Vs.: Why do we metagame?

Editor’s Note: ‘Vs.’ features take an idea or topic that our staff members don’t necessairly agree upon and lets us do an op-ed illistration of our thoughts on the topic. We’re intrested in hearing your thoughts and who you agree with – so please comment. This Vs. set of articles covers the ideas of why do people do things for fun that the games don’t necessairly intend and why do they make a game of things in games. We even get a little off topic and veer into some discussion of old games vs new games and the incentive for moving on or going back to play older titles. Fire away and fuel the discussion!

‘Unlimited Power. Potential Wasted.’ by Rob Alvarado

World of Warcraft players leveled 1 to cap hang out in front of Iron Forge and dance. Fallout 3 players seek out new and elaborate ways of destroying their avatar. Brawlers in Smash Brothers have an itchy pause finger ready to catch any humiliatingly hilarious screen grabs. The thugs running rampant in Grand Theft Auto are putting Evil Knievel to shame by using a full assortment of vehicles to pull off some incredible stunt work. Personally, I like to collect and move things. My favorite is making piles of bodies in any game that doesn’t make them vanish and lets me move them around. Metal Gear is very good for it but I’ve found that Tenchu was the best for this hobby. Ever catch yourself doing something in game that isn’t exactly part of the game or just really dumb?

Within the doldrums of the daily grind it’s perfectly understandable to become distracted. Even by the most mundane causality. Don’t feel like working on an important paper? Check the e-mail that you just checked ten minutes ago. Don’t want to go about cleaning the house? Flip through a magazine you already read. Can’t be bothered to drive the chainsaw juggling hemophiliac neighbor of yours to the hospital? Well, you could just watch the idiot who made an extremely poor career choice bleed to death. Whatever the case may be, video games are an excellent distraction to the tedious monotony of everyday life. Usually. Sometimes the gameplay provided becomes just as tedious and boring as trying to have fun with a Spreadsheet. Fun, an act of or willingness to enjoy amusing recreation, is sometimes lost in even the best of games. Doesn’t matter how much fun it is – give it enough time and anything just gets stale.

This is why random dance epidemics break out in MMORPG’s like fire in a dry pine forest. People just get bored with questing or grinding and they want a simple, no frills break, which takes up as much time as their willing to let waste. Everyone is susceptible to it. A huge raid party completes a time-draining run successfully and a good number of them are going to be too exhausted to do another one, but not quite tired enough to log out of the game yet. What do they do? Maybe they go to a low level area and decimate all the livestock, maybe they start swimming to see how far they can get, maybe they try to get to the “top” of the map. Sometimes, read usually, they just have to dance. Hell, there’s no beating the game so you may as well do whatever floats your boat. A great number of these players are paying monthly fees to get in the game so, technically, it’s a lot like an exclusive dance club anyway.

Grand Theft Auto does have an ending though so why do people screw around in this game? Similar conundrum. They’re bored with fulfilling missions, they’ve beaten it, or they want to hold off on beating the game. By doing crazy wheelies and hitting insane jumps that can only be classified as, “extreme” or, “EXTREEEME!1!!!1!!” Smash Brothers differs a bit but the same scenario applies. If you’re playing with friends, unless the both of you are equally as good, you’ll get bored with the competition rather quickly and find your own fun somehow. Really it’s limited to screengrabs of Falcon Punches and scandalous up skirt shots of some kind.

To this day I haven’t finished Fallout 3 simply because I’ve found my own way to have fun with it. I’m not talking about uploading horrendous wasteland wanderer suicide acts to YouTube. I’ve taken to collecting skulls. So far I’ve only filled the bookshelf in my lab but hopefully my entire shack will become a veritable ball pit of human remains.

There are guys out there, crazy guys, who go about playing games in no manner in which they were originally intended to be played. Google the term, “Speedruns” with Symphony of the Night or Super Metroid. If you’d listened to the first Digital Discourse (Would you kindly check it out?) you may have heard about the Let’s Play Already thread in gamespite.com’s forums. Most everybody takes the time to play through a game and post their experience in the forum so the other readers can get a grip of the how the game works and what it’s about.

Now, the crazy guys? They play Final Fantasy 1 with all but one character in their party dead and post what that experience is like. Why? Not because Final Fantasy is an especially easy or boring game or because it’s an older game but strictly because it’s a game that has become old. Why bother playing it over again, maybe for the hundredth time, the same exact way with a fully diverse party? That’s old hat. Getting to beat it with just one character from the start to the finish? That’s putting a nice new feather in an old hat.

Don’t get me wrong – I love me some outdated games but who here would be really excited to play Halo 3 over the possibility of a Halo 4? Who among you is more excited about throwing together another game of Left 4 Dead than you are for the November release of Left 4 Dead 2? Let’s go back to 1996 for a second. John Carmack said that Quake would be the worst game to use the brand new 3D rendering engine that id Software had just created specifically for Quake. It was a milestone, of course, but Carmack had foresight. He didn’t mean to imply that Quake would be poorly received, he knew that much better things were certain to come from it further down the line. Things like Doom 3, the Call of Duty series, and the first Half Life were all children and great grandkids of the original Quake Engine. Of all the truly great things to come from the original Quake Engine, the original 1996 release of Quake is pretty low on the list. Only because time has provided better things.

