Emergent Gameplay, Emergent Essaying

Abstract

Within our current post-internet landscape of Web 2.0, in which we exist as intermedial beings increasingly engaging with cross-media forms, I propose Emergent Essaying as a connective term, merging the milieu of game design with hybrid creative writing approaches. Emergent Gameplay is ‘a game design term that refers to video game mechanics that change according to the player’s actions’. Emergent Essaying utilizes gameplay techniques within an active digital-born form of essaying, to invite more open, playful, collaborative and changeable modes of thinking, encouraging ambivalence, multiplicity, and fluidity over fixed, finished thinking. Expanding upon creative theorists Lisa Robertson and Anne Carson’s approach to the verb ‘essaying’ as an act of trying, in this digital, hybrid writing context I conceive of Emergent Essaying as an act of playful reimagining from both writer/designer and reader/player, in which the essay is more narrative based, enacting a conversation between ideas rather than focusing on argument. I combine game design techniques with the approaches to hybrid/digital work adopted by indie writers to inform my own practice as a cross-form, cross-genre writer, as reflected both in this paper, and via a link to a digital-born, creative iteration of this work which enacts Emergent Essaying. In a world increasingly controlled by Big Tech and optimization, through Emergent Essaying I advocate for more empathetic digital modes of connection and understanding, valuing the concepts of ‘glitch’ and ‘glitching’, reader/player control and intervention, and the opportunities for nuanced expression afforded by the intertwining of digital environment and language.