Overview

The Emergent Game Group (EGG) is a research group in the Experimental Game Lab at Georgia Tech. We investigate how culture emerges from game design.

EGG designs and researches games that facilitate emergent behavior. We study how patterns of gameplay express broader cultural norms, such as political hierarchy, and how these patterns possess holistic properties not found in their parts. We want to know how people transform game elements into social practices.

For example, when players have the ability to collect and transfer objects to other players, they often engage in twinking. Twinking is a behavior where more powerful players give weaker players power-ups in the form of items and spells. The game functions for collecting and giving do not demonstrate social status, yet when combined with multiplayer decision-making, a function for the transfer of social status emerges. Larger social patterns, such as celebrity, can emerge from twinking.

We want to know what game rules and constraints account for twinking and other cultural developments in multiplayer games. Knowing how virtual culture emerges from game designs will help us understand how culture at large is affected by interactive media.