Emergent just means a more complex behavior (foxes tending to flee towards interactivity-dense areas) resulting from a simpler rule (while fox.spooked, maintain 100 triangles of distance away).
Flocking is an emergent behavior that is basically minimizing a loss function of "maintain x distance". If you implemented boid AI (birds) in skyrim and used triangle count as your metric, you'd be able to spot points of interest by the sudden increase in density of flocks. But players might extrapolate to the idea that "birds flock denser in cities". But no one programmed that behavior. It just emerged.
> Emergent just means a more complex behavior [...] resulting from a simpler rule
Emergence is more a behavior that results from the relationship between two parts of a system. The fox fleeing behavior leads you to interesting things only when coupled with the way the triangles are laid out. The two parts of the world model together bring out the emergent behavior.
