Emergent Gameplay and 'The Battle of Asakai' in EVE Online

[Palle]

People who read MMO press are probably already aware of this story, but here goes.

First, some years back, CCP produced a short promotional video to highlight the concepts of emergent gameplay and 'The Sandbox', illustrating a key selling point of their product.



Easy to write off as pure marketing fluff, yeah?

A little over 24 hours ago, a senior fleet commander in EVE's most prominent alliance [Comparison] committed a critical error in transit between sovereignty regions and found himself stuck in a low security system inhabited by a large outfit of Faction Warfare veterans, who themselves were in the midst of an operation. What followed after a series of batphone pings was quite possibly the largest capital fleet battle EVE has ever seen.

Screencap for effect:

Spoiler!

The serverload was so intense that CCP's Time Dilation system slowed the passage of time in the system more than 90% to maintain packet integrity for the over 2700 combatants, which complicated further the tightrope walk for the fleet commanders who, paradoxically, were increasingly willing to commit greater and greater resources to the fight. Things escalated drastically when a hotdrop landed 50 dreadnoughts to besiege the entangled fleets.

With the first of the titans falling and supercapital pilots beginning to bugout from the grid, the network groaned, and the recently-integrated DUST frontend crashed, then pilots began to experience EVE's patented Soul Crushing Lag.

It's a thing:

Spoiler!

Though there were disconnections, many remained on grid for several hours as they waited for the actions they had committed to catch up to them due to the Time Dilation. Livestreams from around the web portrayed the game grinding to a halt. What follows is a video which has been accelerated to approximate how the events would have looked in real time.

You really need to watch this in fullscreen 1080p. It's pretty glorious.



When the dust finally settled, almost 610 billion ISK in damage was done, equivalent to roughly $16650. After seemingly endless weeks of stagnation in sovereignty space, the colossal engagement came accidentally and in a system none could have anticipated. That is the essence of emergent gameplay.

On a personal note, I have no horse in this race. I'm not a member of any alliance, but I did watch the drama unfold firsthand. Putting all of CCP's marketing hype aside... emergent, player-created content in a single universe of consequences, manifested in events like yesterday's, is the reason I can't go back to standard model MMOs.

o7

[Sinue_v2]

I don't know if I'd really call that emergence. It's definitely a cascade effect in an out-of-equilibrium system... but it's all really still following the game's rules. Nothing new or novel seems to have emerged from the interaction of the lower-order systems. Emergent gameplay I would think would resemble... say, a robust physics engine or glitch allowing the players to discover new game mechanics - creating their own in-game mini-games, or creating possibilities to evade enemies or overcome obstacles that the designers didn't foresee or design for. Perhaps I'm missing the key to all this, but it looks to me like it's just standard gameplay following rules the developers most definitely did foresee and intend... just never to this scale.

I guess to a small degree, the intense lag would have allowed players more time to mull strategies and weigh options, which could cause the event to intensify or diminish... but I don't think anything that had any kind of positive/negative feedback loop was really introduced in all this.

Slap me if I'm wrong, I mean, I'm horrible at teh maths... but I have a passing interest in both chaos and complexity theories.

[Blackheart521]

All I have to say is this is awesome... I love hearing about this kind of stuff, I remember hearing awhile back about some other large inside job that took over a year to execute in EVE that ended up in a large amount of money's worth of items being stolen from a large faction and that sounded awesome...

This makes me want to play EVE just because how dynamic the economy and world is...

[Kent]

That's not really emergent gameplay. Emergent gameplay is something that comes up as a result of players finding new things to do that involve in-game systems. A little vague, I know, but this hardly seems any different from standard fancy-Excel-frontend gameplay, outside of just a large number of participants that caused the servers to fall to their knees.

Probably one of the best examples of emergent gameplay is skiing within the Tribes series. Long version:

Spoiler!

Skiing in the original StarSiege: Tribes was actually a physics exploit that allowed players to leverage the way collision, friction and jumping works with angled surfaces in order to dramatically increase their mobility, which in turn formulated entirely different gameplay from what was intended for the large-scale team-oriented tactical shooter-slash-RTS game it was originally designed and intended to be.

Basically, for those not familiar: If you jump, you actually jump away from the angle of the surface you're standing on. If the surface is flat, you'll jump upward - if it's angled so the surface is pointing forward, the jump action's momentum will instead angle you a diagonal direction upward but also forward. As if, for example, you took a rubber ball and bounced it on an angled surface, it would bounce in a direction based on the angle. Another example of similar physics is in the 2D Sonic games, where the application of impulse from jumping is nearly identical.

