The History of Emergence and Progression

The categories of emergence and progression were originally introduced by game scholar Jesper Juul in his paper “The Open and the Closed: Games of Emergence and Games of Progression” (2002). Put simply, games of emergence are those games that have relatively simple rules but much variation. We use the term emergence because the game’s challenges and its flow of events are not planned in advance but emerge during play. Emergence is produced by the many possible combinations of rules in board games, card games, strategy games, and some action games. According to Juul, “Emergence is the primordial game structure” (p. 324); that is, the earliest games were games of emergence, and in creating a new game, many people begin with emergent designs.