Self-Organisation in Games, Games on Self-Organisation

Abstract

In this paper, we shed light on the phenomenon of self- organisation in the context of computer games. Self- organisation is an important concept that intersperses a broad range of real-world domains-from economy over ecology, the built infrastructure, distributed technologies to the life sciences. Yet, self-organisation is often hard to recognise and especially hard to control. Computer games can amend this problem by training players to cope with self-organising systems interactively. Here, they can continuously interact with self-organising systems, explore them without jeopardy and gain foundational insights in their dynamics. We present several examples of commercial titles that integrate aspects of self-organisation as well as several academically motivated games that explicitly build on top of it. We further propose a taxonomy on the use of self- organisation in gaming contexts and we conclude with an outlook on potential future works in this direction.