Too Big to Fail (Gaming)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Wednesday, April 06, 2016, 01:37 (3157 days ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by uberfoop, Wednesday, April 06, 2016, 02:22

In retrospect, I've softened my stance on this because I guess you could count emergent phenomenon arising from hardware errors (such as floating point rounding) as being legitimately emergent.

Floating point rounding isn't a hardware error, it's a known mathematical error implemented in hardware. While it sometimes differs by processor (i.e. when the floating point hardware isn't using IEEE standard behavior), it's typically a deterministic element, and one that a programmer can usually know the behavior of.

Regardless, you're playing with semantics. Nobody talking about "emergent gameplay" is talking about the logical possibility space of a bunch of code. They're talking about player execution versus what appears to have been design intention, and things like that. Maybe you don't want to partake in a discussion which refers to such things as "emergent gameplay", but then you're just insisting on speaking another language when it's obvious what people mean by their words.

At any rate, as far as things like minecraft are concerned, I feel like you're placing too much emphasis on the end post. The picture that people generate of some thing in minecraft isn't what people think of at interesting in and of itself; it's that someone generated said picture in minecraft. (And more broadly speaking, there's a heck of a lot more to minecraft than those activities. To suggest that it's only significant insofar as it's a clunky 3D CAD program is bizarre.)