#metagaming

[oldschoolfrp]

An ogre rumbles across an irradiated landscape (Elrohir / Kenneth Rahman, The Space Gamer 12, Metagaming, July/August 1977)

[tenleaguesbeneath]

Imagine if baseline D&D character tactical competence were gated as metagaming the way other things were.

"It's a loud and chaotic battle and they're shooting arrows at you, I don't think you'd notice that the rogue who was trying to flank the enemy formation just got ganked. I'm not letting you cast Healing Word on them without a perception roll."

[aceofdivinechlorophyll]

Fanfic Search Request - Heaven Official's Blessing

A question if anyone happens to be able to answer (or has the incredible amount of time and self restraint to go looking). What might be quite a while ago (2+ years?) when I was reading pretty much all Hualian fics available at the time, there were 2 of them that I would really like to read again (and/or read similar fics) if anyone happens to recognize them by the following descriptions:

>> A fic where when Xie Lian ascends for the 3rd time he regains the ability to hear prayers and it turns out he has a massive backlog of them. I don't remember if it's optional to start at the beginning or not, but I'm pretty sure he does and he sits there and listens to every single one of HC's daily (and sometimes multiple a day) prayers that have piled up over the last few centuries - Found! - https://archiveofourown.org/works/40560810 >> What might be an E rated fic but I don't seem to distinctly recall that? where Xie Lian determined at some point during his second banishment that his cultivation method was NOT going to work out so well with his current situation so he switched to what ends up being essentially the exact opposite where part of his cultivation is pursuing desire. Somehow in this he ends up in Ghost City though I don't remember if that involves the whole desire thing or if he's there doing cultivator things (or is there because of bad luck) Also if anyone has been wondering where I've been, the beginning of year is insanely busy for me and I've also been on one of those phases where instead of writing I go read massive swaths of previously read and favored fics, and massive swaths of MXTX fics of favored pairings. In return for suggestions either of the above or of the vibes of above (as well as any that involve Shen Yuan resets or fire master and/or godly Hua Cheng) I offer my current most favorite of the reread list:

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

One of my all time favorite collections of what ifs featuring any number of Hualin shenanigans. I originally found this series when I was searching for ferret!Xie Lian fics and have loved every single fic in this series

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Every now and then this fic crops up to haunt my thoughts (in a good way), specifically one of the opening scenes where Shen Yuan promptly uses all of the knowledge he gained from the initial go around from waking as SQQ to dying during SV's particular brand of saving the world to promptly behave far more in character towards YQY (aka: telling him to fuck off)

[prokopetz]

is there a ttrpg that explicitly asks you to take metagaming into account?

The term "metagaming" doesn't mean any one thing. Metagaming is simply any way of engaging with the fiction that departs from what a particular game deems appropriate.

For example, one game may expect players to make decisions for their characters purely on the basis of in-character knowledge, with as little reference to the mechanics as possible; while another may expect players to adopt the stance of a narrator telling a story about their characters, and permit players to take mechanically significant actions which don't correspond to any particular in-character activity.

What's deemed to constitute metagaming in the former game will not be the same as what's deemed to constitute metagaming in the latter.

In this sense, it's impossible for a game to "take metagaming into account"; anything a game explicitly expects you to do is, by definition, something that game deems appropriate, and metagaming is the act of engaging inappropriately.

That said, there are games that play with the idea of where the boundaries between the game and the metagame lie. The gold standard is probably Dr. Jenna Moran's Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist, a game that cross-breeds a tabletop RPG with a modified Nomic and divides the traditional responsibilities of the GM up among the various player roles: Fatalists have authority over the setting's lore; Theurgists over the mechanics of play; and Wishers over the social contract of the table. Since the question "what is metagaming?" is a function of the latter, Wishers can literally roll dice to determine whether or not something another player just did is metagaming.

[zeltakka]

Playing Games In Good Faith

“The destiny of games is to become boring, not to be fun. Those of us who want games to be fun are fighting a losing battle against the human brain because fun is a process and routine is its destination.”

— Raph Koster, Theory of Fun for Game Design

I've been thinking a lot about how different online gaming is now.

When I look at the last two decades of online games, there's a big shift that I don't really see anyone talk about. Now more than ever, players seem willing to forsake their own preferences about how they play a game in order to improve their perceived odds of success and rewards. Most people experience this to some degree; it's when you reduce your graphics settings in a shooter specifically to make enemies easier to spot. It's when you stop playing a character or class you like because a guide told you it's not good this patch. It looks like skipping cutscenes because they take time away from progression, or playing in immersion-breaking ways that are more statistically effective.

I've taken to defining this idea by what it isn't. Instead of playing games in the way they present themselves to us, or in the way we find fun, we often choose to prioritize playing in ways that our communities consider valid or optimal. Put short, we don't play games in good faith.

A lot of this has to do with metagaming, and while I think these ideas are deeply intertwined, I do think they are distinct concepts. Metagaming is the realization of instrumental play; it is the process that creates the rankings, the strategies, the methods of play that are considered to be "correct" or "optimal" play, through group consensus. Playing games in good faith, however, is what you might call the organic or natural way of playing a game. It's about the way a game presents itself to a player, and how a player perceives it. When outside pressures make you play a game in a way you normally wouldn't, you start to play the game for reasons beyond itself. You begin to play in bad faith.