In this game, players are also outfitted with jetpacks, allowing them to expend their recharging energy pool to gain height - the game is, of course, filled with all sorts of tall buildings and floating structures that necessitate such a thing. However, people figured out that they could combine this with the aforementioned jumping physics, in order to gain considerable momentum, which can then be carried through a series of jumps on angled surfaces.

The end result, is that slopes on the sides of hills could be used to gain incredible horizontal momentum, and when combined with an upward slope (on the side of another hill, for example, or a small dip in the terrain), could cause the player to carry all of this momentum in an upward arc through the air, allowing them to quickly and safely (because it's harder to hit a target flying through the air than it is to shoot an explosive near someone's feet on the ground) travel great distances. This changed the game from a squad-oriented tactical shooter into a shooter with lightning-paced frantic action, an enormous amount of depth and finesse to both movement and shooting enemies that are mobile, while also keeping the core strategy elements that are key to teamwork. As a result, this emergent gameplay was folded into the design of all of its successors within the series, as well as its short-lived spiritual successor made by the same developers.

Short version: People figured out how to work with the game's physics system to give them incredible mobility, while also completely changing how much skill is required in both movement and shooting enemies, particularly due to the way projectiles work (since the only hitscan weapons are short-range leash things, like a TF2 Medigun, or the sniper weapon). It changed the game rather dramatically.

Pacifist runs in games where they aren't intended (so not Metal Gear Solid, for example), are another good example of emergent gameplay.

What's going on with EVE though, seems rather par the course, just taken to the extreme. That's not really emergent.

[Palle]

Slap me if I'm wrong, I mean, I'm horrible at teh maths... but I have a passing interest in both chaos and complexity theories.

No need for slapping, I think that is a valid assessment.

More pointed examples might be:

• The participating Coalitions themselves, which arose out of a need to organize players in numbers greater than the largest groups allowed by the game itself (Alliances which are comprised of Corporations). They are player-defined, using tools primarily outside the EVE client.
• The on-the-grid behavior of bumping, a manual piloting technique which is designed to push out of alignment those ships preparing to warp. The game already provides means to scramble the operations of another ship's warp core, but bumping is a player-created manoeuvre used against the titans in this battle.
• Possibly also the industrialist response. When info of the engagement starting filtering through in-game and out-of-game channels, manufacturers and traders began speculating on Heavy Interdictor ship hulls and construction minerals as they were reported as being lost in substantial numbers. The players determine the prices and which markets will end up as the best for buying or selling, rippling to one another's trade hubs and inciting competition unrelated the the conflict directly.

The Time Dilation itself didn't necessarily force any adaptive behavior from fleet commanders, other than a need to pay much more attention to how modules are activated and deactivated since the spool up and cooldown times were going to be much longer. (A careless pilot could overreact and click a module that had already been clicked but which hadn't turned on due the delay from TiDi, hence turning it off and costing himself time.)

The term 'cascade' is used a lot and is particularly apt in social games dependent upon degrees of cooperation or animosity. The EVE community is frequently called into the spotlight for its propensity for far-reaching treachery, but griefing isn't limited to striking the Achilles Heel of your own alliance and ducking into the night with the loot. There's a laundry list of player-derived methods of exerting advantage in spite of the game's mechanics, including scams, baiting, and suicide ganking. With the frequent updates that the game is put through some doors are closed while windows are opened, and EVE players are always looking for an opening to exploit.

Yet I'm not so sure I would consider emergence to be based solely on the limitations of game mechanics, particularly in social games with large political and economic entities comprised of thousands of individuals whose actions carry a small measure of permanence. Human decisions and errors, like jumping a titan instead of bridging, bring about circumstances for players to generate unforeseen consequences which in some cases test the systems' limitations.

I must admit, though, that my concept of emergence is tied less to game design than it is to philosopies on the interaction of forces.

All I have to say is this is awesome... I love hearing about this kind of stuff, I remember hearing awhile back about some other large inside job that took over a year to execute in EVE that ended up in a large amount of money's worth of items being stolen from a large faction and that sounded awesome...

This makes me want to play EVE just because how dynamic the economy and world is...

To be fair, battles like this have become rare. Large coalitions sit on huge sums of wealth, stagnate, and typically avoid conflict. It's irksome for many players that there is little risk involved for them in maintaining their empires, but that is its own can of worms.

[CelestialBlade]

That's pretty amazing whatever kind of gameplay you decide to call it. The end result is just glorious, haha. Man, the advantages of being able to slow down time for yourself, that'd be amazing.

[.Rusty.]

Can debris from destroyed ships do collision damage in that game? Because that would make it even more of a clusterfuck

[NoiseHERO]

HAHAHAHA JESUS WHAT?

[Akaimizu]

That's a lot of ships. That first screen cap made me wish for more ships just so I can finally see the picture those square blocks were supposed to make. Seurat Style!