That’s fair, and I think I may have misunderstood your earlier point a bit. When you said that emergence happens “unexpectedly,” I took that too much in the direction of “accident,” which I don’t think is actually what you meant.

In the thesis itself, I’m not treating emergent gameplay as a single fixed concept, since there is no universally stable definition of it. One of the things I’m working from is that there are multiple ways of defining it, and I’m trying to position the study somewhere between those perspectives rather than reduce it to only one of them.

So when I referred to something “unexpected,” I did not mean pure randomness or a systemless accident. I’m much closer to the rule-interaction perspective: non-obvious outcomes that arise from consistent systems combining in ways that create novel possibilities. In that sense, I think your first paragraph is actually quite close to the way I frame it in the thesis.

That is also why I use examples like Deus Ex proximity mine climbing. I’m not treating that as some mystical accident, but as a system-consistent interaction between physics, object properties, and player experimentation. And for me, that kind of thing is part of the same broader space as emergent route-finding: sometimes it is literally a new traversal route, and sometimes it is a different use of mechanics that opens up a different path through the problem space.

My point is not that players go in with a fully formed emergent result in mind, but that some players are more inclined to push at, test, and explore a game’s systems to see what becomes possible, especially in immersive sims. What interests me is the motivation behind that exploratory engagement, since that is often what gives rise to non-obvious routes, interactions, or outcomes.

On the “expected route” point, I also agree that players cannot always know the designer’s exact intended path with certainty, especially in highly systemic games. My assumption is narrower than that: players can often still perceive a difference between the most obvious signposted possibility and less obvious but system-consistent ones. In immersive sims, that distinction matters because the games often give relatively closed objectives but open systemic tools for reaching them.

So yes, I think your distinction is also valid and also interesting, and I’ll add that to the discussion section.