When choosing the mechanics of "building blocks"—atomic parts that coalesce into emergence within a system, it is best to follow the law of conservation of information.
In games, things can be turned into other things.
A rudimentary version of this mechanic is the shop: where the player trades a numerical amount of currency in exchange for an item.
Currency ➔ Item
In this example, let's assume that in this game, completing any task rewards the player with the same amount of currency.
Defeat Enemy ➔ X amount of Currency
Complete Quest ➔ X amount of Currency
Regardless of what task the player completes they end up with the same amount of currency. Two players could have taken entirely different paths to obtaining the amount of currency required for the item, but both end up with the exact same item in the end. No factor regarding how the player obtained the currency has an impact on the item that they receive.
Therefore, information is lost.
The obvious remedy to this is to balance the amount of currency rewarded from each task, based on a rough estimate on how difficult and/or time consuming it is.
Defeat Enemy ➔ 20 amount of Currency
Complete Quest ➔ 5 amount of Currency
But there's a problem. While this shop model may succeed in rewarding the player with a trade that feels fair, it can never reward the player with a trade that takes into full account the unique resources, history, and experiences, that the player—and the game—has lost as a result.
This is because, at some point in the game, happenings were converted into currency. And currency is purely quantitative.
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We can think of emergent systems like we think of ecosystems. In an ecosystem, organisms and their matter are traded between each other. An organism's body can be consumed by a predator, its nutrients can be transferred to the predator that consumes it. The rest of its carcass will eventually decompose into the soil below it. Every atom and building block is taken into account, and matter, energy, and information are all conserved as it is traded within the ecosystem. Nature is the perfect emergent system.
But this model is often simplified in energy diagrams. Here, we purely judge the passing of matter between organisms in terms of energy—quantifiable energy to be specific. Here, an organism has done in their life is reduced to a numerical value of how much energy it provides. This is a currency. And with currency, information is always lost.
So if currency and purchasing can't conserve information, why don't we try something else?
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In Suika, food can be combined to create new food. Two specific atoms combine to create a specific product that is different from its whole—and can only be created through the combination of those two specific pieces of information.
So is this it? Is information conserved?
Not quite. While the "unique recipe" format does preserve some information in the system, it doesn't preserve all of it: specifically, it doesn't preserve the information about the two atoms—only what they are. Where were the two atoms before they combined? What direction were they moving towards? How long have they existed? What are those two atoms comprised of? The product of the unique recipe must take into account all of the information regarding the atom in order for all information to be conserved.
We can see this partially applied in Suika: where the product of two ingredients takes on the average position of the original two ingredients. But there's still much information unaccounted for.
There is also the overall problem that the two original ingredients do disappear completely from the game world once they form the product. The product may serve to represent the original ingredients as best as it can, but it is no better than the currency. One small step can be made in ensuring that the product can be reduced back to its original ingredients—including the associated information attached to those ingredients. However, in the state where the product exists, the information of the ingredients do not exist within the game world—thus out of the system. It's not necessarily a bad solution, but we want to aim to create a contained system with conservation of information, and storing intangible data outside of the system defeats the purpose and ultimately hinders the system's emergent qualities.
Let and take this to the extreme.
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This is a house. Built in Minecraft. A player can build it out of blocks. Unlike the previous recipe model, all of the ingredient pieces actually stay intact and continue to exist within the game world. All information regarding the original blocks are stored within the house: as the house is more like an identified formation of atoms than it is something entirely new.
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A molecule.
And thus, information is conserved.
But can we take it further?
All matter consists of other matter
Can't the atom be taken apart? If we want further emergence, the atom should be able to be taken apart into smaller, subatomic building blocks which the atom consists of. And we can perform this recursively, maximizing emergence infinitely!
You have to draw the line somewhere. To some degree, any level of adherence to the law of conservation of information as well as the fact that all matter consists of other matter may be acceptable for the system that you are trying to create. The further you adhere to these rules, the deeper your system will be. What's important is that the designer is conscious of what level of depth they want for their system, and design the system accordingly.
Q: Can't happenings be turned into things? Can't things be turned into happenings?
A: Yes. And they often do. Items are often traded in exchange for events to occur. However this limits emergence. Emergence is best when happenings are caused by things.
If an enemy is given a temporary speed buff, the player may not have a natural way to try and slow them down. This is because the speed buff doesn't really exist in the game world. It can be earned through play, but the mechanisms in which it applies the boost to the enemy cannot be modified by the player physically because it is intangible. Now, if the "speed boost" phenomena were to be caused by the enemy walking over an icy path, the speed boost would be caused directly by the existence and interaction between objects that exist within the game world. As a result, the player can attempt to do various things to negate this speed boost: kite the enemy out of the icy path, break or destroy the icy path, or even run on the icy path to gain the same speed boost as their enemy.
Q: Okay, so should I just make atoms?
A: Yes but no.
Players understand atoms by understanding structures first.
The developer must create the universe bottom up.
But the designer must create a universe for the player that understands the universe top down.
Flocking patterns can more easily explain the movement of birds than the chemical mechanisms which drive the bird to move its body.
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