It's just a game.... right?
June 1, 2011 5:45 PM Subscribe
I'm in search of examples of metagaming.
Metagaming is when actions or decisions taken outside of the context of an individual game help decide the outcome of the game. The canonical example of metagaming is probably a Magic: The Gathering player preparing for a tournament that he suspects will be dominated by red decks by including Circle of Protection: Red in his deck.
Another, more extreme, example would be the story The Mittanni tells of a Russian Eve alliance leader who tried to find the home address of a player so he could have the power to his home cut during a battle.
I'm looking for as many examples people can think of from sports or computer games or any other kind of competition. The bigger and more unexpected the impact of metagaming is, the better.
Bonus question: Examples of events in games having real life consequences outside of the game -- again, the bigger and more unexpected, the better.
Metagaming is when actions or decisions taken outside of the context of an individual game help decide the outcome of the game. The canonical example of metagaming is probably a Magic: The Gathering player preparing for a tournament that he suspects will be dominated by red decks by including Circle of Protection: Red in his deck.
Another, more extreme, example would be the story The Mittanni tells of a Russian Eve alliance leader who tried to find the home address of a player so he could have the power to his home cut during a battle.
I'm looking for as many examples people can think of from sports or computer games or any other kind of competition. The bigger and more unexpected the impact of metagaming is, the better.
Bonus question: Examples of events in games having real life consequences outside of the game -- again, the bigger and more unexpected, the better.
Urban Dead. The metagaming there has more or less destroyed any semblance of realism the game might have had. Wikis, various programmed tools, translators, everything. Attempting to play the game without metagaming results in total failure now.
posted by adipocere at 5:57 PM on June 1, 2011
posted by adipocere at 5:57 PM on June 1, 2011
Honestly... you'll find a lot of accusations of metagaming in vampire larp games or organizations. I've heard crazy stories about a guy killing a player to kill their character in brazil. I'm almost entirely sure that that is untrue, but it's a pernicious rumor.
Metagaming usually has the context of bad actions, which is I think what you are going for, but I'd also point out that it can be done in good ways. For example, going easy on new players in character mistakes.
I'm not sure I'd consider having CoP Red in a deck in a Magic tournament metagaming. magic has supported the concept of sideboarding (having extra cards to be swapped in in tournaments) for years.
posted by gryftir at 5:59 PM on June 1, 2011
Metagaming usually has the context of bad actions, which is I think what you are going for, but I'd also point out that it can be done in good ways. For example, going easy on new players in character mistakes.
I'm not sure I'd consider having CoP Red in a deck in a Magic tournament metagaming. magic has supported the concept of sideboarding (having extra cards to be swapped in in tournaments) for years.
posted by gryftir at 5:59 PM on June 1, 2011
Response by poster: I'm not sure I'd consider having CoP Red in a deck in a Magic tournament metagaming.
The first time I heard the term 'metagame' was in a series of articles in the Duelist, written by Richard Garfield, describing this exact thing. And I'm fairly sure he popularized the term among competitive gamers in the 90s because of all the crossover with Magic and other geek past-times.
posted by empath at 6:19 PM on June 1, 2011
The first time I heard the term 'metagame' was in a series of articles in the Duelist, written by Richard Garfield, describing this exact thing. And I'm fairly sure he popularized the term among competitive gamers in the 90s because of all the crossover with Magic and other geek past-times.
posted by empath at 6:19 PM on June 1, 2011
Best answer: There's the infamous example of Michael Larson, who won a great deal of money on the show Press Your Luck by memorizing the pseudo-random pattern of the game board.
posted by dephlogisticated at 6:20 PM on June 1, 2011
posted by dephlogisticated at 6:20 PM on June 1, 2011
three blind mice's sidebarred comment about chess has a good example.
posted by fings at 6:28 PM on June 1, 2011
posted by fings at 6:28 PM on June 1, 2011
Best answer: Brute forcing is a common method for ARG/immersive fiction players to try and get around puzzles.
It's usually frowned upon by the community, but I have a smallish example that occurred during one game I played, during which it became suddenly necessary. At the early stage of game, players had to collect documents from drop spots all around the world. A player's friend's former classmate in Hong Kong was asked to pick one up and scan it in, but somewhere along the way she got weirded out by the drawings on the paper (they looked like yoga poses, but it's easy to understand how she might've thought they were somehow related to the occult) and destroyed it. She apologized and sent a single, blurry phone cam pic, and that's all we had of that piece of the puzzle.
