Emergent Play

Generative AI's uncanny instability becomes terrain, signal, and collaborator.

This paper argues that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) can be a novel, productive material and process for game design when intentionally designed to leverage its emergent uncanniness in gameplay. While GenAI has seen rapid adoption within the interactive media and game production processes, its uses are often limited to streamlining existing processes and controlling output efficiency and consistency, thereby forgoing its uncanny and emergent potential as a productive and creative medium. Drawing from accounts of game glitches and uncanniness as understood through Glitch Art theories and Freud's concept of the Unheimlich as a return of the familiar in defamiliarized form, we ask: (1) How does AI's emergent property influence the dialogical nature of play, interactive experiences, and the relationship between players and the game/computer/AI? (2) What are its implications regarding the designer/player/computer agency within the game study and game design practice? (3) What is the potential of AI as a creative medium for novel creative expressions? We adopt a Research through Design approach and use Topology Unknown, a game prototype that we created, as our methodology and the platform for experimenting with novel GenAI-based gaming applications, whose design process and outcomes inform us of GenAI's uncanniness as a possible communicative and design material. In conclusion, we observed that agency has been redistributed among the triad designer/player/AI. Positioning uncanny affordances as the introduction to the interpretive act of communication, rather than as defects, expands the range of possible pedagogical approaches to GenAI-procedural game aesthetics and process-first design. The narratives produced this way help situate AI cartography as a performative, epistemic instrument, making the system thinkable and building AI literacy.