Metagame

A metagame, broadly defined as "a game beyond the game", typically refers to either of two concepts: a game which revolves around a core game; or the strategies and approaches to playing a game. A metagame can serve a broad range of purposes, and may be tied to the way a game relates to various aspects of life. In competitive games, the metagame can refer to the most popular strategy, often called a game's meta, or preparation for a match in general. In tabletop role-playing games, metagaming has been used to describe players discussing the game, sometimes simply rules discussions and other times causing the characters they control to act in ways they normally would not within the story.

A metagame, broadly defined as "a game beyond the game", typically refers to either of two concepts: a game which revolves around a core game; or the strategies and approaches to playing a game. A metagame can serve a broad range of purposes, and may be tied to the way a game relates to various aspects of life. In competitive games, the metagame can refer to the most popular strategy, often called a game's meta, or preparation for a match in general. In tabletop role-playing games, metagaming has been used to describe players discussing the game, sometimes simply rules discussions and other times causing the characters they control to act in ways they normally would not within the story.

Etymology

The word metagame is composed of the Greek-derived prefix meta– (from μετά, meta, meaning "after") and the noun game. Metagame was used in the context of playing zero-sum games in a publication by the Mental Health Research Institute in 1956. It is alternately claimed that the first known use of the term was in Nigel Howard's book Paradoxes of Rationality: Theory of Metagames and Political Behavior published in 1971¹, where Howard used the term in his analysis of the Cold War political landscape using a variation of the Prisoner's Dilemma., however Howard used the term in Metagame Analysis in Political Problems published in 1966. In 1967, the word appeared in a study by Russell Lincoln Ackoff and in the Bulletin of the Operations Research Society of America.

Competitive gaming

In the world of competitive games, rule imprecisions and non-goal oriented play are not commonplace. As a result, the extent of metagaming narrows down mostly to studying strategies of top players and exploiting commonly used strategies for an advantage. Those may evolve as updates are released or new, better, strategies are discovered by top players. The opposite metagame of playing a relatively unknown strategy for surprisal is often called off-meta. This usage is particularly common in games that have large, organized play systems or tournament circuits. Some examples of this kind of environment are tournament scenes for tabletop or computer collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering, tabletop war-gaming such as Warhammer 40,000, or team-based multiplayer online games such as Dota 2. The metagame in these environments is often affected by new elements added by the game's developers and publishers, such as new card expansions in card games, or adjustments to character abilities in online games. The metagame may also come within player communities as reactions to win over currently-popular strategies, creating ebbs and flows of strategy types over time.

See also

Bluff (poker) Calvinball Emergent gameplay Metagame analysis Mornington Crescent Nomic Pervasive game Poietic Generator Prisoner's dilemma

References

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1376533864 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.