Personally, the most significant instance of this issue that I've experienced was in World of Warcraft during the Shadowlands expansion. In Shadowlands, there was a system called Torghast that was initially meant to be a kind of optional game mode, inspired by games like Hades or Dead Cells. The mode itself is unimportant here, but what is important is that playing that game mode was the only source of an obscure currency for upgrading your character. The power gained from these upgrades was viewed during development as relatively small, meant to be a bonus for the subset of players that enjoyed the new mode, and not much more. In practice however, the WoW community largely decided to make playing Torghast mandatory for everyone. The community's argument was, it's a statistical benefit to your group if you get those upgrades, so by not getting them, you were being rude and holding other players back. Not just at the highest levels of play, mind you, but basically across the board. To be clear, If you did not spend hours a week grinding out the currency from this game mode, players would refuse to group up with you. From the game director at the time:

"We often hear feedback that people are upset when they run out of goals and lack the motivation to do anything. But what we found, to our initial dismay and horror to some extent, is that a much broader range of players than we expected saw this .4% power increase that was behind something they didn’t necessarily enjoy doing as absolutely mandatory."

— Ion Hazzikostas, in a 2021 Interview with Gamesbeat

This issue is certainly not exclusive to WoW. In basically any online game, the decisions about what character to pick, what items to use, the strategies you employ, are all more driven by social pressures than they ever have been before.

There's a whole other side to this discussion, about how social media and the proliferation of player-created guides and strategies affects how we view these things. It's harder to engage with a game organically when so much media is determined to tell you the "correct" way to play. But that aside, the more I think about this, the more I see a common trend in online games across the board; fun in online games always takes a back seat to success. The social structures around gaming have just never really materialized a form of sportsmanship, or "playing-in-good-faith". Broadly, socially, players will choose to win while having a bad time rather than lose while having fun. Or rather, in online gaming, extrinsic rewards are socially prioritized over experiential, intrinsic fun. Intrinsic fun, on some level, requires variables, unpredictable outcomes, and surprises, and the agency to make meaningful decisions based on the info provided to you. Meta-gaming requires those uncertainties be shaved off if they don't get rewarded faster than other methods. And more than ever, gaming communities define "fun" by success and rewards almost exclusively.

This is the part where I'd love to give some kind of idea for a solution, but truthfully I don't think there's a way to put the cork back on the bottle. The channels by which these pressures propagate are already too deeply entrenched, and the pressure to play "optimally" is only getting stronger with time. But I do think we lost something along the way, when we collectively shifted to prioritize success over authenticity.

P.S.: There are a ton of other related topics I wanna give their own discussion later, like social media's role in all this. Also while I mostly talked about online, multiplayer games, this phenomenon does occur with single-player games as well to varying degrees (i.e., the community around Elden Ring offered a deluge of guides/tier lists/builds when that came out). I didn't focus on single-player games here because there's far less social pressure. You don't have teammates pressuring you to play a certain way, so it's much more avoidable.

P.P.S.: I linked it once above, but seriously. Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft by Folding Ideas is one of the best videos on this kind of topic. Please, if you can spare the time, give it a watch. He's much better with words than I am.

[healsypally]

I HATE "the Meta" in video games.

Some people look at you like you've got three heads when you explain you don't care about "the meta" in any video game, ever.

Sorry i actually don't want to complete the game in record pace. Every hour of my life is spent trying to try to carve out time for me to relax for ten seconds, and I'm not going to cut that down to 3 seconds because "efficiency is king" nor am going to spend all of it learning "the meta"

Sorry i want to naturally learn the best way to play by playing through the game, and not just go online and mindlessly implement what someone told me to do.

If I can't succeed in multiplayer by self-learning my way towards "the meta" during singleplayer playthroughs?

And i have to instead learn an entirely new way to play by learning outside the video game, that is sometimes counterintuitive and other times so much more complex it literally becomes an entirely different game you never wanted to play?

And the game developer doesn't (after learning about this new way to play the game) take steps to teach that meta through additional, newly-created game tutorials implemented into the base game?

Then it is Not a good gaming experience, and the game designer failed. Hot take I guess

[vintagerpg]

I bought this because of Denis Loubet’s excellent cover. Look at it! So good, so smooth, so warm. What is it? Something damn strange: Dragons of Underearth (1982). But what’s that? Steve Jackson’s Fantasy Trip, sort of.

The Fantasy Trip is great, a lean and mean point-buy RPG focused on tactical combat that began life as too microgames, Melee and Wizard. Based on the success of those games, in 1980 Metagaming had Jackson design a more advanced game, a full-fledged RPG consisting of three books and an adventure (Advanced Melee, Advanced Wizard, In the Labyrinth and an adventure, Tollenkar’s Lair). All those things were supposed to be in one box set, but got released separately, seemingly because it was cheaper to do it sans box. That, and other difficulties, led to Jackson bailing on the company and the game. After that, The Fantasy Trip gets even more confusing, with a series of supplements coming out that were advertised as being compatible with both versions of the game, or lacked any compatibility information at all. Many of them, like Dragons of the Underearth, came packed, infuriatingly considering the history of the game, in boxes. Unsurprisingly, Metagaming shuttered in 1983.

This thing is appealing in a lot of ways. The box is small and reminds me of a videogame box. The art is good. The tokens are sharp as hell. But it is just a watered-down version of Fantasy Trip. Or rather, the previous box, Lords of Underearth, was a watered-down version. This is technically an advanced watered-down version. Dear god.

[epigraphexhibition]

from Metagaming (Stephanie Boluk & Patrick Lemieux, 2017)