Metagaming has fucked my mind. This new breed of video game aims to focus the player on gameplay conventions, deconstructing them and leaving the player pondering over the whys and hows of the game design process. These gameplay conventions – which have evolved over the past few decades, since the days of Pong, bulbous joysticks, & text-based adventures – are the palette game designers draw from, they are the conceptual building blocks that the interactive arts are sculpted out of. And while many of these conventions can function to enrich the game-playing experience, there are certain wide-spread practices which undercut the true potential of interactive media, certain stale or lazy or harmful practices which have evolved over the medium’s short life.

All games teach us something, whether in the explicit sense of an edutainment, Reader Rabbit-type game, or whether it’s the subtler teaching of the game-world’s rules (the rules you need to internalize in order to succeed/win), or whether it’s the more abstract, psychological level of teaching/conditioning certain behaviors or puzzle-solving mindsets. In Jonathan Blow’s Design Reboot lecture (and this is a must listen for anybody who cares about games or interactive media experiences), Blow makes the accusation that many game designers fail to be discerning in how they choose to appeal to the player, offering up the gameplay equivalent of crack cocaine with gratuitous and extraneous rewards, rather than more psychologically & emotionally nourishing rewards systems. And I think if you’ve played enough games there’s a ring of truth in this – grinding to level up a character in RPGs comes to mind as being one of the more insidiously addictive abuses in the designer-player relationship. It’s a cop out on the designer’s part that seems to teach the player his/her time and mental state is of little value, but its effectiveness in getting players to invest time in the game is undeniable.

So what is meaningful gameplay and how do you design a game that’s more than what amounts to a junkie’s fix? That’s a fairly tricky question with no single answer, but I believe it begins, as Blow states, with designers being true to their own ideals of what makes for worthy gameplay. The interactivity provided by video games allows them to reach much deeper connections with their audience than other mediums. And as they become an increasingly ubiquitous part of society, as technologies such as Augmented Reality gain traction and become commonplace, the sociological power of games as a medium grows exponentially, and we must consider how to responsibly design them. The beauty of metagames is that they force you into these considerations, they tear apart the facade so that you can focus on an archetype of a convention as represented in the metagame’s gameplay. They function not to answer the questions of what game designers should do, but rather they function to more viscerally bring these questions into the player’s consciousness.

For example, in You Have to Burn the Rope you are given the winning strategy right in the game’s title, it’s a game you can beat in under a minute. By making the gameplay so incidentally brief, YHTBTR brings focus away from the gameplay and towards the reward system – burning the rope earns you a pleasant musical credit sequence which asks you what you’re going to do with the rest of your day now that “you’ve managed to beat the whole damn game.” You’re praised for being “the hero we all wish we could be” in glorious song. After beating YHTBTR, I found myself thinking, “Hell, there are plenty of games that take tens of hours to complete with very similarly structured conclusions/rewards.” In this way YHTBTR asks the player, “what is a worthwhile reward?” When hours upon hours are invested in a game, how do you pay that off so the player doesn’t leave with an empty, dissatisfied feeling, the feeling of having been cheated?

Other exciting examples of metagames include This is the Only Level, Achievement Unlocked, and the truly wonderful Upgrade Complete. All of these games experiment with structure – in Upgrade Complete, for example, the currency you earn playing the game can be used to buy better graphics, backgrounds, music, menu items, the ability to save, and much more. As I maxed out each upgrade, I found myself reflecting on the role upgrading plays in game design – how can it be used as an effective reward system, and how can it be abused to create a relatively empty gameplay experience that is nothing more than striving for a snappy sound effect with the words “Level Upgraded” fading in and out over your avatar? These are important question that the average gamer will most often overlook, and it’s why it can be so easy for designers to abusively take advantage.

Then there’s Ginormo Sword. I would like to warn those of you with addictive personalities to approach this game very carefully, because even with it’s primitive graphics and relatively limited scope, it can take over your mind if you allow for it. It is the epitome of the grinding RPG – you earn money by defeating different types of monsters, and this allows you to purchase upgrades for your character stats and your sword’s width and length (eventually you get to the point where your sword takes up the entire screen); you can spend hours killing bosses over and over to earn enough money to increase your stats to the point where you are able to defeat the next wave of kooky critters. As I played it I found myself, at times, in a state of self-loathing, yet I felt powerless to stop – I had to defeat the Avatar God and get 100% of my monster library. But I wasn’t angry at the designer because the game is unflinchingly upfront with what you must do to progress. And like the previously mentioned metagames, it reveals something about gaming conventions in the gameplay, and this is what I’m coming to find so invaluable – it instigates important questions: with such deceptively simple gameplay & graphics what makes Ginormo Sword so addictive? Is relying on grinding as the principle gameplay element irresponsible to players or a valid and amusing technique?

Taking things in a completely different direction, Host Master and the Conquest of Humor is a delightful trip back to legendary designer Tim Schafer’s groundbreaking work on such LucasArts classics as the Monkey Island series. In Host Master, you play as Schafer himself as he prepares to host the Game Developers Choice Awards. The entire game takes place backstage and gameplay will be quite familiar to anybody who recalls LucasArts’ SCUMM-based adventure games. While many SCUMM games incorporated a certain amount of metagaming (e.g. addressing the player directly), Host Master is downright soaked in it – the puzzles conjure up the entire genre, and it’s hard to overlook the fact that you’re playing a game taking place backstage at an award show for games. And beyond any of that, the gameplay is so reflexive, so self-acknowledging, that you can’t help but think through the structure of the puzzles.

This is what is so singularly valuable about metagames – they reveal an aspect or quality of gaming, or certain game genres, that you would normally overlook, that would normally be covered up as best as possible – typically a well-designed game skillfully shields the player from the elements that make it up, just as a typical narrative film attempts not to draw attention to formal elements (e.g. editing, lighting, image texture). One is meant to be carried away by the experience, engulfed by it, and therefore one has little opportunity for critical reflection. A metagame, however, functions more like an experimental film, foregrounding structure and form so that the audience is forced into considering the formal ingredients that it’s composed of – the structure and components of gameplay are elevated to the realm of conscious analysis. And for game designers and New Media artists, whose medium of choice is uniquely characterized by the interactive experience, playing metagames can teach how to effectively craft those experiences – while they aren’t explicitly didactic, their value is found in the questions they raise. Playing the metagame forces you to experience a critique of gaming. That’s what’s so beautiful about them.

Check out:
Offworld: Make Mine Meta
The Play’s the Thing by David Radosh

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 23rd, 2009 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.