Each paper had a series of numbers and letters which were subfolders on an in-game site, and getting them all correct led to a PDF of the physical document, ie url.com/16ka/0989/09an/ka0a/document.pdf. Entering a wrong address got an error message, but getting a correct subfolder returned a blank page.
We were able to figure out the first subfolder by trial and error, based on that phone came pic, but ended up having to recruit a programmer to write something that would try every single combination until it hit upon the right one, and then move onto the next subfolder. It ended up working in the end, and I learned later that the gamemasters were scrambling to think of ways to get around not having that info in the game at all, since they weren't going to just hand it to us.
It's not terribly exciting to read about after the fact, but it highlights one of the reasons I love playing ARGs, which is that it's about people coming together in a specific moment in time for a shared experience, which can never be recreated. It was also pretty intense waiting for it all to be revealed, which is another fun experience about that type of game - they blur the lines between reality and the game, by an understood agreement of the players. It's a fun space to inhabit.
posted by lhall at 6:47 PM on June 1, 2011
It's usually frowned upon by the community, but I have a smallish example that occurred during one game I played, during which it became suddenly necessary. At the early stage of game, players had to collect documents from drop spots all around the world. A player's friend's former classmate in Hong Kong was asked to pick one up and scan it in, but somewhere along the way she got weirded out by the drawings on the paper (they looked like yoga poses, but it's easy to understand how she might've thought they were somehow related to the occult) and destroyed it. She apologized and sent a single, blurry phone cam pic, and that's all we had of that piece of the puzzle.
Each paper had a series of numbers and letters which were subfolders on an in-game site, and getting them all correct led to a PDF of the physical document, ie url.com/16ka/0989/09an/ka0a/document.pdf. Entering a wrong address got an error message, but getting a correct subfolder returned a blank page.
We were able to figure out the first subfolder by trial and error, based on that phone came pic, but ended up having to recruit a programmer to write something that would try every single combination until it hit upon the right one, and then move onto the next subfolder. It ended up working in the end, and I learned later that the gamemasters were scrambling to think of ways to get around not having that info in the game at all, since they weren't going to just hand it to us.
It's not terribly exciting to read about after the fact, but it highlights one of the reasons I love playing ARGs, which is that it's about people coming together in a specific moment in time for a shared experience, which can never be recreated. It was also pretty intense waiting for it all to be revealed, which is another fun experience about that type of game - they blur the lines between reality and the game, by an understood agreement of the players. It's a fun space to inhabit.
posted by lhall at 6:47 PM on June 1, 2011
Another note about ARGs is that there tends to be a lot of Google stalking of staff members and game creators, sometimes revealing business connections or personal information that's tangentially related to gameplay. Since that falls under the social contract element described in the Garfield article, I thought it was worth a mention. I don't know any examples offhand, but I'll ask around...
posted by lhall at 6:53 PM on June 1, 2011
posted by lhall at 6:53 PM on June 1, 2011
Best answer: There's the infamous example of Michael Larson, who won a great deal of money on the show Press Your Luck by memorizing the pseudo-random pattern of the game board.
Personally I think that's not meta gaming any more than studying trivia to play Jeopardy is metagaming, he just got good at a part of the game that the creators of the game didn't think anyone could become good at.
The MIT Blackjack Team is a better example. The card counting strategies they used, while advanced, were basically just ways of playing blackjack as close to optimally as possible. But after casinos started getting serious about profiling and tracking card counters, they developed metagaming techniques to disguise the play of the individual members. So, for example, they would have a serious card counter play very low stakes at a table using a standard non-optimal strategy. But when the deck became favorable to the players (which is what card counting is about), that player would signal another player, pretending to be a high roller, to sit down at the table and bet big. The high roller would then "get lucky" and win when to the casino staff it would have been impossible for them to have been counting cards. Eventually when they caught on the casinos just literally blacklisted everyone from the MIT yearbook.
posted by burnmp3s at 7:02 PM on June 1, 2011
Personally I think that's not meta gaming any more than studying trivia to play Jeopardy is metagaming, he just got good at a part of the game that the creators of the game didn't think anyone could become good at.
