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''ABOUT'' //Emergent Gameplay, Emergent Essaying// is a collection of essays that are playable. You can start with any essay you like and play for as long as you want. Each of the essays influence each other and you can navigate between them, three at a time, to design your own emergent journey with twenty one variable conclusions and a travelling Inventory of Thinkers. This collection was written and designed as part of a Doctorate in Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. Full abstract and references can be read below. Scroll down for link back to the index. ''FULL 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. 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-five 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. ''ALL REFERENCES'' Al Maria, Sophia, 2019. Sad Sack. London: Bookworks. Alsadir, Nuar, 2017. Fourth Person Singular. Liverpool: Pavilion Poetry. Alsadir, Nuar, 2022. ‘Corpsing: On Sex, Death, and Inappropriate Laughter’. The Paris Review. Available at: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2022/06/16/corpsing-on-sex-death-and-spontaneous-laughter/ Alsadir, Nuar, 2022. Animal Joy. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions. 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''IMAGE AND SOUND CREDITS'' All sound by Kirsty Dunlop: field recordings and clarsach composition: <a href= "traffic-glasgow-eastend.m4a">Glasgow Traffic Sounds</a> <a href= "river-kelvin.m4a">River Kelvin Sounds</a> <a href= "three strings 1.mp3">Clarsach Composition</a> <a href= "three strings 2.mp3">Clarsach Composition Layering</a> All videos by Kirsty Dunlop: <a href= "sunglasgow1.mp4">Sun in Glasgow Video 1</a> <a href= "sunglasgow2.mp4">Sun in Glasgow Video 2</a> <a href= "sunglasgow3.mp4">Sun in Glasgow Video 3</a> <a href= "cloudglasgow1.mp4">Cloud in Glasgow Video 1</a> <a href= "cloudglasgow2.mp4">Cloud in Glasgow Video 2</a> <a href= "cloudglasgow3.mp4">Cloud in Glasgow Video 3</a> <a href= "rainglasgow1copy.mp4">Rain in Glasgow Video 1</a> <a href= "rainglasgow2.mp4">Rain in Glasgow Video 2</a> <a href= "rainglasgow3.mp4">Rain in Glasgow Video 3</a> <a href= "womencomp.gif" >A Colossus Mark 2 codebreaking computer being operated by Dorothy Du Boisson (left) and Elsie Booker (right), 1943, taken from Public Domain Media at https://picryl.com/media/colossus-c6442b, converted into moving image GIF by Kirsty</a> <a href="acknowledgements" >Acknowledgements</a> <a href="index" >Return to homepage</a>