It’s time that erodes our merriment. I could tell you today about the best game that you’ll ever play for the rest of your life. Let’s say that it’s being released next week, maybe it’s Shadow Complex. A month to a year from now that game (not necessarily Shadow Complex) will be mundane, trivial, and soon to be replaced by the next big hit. There’s nothing you can do about it. No amount of downloadable content, no crazy achievements, trophies, collectibles or unlockables, no number of expansion packs you can release to keep a game fresh. It’s exactly why gamers are doing things in games many people wouldn’t expect. It’s exactly why sequels and remakes and mediocre games are so common. On a long enough timeline, the survival rate of a video game’s hype drops to zero. So I say bring in the new and fresh. Just be wary and don’t go getting too excited about it. Chances are you’d still rather skate around on turtle shells in Mario 64 than play any part of Luigi’s Mansion.

‘The Complex God Complex’ by Ronald Diemicke

Did you ever try to hold your breath when you were a kid? I know I did. I use to see how long I could hold my breath and then try to break that time. In retrospect – this was a pretty stupid idea. I know I used to make games out of all sorts of things: not stepping on cracks in the sidewalk or between tiles, counting the light posts on highways, tracing the crisscrossing power and telephone lines with my eyes. Ok – so maybe I was a very weird child.

The point is that we as human beings look to create something from nothing. In the case of my childhood, creating games where there was none. In the case of many other games, a metagame is over laid over the existing material.

You’ll see how many cops you can outlast in Grand Theft Auto 4 or how fast you can race through Contra without using the Konami code. Some of this may be boredom, but I think this has much more to do with people looking at a game and see the endless possibilities to make their own game inside of the game that shipped in the box.

Childhood permits kids to run to their friends and bag about the biggest, baddest thing they did with their friends attempting to ‘one up’ their achievement. Now, with the level of sophistication in the technology, you can strive to get all of the achievements in a game to prove your superiority by participating in the ‘gamerscore / trophy rush’ metagame or complete a speed run of a title or exploit glitches allowing you to do things gamers didn’t intend and then post a video to youtube to brag to the internet about your accomplishment.

With little effort, you can turn almost anything into a game of some sort or another.

Time is not the enemy of the gamer – if anything, it just increases the levels to which we’ll go to make things interesting.

This ranges from fans taking the source code for certain ‘released to the public’ games and overhauling them graphically or doing major additions such as in the case of Freespace 2 or Jagged Alliance 2 to companies realizing the value in their older properties like Lucasarts just has with the reskinning of Secret of Monkey Island. With a little polish, love, time and effort, what’s old is new again.

Furthermore, some games don’t even need that.

Games are not like computer hardware that is outdated upon or shortly after its release. I fall into the camp that considers video games to be art. Like much art, sometimes time is needed to appreciate how much a game has had an effect on altering the direction of all those after it.

Say what you will about Halo’s story or fun, but it did quite a bit for evolving the mechanics of First Person Shooters. From the idea of regenerating health (well shields in the first game, but almost the same thing), to the ability to only carry two weapons at a time, and vehicles with spots for multiple players – Halo started or mainstreamed certain trends that began to be heavily ingrained in almost all FPSs in recent memory. People will go back to play Halo because it was a landmark title, and most heavily enjoyed that game for either what it was or for the nostalgia they had when they played it the first time.

The original Super Mario Bros. is the same way. This game sold many people on the idea of a home console. It has been remade and repurchased over and over again countless times by people – either so they can replay it to recapture old memories or maybe by some so they can take a second stab at it and see how their skills of today fair against those of way back when. Other segments will create all sorts of other metagames to see if they’re faster than they were or how much they remember of the game.

I think the reason we tend to see more of these metagames pop up in multiplayer and sandbox titles is different. In multiplayer games, you have an audience to witness the metagame take place.

It’s why people will play games with repetitive gameplay over and over if their faction can gain points or they can unlock new items – more often than not they’re having just as much fun playing the metagame of unlocking or trying to help their nation conquer others as they are playing the basic grind. The idea that you can bring your achievements into a space for others to see goes back to the childhood idea of wanting to show off.

As for sandbox games, what you lose in exposure, you gain in freedom. You’ll find the tallest building to jump off of or blow up every building or collect every orb/audio diary/ target for the simple reason that its another game within the game. When games allow more freedom, its easier to come up with ways to bend or break the rules that structure the main game flow or story. You can have just as much fun creating your own story of how you killed 50 cops, got a 5 star wanted level, then drove your car up a building and into a police helicopter before parachuting out and being cut down by army tanks and the FBI as you could if you were following the story built into a game like Crackdown or GTA 4.

There is an element of godlike power in creating your own game in a game. The idea that you were able to take the tools someone else has handed you and make something. Maybe you make it yourself to claim ownership of it like seeing how to beat Mario 3 and playing the fewest levels possible. Or maybe you hop on someone else’s bandwagon to prove your superiority by beating someone else’s speedrun of Sonic 2. It also somewhat goes without saying that ‘bad’ games may still have great mechanics and are ripe for this sort of repurposing where people will create their own games inside them that are ‘better’ than what the developers originally had planned.

In any case where a metagame of sorts is created, you take a pseudo-development role and find a new way to examine the existing art. Good games never die. We just find new ways to play them until the next game we can manipulate in a new way comes out.

Have you ever caught yourself doing something in a game that isn’t exactly part of the game but still lots of fun? Sleeper Hit wants to know about it.