The MIT Blackjack Team is a better example. The card counting strategies they used, while advanced, were basically just ways of playing blackjack as close to optimally as possible. But after casinos started getting serious about profiling and tracking card counters, they developed metagaming techniques to disguise the play of the individual members. So, for example, they would have a serious card counter play very low stakes at a table using a standard non-optimal strategy. But when the deck became favorable to the players (which is what card counting is about), that player would signal another player, pretending to be a high roller, to sit down at the table and bet big. The high roller would then "get lucky" and win when to the casino staff it would have been impossible for them to have been counting cards. Eventually when they caught on the casinos just literally blacklisted everyone from the MIT yearbook.
posted by burnmp3s at 7:02 PM on June 1, 2011
Best answer: Metagaming in warhammer 40K is rampant.
In any kind of tournament structure where you are limited to a single army build you generally build your army with an eye to defeating space marines because approximately 50% of armies you'll play against will be some variant of space marine. Somewhat ironically this means that the top places are often disproportionately not space marines because everything Space Marines play is tooled to exploit their weaknesses and they perform poorly or get knocked out early. Plus unpopular armies have the advantage that the average player has rarely played against them. There is a certain element of surprise.
Some players will also build their army to compete against specific opponents in friendly games as well. Whether this is unsportsmanlike or not depends on the local players. Some groups are win at all cost, some are always play an all comers list and some only care about how fluffy their list is (IE: how realistic it is given the history of that race/chapter/division/group regardless of the strength of the list).
posted by Mitheral at 7:50 PM on June 1, 2011
In any kind of tournament structure where you are limited to a single army build you generally build your army with an eye to defeating space marines because approximately 50% of armies you'll play against will be some variant of space marine. Somewhat ironically this means that the top places are often disproportionately not space marines because everything Space Marines play is tooled to exploit their weaknesses and they perform poorly or get knocked out early. Plus unpopular armies have the advantage that the average player has rarely played against them. There is a certain element of surprise.
Some players will also build their army to compete against specific opponents in friendly games as well. Whether this is unsportsmanlike or not depends on the local players. Some groups are win at all cost, some are always play an all comers list and some only care about how fluffy their list is (IE: how realistic it is given the history of that race/chapter/division/group regardless of the strength of the list).
posted by Mitheral at 7:50 PM on June 1, 2011
I'm not sure I get what 'metagaming' is. From the examples in the OP and above (and at the completely unsourced Wikipedia article), it can include:
- preparing for likely opponents (if prepping a Magic deck is metagaming, is studying past games from next week's chess opponent? Asking around about a poker player's tells? Observing that Fred always plays scissors on the first throw?)
- cheating (is cutting the power metagaming because you're cheating outside rather than inside the game? If so, isn't prepping a Magic deck or reading a poker opponent part of the game?)
- brute forcing (would this include thinking through all the available moves for a given tic-tac-toe board?)
- understanding the game really, really well (so would memorising patterns in Pac-man or Donkey Kong be an example? Playing the corners in tic-tac-toe?)
It seems to state the obvious - that there's more to gameplaying than what's in the rule book. But isn't this true for all games? The rules say i can move a knight in a certain way, but if I move it because I suspect you're likely to respond in a certain way, suddenly I'm metagaming?
posted by obiwanwasabi at 8:47 PM on June 1, 2011
- preparing for likely opponents (if prepping a Magic deck is metagaming, is studying past games from next week's chess opponent? Asking around about a poker player's tells? Observing that Fred always plays scissors on the first throw?)
- cheating (is cutting the power metagaming because you're cheating outside rather than inside the game? If so, isn't prepping a Magic deck or reading a poker opponent part of the game?)
- brute forcing (would this include thinking through all the available moves for a given tic-tac-toe board?)
- understanding the game really, really well (so would memorising patterns in Pac-man or Donkey Kong be an example? Playing the corners in tic-tac-toe?)
It seems to state the obvious - that there's more to gameplaying than what's in the rule book. But isn't this true for all games? The rules say i can move a knight in a certain way, but if I move it because I suspect you're likely to respond in a certain way, suddenly I'm metagaming?
posted by obiwanwasabi at 8:47 PM on June 1, 2011
Pulling a gun to distract your chess opponent? Obiwanwasabi kind of has a point, that the terminology has been defined vaguely at best.
posted by DoctorFedora at 11:00 PM on June 1, 2011
posted by DoctorFedora at 11:00 PM on June 1, 2011
Best answer: Metagaming exists outside of the environment of the game. Chess doesn't have a backstory so metagaming isn't a great concept their - you are directly playing against your opponent. Same with poker.
