Emergent gameplay refers to complex situations in video games, board games, or role-playing games that emerge from the interaction of relatively simple game mechanics.

Designers have attempted to encourage emergent play by providing tools to players such as placing web browsers within the game engine (such as in Eve Online, The Matrix Online), providing XML integration tools and programming languages (Second Life), fixing exchange rates (Entropia Universe), and allowing a player to spawn any object they desire to solve a puzzle (Scribblenauts).^{[citation needed]}

Intentional emergence occurs when some creative uses of the game are intended by the game designers. Since the 1970s and 1980s board games and role playing games such as Cosmic Encounter or Dungeons & Dragons have featured intentional emergence as a primary game function by supplying players with relatively simple rules or frameworks for play that intentionally encouraged them to explore creative strategies or interactions and exploit them toward victory or goal achievement.^{[citation needed]}

Immersive sims, such as Deus Ex and System Shock, are games built around emergent gameplay. These games give the player-character a range of abilities and tools, and a consistent game world established by rules, but do not enforce any specific solution onto the player, though the player may be guided into suggested solutions. To move past a guard blocking a door, the player could opt to directly attack the guard, sneak up and knock the guard unconscious, distract the guard to move away from their post, or use parkour to reach an alternative opening well out of sight, among other solutions. In such games, it may be possible to complete in-game problems using solutions that the game designers did not foresee; for example in Deus Ex, designers were surprised to find players using wall-mounted mines as pitons for climbing walls. A similar concept exists for roguelike games, where emergent gameplay is considered a high-value factor by the 2008 Berlin Interpretation for roguelikes.

Such emergence may also occur in games through open-ended gameplay and sheer weight of simulated content, like in Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress or Space Station 13. These games do not have any endgame criteria though they do, similarly to immersive sims, present a consistent and rule-based world. These games will often present the player with tutorials of what they could do within the game. From this, players may follow the intended way to play the game, or can veer in completely different directions, such as extravagant simulated machines within Minecraft.

Certain classes of open-ended puzzle games can also support emergent gameplay. The line of games produced by Zachtronics, such as SpaceChem and Infinifactory, are broadly considered programming puzzles, where the player must assemble pieces of a mechanism to produce a specific product from various inputs. The games otherwise have no limits in how many components can be used and how long the process needs to complete, though through in-game leaderboards, players are encouraged to make more efficient solutions than their online friends. While each puzzle is crafted to assure at least one possible solution exists, players frequently find emergent solutions that may be more elegant, use components in unexpected fashions, or otherwise diverge greatly from the envisioned route.

Some games do not use a pre-planned story structure, even non-linear.

In The Sims, a story may emerge from the actions of the player. But the player is given so much control that they are more creating a story than interacting with a story. Emergent narrative would only partially be created by the player. Warren Spector, the designer of Deus Ex, has argued that emergent narrative lacks the emotional impact of linear storytelling.