This article was originally published in First Person Scholar and republished with permission. I have a semi-concreate plan to write a series of articles looking at the game design of reality shows, but those might have to wait for the summer
On August 23rd, 2000, more than 50 million Americans watched the finale of the first season of Survivor1, making it a cultural icon and birthing the age of competitive reality shows. Almost 20 years later, Survivor is still running, and, while it doesn’t reach the rating highs it did in 2000, it is still one of CBS’ most popular shows2.
For a show that has so much staying power and popularity, there is little scholarly work on it beyond the initial exploration of its cultural impact at the start of the 21st century. This is unfortunate, as there are a lot of things we can analyze and critique about this show, from issues of race, colonialism, and gender to the evolution of strategic gameplay over the course of the show run.
I would like to focus on emergent narratives in the show and how we can use them when designing games. I am going to look at the way the players (contestants) interact with the systems of rules set by the designers of the game and how they use those to create their own rules and game dynamics. While the rules of the game have not changed much since season 1, the way the players use them and interact with each other is ever-changing, creating surprising, new interactions and narratives.
Before we talk about emergent narrative, let’s first look at the rules of the game!
Survivor is divided into two parts: the pre-merge, in which two or more small groups (“tribes”) of players compete against each other, and the post-merge (or merge), where the remaining players all join together to be in one tribe, and the game becomes an individual’s game. Both have similar rules but slightly different competitive gameplay as the game shifts from a team-based approach to a ‘survival of the fittest contest. At the start of the game, roughly 16-20 players are divided into tribes, either randomly picked or are arranged according to a theme and are asked to survive in the wilderness3.
Every three days, the players compete to earn a reward, which usually involves food or objects they can use to survive and immunity which grants safety to one player and prevents them from being voted out by other players that week. At the end of those three days, the players then collectively vote out one player. This continues until there are two or three players left. During the pre-merge section, the competitions are tribe based, with the tribe that loses immunity voting out a member from their team. In the post-merge section, the challenges are completed by each individual, but the players who are voted out become part of the jury, who are entitled to witness the remaining players’ actions. At the end of the game, the jury must vote for who, out of the remaining players, they think should win the game. The post-merge section of the game is generally considered the more entertaining part of the game as by this point, the strongest players are left and the strategy becomes more complex as a result.
Over the years, other mechanics were introduced, with varying degrees of success. Two of those mechanics, the tribe swipe and the hidden immunity idol, are now a ubiquitous part of the game and can be considered official rules4.
In the simplest terms, emergence is when the game allows the player to craft their own experience. It is the unexpected outcome of the player’s interaction with the system of rules set by the designer. The problem with emergence is that, unlike stories which are pre-determined and designed by the game developers, emergent stories and systems are not something we necessarily know how to design and approach in ways that will create an engaging play experience.
Designers can look to Survivor for inspiration, as it has spent the last 20 years trying to figure out how to successfully create an emergent narrative and had the time to fine-tune its systems in ways that create engaging experiences. Both the success and failure of Survivor can tell us a lot about interactions in an emergent game and the problems which we might encounter in designing one.
You can look at Survivor as a game with four distinct levels of engagement: the producers, the players, the editors, and the viewers, with each level’s separate contribution helping with the success of the show.
The producers act as both the ‘dungeon masters,’ guiding the player and helping them navigate the rules, as well as game designers that are there to design and enforce the rules of the game. While they are mostly silent, the host, Jeff Probst, acts as their representative and reinforcer, guiding the players, ensuring that the game runs smoothly and maintains the illusion of reality in a make-believe situation5.
The players are the people chosen to play the game, and are the ones who produce the majority of the emergent narrative content as they are directly interacting with the rules set by the producers.
As the players are filmed 24/7, it is the editor’s job to distill those narratives into coherent, 45-minute-chunks that tell the viewers everything that happened over a span of 3 days. The editors have full control over how to tell the narrative, but that narrative is also completely dependent on the players’ actions6. If the players have nothing to show, even the most interesting editing wouldn’t help with crafting an interesting story.
The last level of engagement is the audience itself, who engage with the game through the medium of TV and thus have no power to directly control its narrative, but can engage in participatory actions when the need arises (like voicing their opinion about certain events in the show or their feelings about specific players)7.
While I will mostly focus on the player level, it is important to note that all those levels work symbiotically and all contribute to the success of the show and it’s emergent elements.
The single most important act of emergence in Survivor happened in the first season, and it defined not just the show but the genre of competitive reality shows. Initially, Survivor was billed as the greatest social experiment on the planet, a show in which a group of ordinary Americans are left stranded on an island and had to build a new society. Most of the players took that to heart, and while they voted out a player every week, those players were generally the people who could not handle the physical and social aspects of the game8. The players were so uncomfortable about voting out other players that, in one episode, they tried to vote out the host Jeff Probst, and one of the players famously voted out players in alphabetical order.