In D&D however, Eomer the Elf doesn't even know there is a DM pulling the strings but you the player know that the DM has lately been on a real, I don't know, Gelatinous Cube kick so you're going to be extra prepared for that.
In the case of Urban Dead (which is still kind of fun starting as a doctor and leveling up by yourself) people stepped out of the constraints of the game to organize. Zombies don't talk and strategize but the people who control them can collude outside of the game to wreck Pole Mall at 8pm EST.
posted by codswallop at 11:28 PM on June 1, 2011
In D&D however, Eomer the Elf doesn't even know there is a DM pulling the strings but you the player know that the DM has lately been on a real, I don't know, Gelatinous Cube kick so you're going to be extra prepared for that.
In the case of Urban Dead (which is still kind of fun starting as a doctor and leveling up by yourself) people stepped out of the constraints of the game to organize. Zombies don't talk and strategize but the people who control them can collude outside of the game to wreck Pole Mall at 8pm EST.
posted by codswallop at 11:28 PM on June 1, 2011
Best answer: A one-off metagaming moment I recall laughing about, at a LAN cafe, in the early days, there were people playing Counter-Strike. Only one member of each team was alive at this point. The "Last Terrorist" was holed up in a room with two entraces with the hostages, alternately covering each entrance with his gun. The "Last Counter-Terrorist" was waiting outside, trying to decide which entrance he should bust in - if he chose the wrong one, he would get shot in the face and lose the match for this entire team.
It was a tense moment. Suddenly someone shouted "Go in now! He's not looking at the door!" whereupon, the Counter Terrorist immediately entered the room and got shot in the face.
Turns out it was someone on the Terrorist team shouting that information.
posted by xdvesper at 11:36 PM on June 1, 2011 [1 favorite]
It was a tense moment. Suddenly someone shouted "Go in now! He's not looking at the door!" whereupon, the Counter Terrorist immediately entered the room and got shot in the face.
Turns out it was someone on the Terrorist team shouting that information.
posted by xdvesper at 11:36 PM on June 1, 2011 [1 favorite]
Wikipedia doesn't represent a consensus view, but their very first example is equivalent to obiwanwasabi's example. In a game like chess that's defined strictly by its rules metagaming is anything at all outside of those rules. Solving tic-tac-toe is possible just by extrapolating from the rules, so that example isn't metagaming.
And FWIW, the humans started the metagaming by breaking character and standing politely in line to get revivified. So it was only fair for us zombies to respond in kind.
posted by marakesh at 11:42 PM on June 1, 2011
And FWIW, the humans started the metagaming by breaking character and standing politely in line to get revivified. So it was only fair for us zombies to respond in kind.
posted by marakesh at 11:42 PM on June 1, 2011
Fighting video games typically develop huge a huge meta-game.
Super Smash Brothers Melee springs to mind.
Many glitches and or tricks were found to make your character do things never intended. Things like canceling animation frames to start attacks earlier, to complex button combinations that made your character appear to be floating across the map.
posted by lakerk at 1:05 AM on June 2, 2011
Super Smash Brothers Melee springs to mind.
Many glitches and or tricks were found to make your character do things never intended. Things like canceling animation frames to start attacks earlier, to complex button combinations that made your character appear to be floating across the map.
posted by lakerk at 1:05 AM on June 2, 2011
Best answer: In the RP games I play in, we use metagaming to refer to the players acting based on knowledge that they have, but their characters don't.
So if the party has split up and one half of the group is getting into trouble, it would be metagaming for the other half to have their characters ride in to the rescue, because the characters would not know about the situation of the other group.
In some circumstances however, this kind of mild metagaming is allowed as it advances the plot and is not particularly negative. We do try to avoid it though.
posted by maybeandroid at 1:29 AM on June 2, 2011
So if the party has split up and one half of the group is getting into trouble, it would be metagaming for the other half to have their characters ride in to the rescue, because the characters would not know about the situation of the other group.
In some circumstances however, this kind of mild metagaming is allowed as it advances the plot and is not particularly negative. We do try to avoid it though.
posted by maybeandroid at 1:29 AM on June 2, 2011
Best answer: I would agree with maybeandroid's definition. In text-based RPGs (MUDs), you see one side learn that they need to find the Orb of Argh in order to win. The other side is not told through any in-game means, but suddenly starts looking for the Orb of Argh anyway...because one person is roommates with another person, or someone told their buddy through an instant messenger, or some idiot posted it on the out of game message board....
