Emergent Gameplay, Emergent Essaying

Dunlop, Kirsty Jean (2026) Emergent Gameplay, Emergent Essaying. DFA thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

In the rapidly changing landscape of the post-internet, in which we increasingly exist as intermedial beings, I propose Emergent Essaying as a hybrid, digital-born creative-critical practice, merging the milieu of game design techniques with the expansive act of essaying.
Emergent Gameplay is a game design term that refers to video game mechanics that change according to the player’s actions, commonly used to refer to acts of player intervention not foreseen by the designer, such as cheats and exploits. Harkening back to the open dynamics of early Role Playing games, it can be seen in structures and techniques that encourage exploration and the discovery of unexpected throughways that cannot exist within a linear narrative. I draw upon this concept in its most expansive definition, covering a broad range of design elements such as choice, randomisation, glitches, inventories, text inputs, and outside data, all as sites of variability and potential. Sometimes these seemingly simple interactions, both deliberate and involuntary in a game, can lead to complex outcomes.
Emergent Essaying utilises these emergent gameplay techniques to invite more open, playable modes of thinking, to craft a hybrid, language-based experience that invites collaboration. Readers can glitch and craft their own pathways through the textual landscape of this work, uncovering hidden portals and effects potentially unforeseen even to the writer. The design, pacing, restrictions, poetics, and gameplay of this practice and this collection are integral to how the essaying is both performed and understood. Here is human-centred system thinking, enacted through attention to the interweaving of form, expression, tone, and medium. Drawing upon recent strands of creative theory from contemporary essayists, such as Anne Carson and Lisa Robertson, I invite and have crafted a playable text that opens up ideas around glitching, process, and hybridity as sites of slowed down, complex thinking against the hyper-accelerationist backdrop of our online world.
The original definition of essaying, derived from the French, is an active word, an act of 'trying', and in the digital activation of text, that process of thought-in-motion and questioning, of wandering and getting lost, is brought to the surface. In merging two fields rarely brought together: narrative game design and hybrid essaying, a space can be made for more playful and nuanced modes of digital connection and understanding.
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This practice-based doctorate takes the form of a digital-born collection of playable essays accompanied by a handbook, which provides context, hints, and insights for new players. Designed and coded on the interactive writing platform Twine, the five essays are accessed via a website, with each existing as an individual playable piece, while also influencing one another. This essaying refuses to be limited to a single strand of thought, instead moving between hybrid fictional landscapes and characters, poetics, and theory-play, to open up concepts of glitching, creative process, technology, ecology, and bodily systems of understanding. With twenty-one possible conclusions and a number of changeable inventories, such as an inventory of thinkers and an inventory of emotions, each player’s journey will differ from the next. Emergent Essaying is a writing, coding, and design practice of ongoingness and variability.

• Item Type: Thesis (DFA)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Subjects: P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General); Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
• Colleges/Schools: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies
• Funder's Name: Eglinton Fellowship
• Supervisor's Name: Reeder, Dr. Elizabeth, Randall, Professor Bryony and Barr, Dr. Matthew
• Date of Award: 2026
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2026-85906
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 01 May 2026 15:56
• Last Modified: 01 May 2026 15:56
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.85906
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/85906

Related URLs

• http://www.kirstydunlop.com/dfa/index