In game design there is a commonly made distinction between “emergence” and “scripting”, but the distinction is often poorly explained. Emergence is often treated as some kind of ‘magic’ that just happens (or fails to happen) when a system is complicated enough. Or else is just a term used to explain anything unexpected in a game or unintended by the designer. We are only beginning to understand reliable ways to engineer emergence deliberately, with specific goals in mind.
Rather than speak of ‘emergence’, I see a more useful distinction between ‘endogenous’ and ‘exogenous’ variables in economics. The exogenous variables are those whose value is imposed from outside the system, while the ‘endogenous’ variables arise from the system itself. So, for example, in an economics problem the supply and demand curves are often exogenous (externally imposed) but the price is endogenous (the outcome of balancing supply and demand).
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