Games which use random generation, especially rogue-likes such as Nethack, can produce metastrategy, where a player takes actions which have a large risk for any specific character, but if done repeatedly will eventually have a beneficial result for some character (this requires the player knowing that something beneficial will eventually happen, and ignoring that many characters will die before it does). Things like drinking from every fountain as a low level character, which will tend to kill off characters quickly but sometimes (rarely) grants a powerful wish. Or re-roll scumming, where you don't even bother to play with characters who don't have the best equipment and instead keep generating new characters until you get lucky.
posted by anaelith at 6:01 AM on June 2, 2011
Games which use random generation, especially rogue-likes such as Nethack, can produce metastrategy, where a player takes actions which have a large risk for any specific character, but if done repeatedly will eventually have a beneficial result for some character (this requires the player knowing that something beneficial will eventually happen, and ignoring that many characters will die before it does). Things like drinking from every fountain as a low level character, which will tend to kill off characters quickly but sometimes (rarely) grants a powerful wish. Or re-roll scumming, where you don't even bother to play with characters who don't have the best equipment and instead keep generating new characters until you get lucky.
posted by anaelith at 6:01 AM on June 2, 2011
I think poker is a good example of metagaming. There is the game itself -- the best hand wins -- and there is the metagame of bluffing. Bluffing isn't just about claiming to have a better or worse hand than you actually have. It's also about pushing people around with your personality and your chip stacks. It's about observing other peoples behavior to determine how you can use your behavior to encourage them to fold, stay in, or even raise the pot.
posted by indigo4963 at 7:29 AM on June 2, 2011
posted by indigo4963 at 7:29 AM on June 2, 2011
Response by poster: It seems to state the obvious - that there's more to gameplaying than what's in the rule book.
That is exactly what metagaming is -- A pure game uses only the information available to a player going in blind to the game -- the rules, the positions of the pieces, the score etc. Any information or action that's brought into the game is metagaming, though obviously, some cases are more 'extreme' examples than others.
Starting with a particular risky opening in chess that you know your opponent is weak against is one example of metagaming, knowing an opponents tells in poker would be another, shooting a star soccer goalie to stop him from playing in a play-off game would be an extreme example.
posted by empath at 7:33 AM on June 2, 2011
That is exactly what metagaming is -- A pure game uses only the information available to a player going in blind to the game -- the rules, the positions of the pieces, the score etc. Any information or action that's brought into the game is metagaming, though obviously, some cases are more 'extreme' examples than others.
Starting with a particular risky opening in chess that you know your opponent is weak against is one example of metagaming, knowing an opponents tells in poker would be another, shooting a star soccer goalie to stop him from playing in a play-off game would be an extreme example.
posted by empath at 7:33 AM on June 2, 2011
Response by poster: I think poker is a good example of metagaming.
Right, the 'game' in poker is properly only one particular hand, but the metagame (ie, the result of playing many individual games over time) is the interesting part of poker. There's not reason you can't have games within games within games. I'm just looking for as many examples as possible.
posted by empath at 7:35 AM on June 2, 2011
Right, the 'game' in poker is properly only one particular hand, but the metagame (ie, the result of playing many individual games over time) is the interesting part of poker. There's not reason you can't have games within games within games. I'm just looking for as many examples as possible.
posted by empath at 7:35 AM on June 2, 2011
Response by poster: For some reason, I hadn't even thought of roleplaying as an example of metagaming, because I'd always thought of it as a competitive thing, so thanks for all the people giving examples of that. Though I'd really like some more specific stories -- even if they're personal ones.
posted by empath at 7:37 AM on June 2, 2011
posted by empath at 7:37 AM on June 2, 2011
Response by poster: Is there a good summary article or forum post or something about metagaming in Urban Dead I can read? I'd love more information about that specifically
posted by empath at 7:39 AM on June 2, 2011
posted by empath at 7:39 AM on June 2, 2011
Response by poster: Personally I think that's not meta gaming any more than studying trivia to play Jeopardy is metagaming, he just got good at a part of the game that the creators of the game didn't think anyone could become good at.
