Book Snippet: Emergence by Steven Johnson (2001)

Sharing your thoughts on a book is brilliant, so I'd like to start with a Book Snippet on Emergence by Steven Johnson (2001).

I was first introduced to the concept of emergence in my second year of university; it was a weird concept to get my head around, Steven Johnson looks at how collective intelligence is created by looking at why people tend to bunch up in town and how communities are made on websites and forums, he used clear examples that demonstrated the phenomena in action.

Emergence is alive in biology, psychology, urban planning and computing among much more; Johnson explains this in his introduction,

‘We’ll look at computer games that stimulate living ecologies, the guild system of twelfth-century Florence; the initial cell divisions that mark the very beginning of life; and the software that lets you see the patterns of your own brain. What unites these phenomena is a recurring pattern and shape: a network of self-organization, of disparate agents that unwittingly create a higher-level order’ (p. 21).

He also looks at The Sims and the seemingly arbitrary choices the player has which are actually extremely important to the function of the game, to create a living example of a person and their life. It’s a fascinating subject and I found the concept of how towns are created most interesting, I took a look at Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) where she looks at the car-centric and people-centric ideas that evolved cities. It also gave me important theories and ideas to think about while writing my dissertation: how games use mise-en-scene to portray a story in the game space.