the real-world phenomena it supposes to allude to, but outside the game I certainly did.

Design is a funny thing, so circular. If there’s players emerging then as designers we can recognize and design for the possibility of that. We can encourage or discourage it. We can participate in the design of emerging, or in other words participate in emersive design.

Keeping you inside

Addictive.

Compelling.

Page-turner.

Cliffhangers.

Foreshadowing.

Part of the craft is the design of attention. If I have a hundred little arrows in my head directing my thoughts, you can think of a compelling page-turner as a work that succeeds at pointing a great number of these arrows towards wondering, craving,

“What happens next?”

This isn’t to denigrate this part of the craft. It’s unavoidable, I think, because to think about something you need to have spent time understanding it first. If that ‘something’ is complicated, you might get bored of understanding it before it’s done explaining itself to you.

But this specific thought is distinctly not emersive, because I’m thinking of nothing but being drip-fed the next piece of content. All my arrows are pointed inward and ahead. I’m not bringing anything or emerging from anywhere, I’m just sitting still and allowing myself to be moved along.

My answer to the question, “What isn’t emersive?“

There’s a great deal of ways to interpret this, and I’ve moved between interpretations too quickly. To emerge is to move from inside of something to outside of it, and that all depends on how one defines “inside,” and “outside.”

To excuse my fluctuations: it depends where I feel ‘stuck’. l felt stuck on the computer, and wished I had a way to spend more time with my friends physically, in the city, in the park, etc.; I mistakenly labeled this as emersive, because what I really wanted was a way to effect a specific change in my life.

Maybe the opposite of emersive is known, comfortable, familiar.

To emerge is to go outside of what one has internalized, what one knows. There was a time when all of life was a process of emerging.

I have this very specific memory of waiting at the bus stop and realizing I could get on that bus, or any bus, and just go anywhere I wanted — not only to my destination, but I could choose to travel anywhere in the city. That that’s what buses were for.

Getting on a bus today isn’t charged with the same energy.

… I say that, but when I take transit these days I’m often still in that same old mindset: I’m going to a predictable destination, most of the time, and not thinking about the freedom I have. All the places I could go.

Maybe once in a while, I could remind myself to feel that energy again.