Well, I would kind of count it as metagaming, because the movement of the tiles was intended to be effectively random (and luck based) and only wasn't because of technical limitations. But I agree it's kind of an edge case of metagaming/cheating/skill, but it's interesting to hink about regardless.
posted by empath at 7:44 AM on June 2, 2011
Well, I would kind of count it as metagaming, because the movement of the tiles was intended to be effectively random (and luck based) and only wasn't because of technical limitations. But I agree it's kind of an edge case of metagaming/cheating/skill, but it's interesting to hink about regardless.
posted by empath at 7:44 AM on June 2, 2011
Most of sports? Why else do we have cheerleaders (to psych up the home team), trash talking, waving visual distractions behind the basket during a free throw, chanting from the dugout, etc., but to influence the play of the game outside of what's in the rule book?
posted by chengjih at 7:49 AM on June 2, 2011
posted by chengjih at 7:49 AM on June 2, 2011
Best answer: I don't think the Magic: The Gathering example is actually meta-gaming. It's just plain old preparing for your opponent. It all depends, I suppose, on what you consider "the game" to be.
Another D&D example would be when one of the characters in a party steals something from another character in the party without the character knowing. The player, of course, knows exactly what happened and will, in all likelihood, behave differently.
There is an example in one of PG Wodehouse's golf stories of a character psyching another character out during a Very Important Golf Game. He arranged for about a dozen telegrams to be sent to his businessman opponent. All marked urgent. The caddy (who, I recall, was the one behind the whole thing) said "No, I can't possibly let you read these. They might be bad news with your business. You must focus on the golf" and the character completly lost his cool. The telegrams, of course, all said "Good luck with your game!" and "We know you can do it!" and the like.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 8:07 AM on June 2, 2011 [1 favorite]
Another D&D example would be when one of the characters in a party steals something from another character in the party without the character knowing. The player, of course, knows exactly what happened and will, in all likelihood, behave differently.
There is an example in one of PG Wodehouse's golf stories of a character psyching another character out during a Very Important Golf Game. He arranged for about a dozen telegrams to be sent to his businessman opponent. All marked urgent. The caddy (who, I recall, was the one behind the whole thing) said "No, I can't possibly let you read these. They might be bad news with your business. You must focus on the golf" and the character completly lost his cool. The telegrams, of course, all said "Good luck with your game!" and "We know you can do it!" and the like.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 8:07 AM on June 2, 2011 [1 favorite]
Best answer: It is sometimes said that no one ever won a chess game by resigning. My response to that has always been that the person who said that never had to play more than one game in a day.
To explain: chess tournaments are often arranged such that, if a game took the maximum allotted time, the players would have to start the next round almost immediately after their last game finished. Since chess can be mentally exhausting, this is difficult to do. I'd rather resign a game that is almost certainly lost for me and have a break (maybe even something to eat!) before my next game to refresh, rather than grinding it out to the bitter end and having to start my next game immediately after the last one ended.
Somewhat related are "grandmaster draws." In high-level tournaments, it sometimes occurs that all a player needs to achieve his best possible result in the tournament is a draw in a particular game (particularly in late rounds). Sometimes it happens that both players in a game would be satisfied with a draw, in which case both players may make 15 or 20 "safe" moves, and then agree to a draw. This is unsatisfying to fans, but makes sense to the players in the context of the tournament.
There's also the situation in the NFL where a team which has already secured a spot in the playoffs before the regular season ends, and cannot affect its seeding in the playoffs by the result of any remaining regular season games, may "rest its starters," i.e., have its best players play for a short time or not at all in the remaining regular season games (to avoid risk of injury) and play most of the game with its second- or third-string players. (I don't know if this occurs in other sports or not, as I don't follow them closely enough to know, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did.)
All of these are metagaming in the sense that a strategy which seems poor in the context of an individual game is a good strategy in a larger "game" (the tournament or the season) which consists of many individual games.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 9:56 AM on June 2, 2011 [1 favorite]
To explain: chess tournaments are often arranged such that, if a game took the maximum allotted time, the players would have to start the next round almost immediately after their last game finished. Since chess can be mentally exhausting, this is difficult to do. I'd rather resign a game that is almost certainly lost for me and have a break (maybe even something to eat!) before my next game to refresh, rather than grinding it out to the bitter end and having to start my next game immediately after the last one ended.
Somewhat related are "grandmaster draws." In high-level tournaments, it sometimes occurs that all a player needs to achieve his best possible result in the tournament is a draw in a particular game (particularly in late rounds). Sometimes it happens that both players in a game would be satisfied with a draw, in which case both players may make 15 or 20 "safe" moves, and then agree to a draw. This is unsatisfying to fans, but makes sense to the players in the context of the tournament.
