It's telling that you didn't try to summarize it for him and the rest of us to further the discussion.
Eh, the artice is quite long. I think it's worth a complete read, whatever you think of its opinions.
Anyway, here's a summary, in my words:
In videogames, 'emergence' is treated as gameplay possibilities that surface which were not 'intented' or 'expected' by the desiger(s). The 'intention' part is where it becomes slippery. Firstly, how does one know if something is intended or not. Secondly, does it even matter if it's intended or not.
In science, 'emergence' is phenomenon that arises and exists due to individual parts working together, and that cannot be predicted based the individual properties. So it's about whether something is predictable or not. Whether someone tried to predict is irrelavent. Emergence is a common phenomenon in sciences; we have theories to predict events, but the results obtained from theoritical calculations *always* deviate from observed values. Science is incapable of accurately predicting real events based on the fundamental laws. Mind you, even those laws are based on observation. Scientific models constructed from individual components to mirror real models are always inaccurate. This is due to 'emergence'.
In videogames, the whole game exists in the code. All possible inputs, and all possible outcomes based all the permutations and combinations of inputs are there in the code. Of course, designers and programmers may not know all the gameplay possibilties, but that's beside the point. The point is, given resources, the code can be analysed and every single possibility can be calculated. So there's nothing unpredictable about the videogame code, hence no emergence.
How is it not possible? It is a matter of time, tools, processing power, etc.
Whether the team bothered to do it or not is irrelevant.
Here's my issue with that: if no one bothered to predict or calculate, how does one know whether something is predictable or not? The article presumes, perhaps rightly so, that every possibility of a videogame code is ultimately calculable. Do we know that to be true? Even if someone writes a simple programme to output the addition of two numbers, is it possible to predict every single outcome? I mean, there is hardware behind this '0 and 1' code. And that hardware is governed by different laws of science. For example, can we accurately predict what an overheating graphics card can result in the game?