Confidence. In other words, confidence in the designer determines whether auxiliary or advice text is helpful for me as a player/GM/reader/whatever.

These games are really awesome and really weird (speaking of RPGs and story games) and a lot of the time really hard to figure out how to play. The last thing my brain wants when trying to figure a game out and play it the first couple of times is extra text that isn’t rules and procedures. This is where the confidence comes in. For a new game, I’m going to try my hardest to give it the benefit of the doubt that the designer knows what they’re doing. If advice/guidance text IS needed, I lose faith in the design, honestly.

Now I’m just talking about learning games. As far as emergence goes? I don’t know, but I do love it when I get to discover it myself.