This talk examines the tension between bottom-up or systemic game design and more traditional top-down scripting of unique narrative experiences. Market and design trends have been pushing triple-A games towards a combination of these approaches for some years now. However, many designers still see bottom-up emergence as a magic bullet, and vainly hope to integrate this with heavily scripted sequences without considering the deep implications of trying to do so. In the second half of the talk we will explore game design approaches that are neither bottom-up nor top-down, but both at the same time, which we call 'sideways design'.