There's also the situation in the NFL where a team which has already secured a spot in the playoffs before the regular season ends, and cannot affect its seeding in the playoffs by the result of any remaining regular season games, may "rest its starters," i.e., have its best players play for a short time or not at all in the remaining regular season games (to avoid risk of injury) and play most of the game with its second- or third-string players. (I don't know if this occurs in other sports or not, as I don't follow them closely enough to know, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did.)
All of these are metagaming in the sense that a strategy which seems poor in the context of an individual game is a good strategy in a larger "game" (the tournament or the season) which consists of many individual games.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 9:56 AM on June 2, 2011 [1 favorite]
xbox achievements and the like
posted by nequalsone at 10:10 AM on June 2, 2011
posted by nequalsone at 10:10 AM on June 2, 2011
Some players of RPGs are "min-max-ers". This refers to their attempt to engineer combinations in the character design system to maximize their bonuses. For a while (this would be around D&D 3e and 3.5e) in Dragon magazine, there was a sidebar column that suggested particular character builds that resulted in surprisingly fit first-level characters. This practice ignores the idea that character design in a paper RPG is about character more than design.
David Foster Wallace, in his essay Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes: A Midwestern boyhood writes
Somewhere I read about some European royal who had a tennis court built on a slope, downhill side on the east, and played in the late afternoon, never switching sides of the court. All this to maximizing the advantage of slope and sun.
lhall mentioned how in ARGs that the playerbase tends to research who is running and who is sponsoring any new rabbit hole. This sort of information is generally considered to be outside the story of the game. But knowing who is behind a production can energize the playerbase. I don't know if it's metagaming, but I think it's meta-play.
Speed Chess applies a meta-layer over the game of Chess.
posted by Prince_of_Cups at 11:19 AM on June 2, 2011 [1 favorite]
David Foster Wallace, in his essay Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes: A Midwestern boyhood writes
I couldn't begin to tell you how many tournament matches I won between the ages of twelve and fifteen against bigger, faster, more coordinated, and better coached opponents simply by hitting balls unimaginatively back down the middle of the court in schizophrenic gales, letting the other kid play with more verve and panache, waiting for enough of his ambitious balls aimed near the lines to curve or slide via wind outside the green court and white stripe into the raw red territory that won me yet another ugly point. It wasn't pretty or fun to watch, and even with the Illinois wind I never could have won whole matches this way had the opponent not eventually had his small nervous breakdown, buckling under the obvious injustice oflosing to a shallow-chested "pusher" because of the shitty rural courts and rotten wind that rewarded cautious automatism instead of verve and panache.This is a little squishier than straight-out metagaming, but it points out that in an individual sport contest, reliance on qualities other than the physical ones of the competitors can lead to a win.
Somewhere I read about some European royal who had a tennis court built on a slope, downhill side on the east, and played in the late afternoon, never switching sides of the court. All this to maximizing the advantage of slope and sun.
lhall mentioned how in ARGs that the playerbase tends to research who is running and who is sponsoring any new rabbit hole. This sort of information is generally considered to be outside the story of the game. But knowing who is behind a production can energize the playerbase. I don't know if it's metagaming, but I think it's meta-play.
Speed Chess applies a meta-layer over the game of Chess.
posted by Prince_of_Cups at 11:19 AM on June 2, 2011 [1 favorite]
The card game Legend of the Five Rings has an official game-and-story-influencing metagame that is driven by tournament results and points gained in activities related to the game. Tournament winners either get a reward in the card game itself or a lore based reward. Maybe that isn't an actual metagame, though, but rather a larger game on top of the other.
Nonetheless, this kinda-metagame has led to an actual metagame as players from different clans sometimes work together and make deals to thwart the plans of rival clans, either with a lore-based excuse (many players are also active in the RPG based on the same gameworld) or in order to correct for some perceived imbalance in favor of their hated clans.
posted by aldurtregi at 4:00 PM on June 5, 2011
Nonetheless, this kinda-metagame has led to an actual metagame as players from different clans sometimes work together and make deals to thwart the plans of rival clans, either with a lore-based excuse (many players are also active in the RPG based on the same gameworld) or in order to correct for some perceived imbalance in favor of their hated clans.
posted by aldurtregi at 4:00 PM on June 5, 2011
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I wonder if tactical voting counts as a sort of metagaming, since you're looking to manipulate the system rather than playing by the 'rules' of expressing your preference.
posted by lantius at 5:53 PM on June 1, 2011