Meta-gaming: Bending the game without breaking it

Do the ends justify the means?
Metagaming is an example of gamesmanship.

When you play any game, your objective is to win. The competition presented is strategized during or before to come out on top. When playing a game, adjusting your character’s skills and using the environment & equipment to your advantage is one thing, but metagaming is another.

The term meta in gaming is thrown around regularly nowadays. Let us explain what meta means in gaming and metagaming with some examples.

What does meta in gaming mean?

Meta defines the tactic generally agreed upon as the most effective among all, the acronym for “most effective tactics available.” The use of the term varies between games, but the meaning stays the same: You will be more likely to win adopting meta.

The term emerged from the nature of competitive games. Some equipment, tactics, and specific ways to play are better than the others. With players’ objective to win, they are likely to follow the meta. One can only make her game fairer, but this is especially hard to achieve in competitive video games. I will refer to this kind of metagaming as “metagaming inside borders of the game.”

Stepping outside the borders of the game is also considered metagaming. A comprehensive explanation of that will be under “metagaming outside borders of a game.”

Metagaming inside borders of a game

This type of metagaming is often about min-maxing, choosing characters, or practicing a specific gameplay route for optimization. Those types of metagamers achieve to be as powerful as possible with the game’s options. 

Every game has some mechanics to take advantage of.

Min-maxing

Players build their character according to their desire in role-playing games(RPG) like Dungeons & Dragons, Diablo, Dark Souls, etc. A character is min-maxed when desired stats are maximized, and the rest is minimized. Min-maxing is often considered as powergaming.

The controversy behind min-maxing is often related to disregarding the game’s role-playing and scaling. Some game developers also dislike min-maxing because it prevents players from exploring the game’s possibilities.

The player is often disliked because of his approach to the role-playing aspect of the game. Playing an RPG game solely for its mechanics is often poorly received by other players since the role-playing element separates this genre from others. While it’s not breaking the game, it’s not welcomed either. Min-maxing is shunned more on pen-and-paper RPGs than online RPGs since they are more role-play driven, and people might enjoy online RPGs only for their person-versus-person (PvP) experiences.

There will always be stronger and weaker characters.

Choosing certain characters

This type of metagaming is often practiced in MOBA and fighting games. Players know which characters are better and which are worse. Despite their weakness, if every duel is winnable with every character, this is not a massive problem besides the lack of variability in fights.

If, however, meta characters are unfairly better than the others, players are either forced to switch or quit playing. That often occurs in games like League of Legends, where the roster of champions expands over time. New characters are usually not well balanced, so the game gets patched with buffs and nerfs. These patches define the game’s meta, where some characters are flat out stronger than others for a period.

In RPG games, a player can also min-max their build to achieve the meta build of the game. More players opt-in for those builds if some equipment and skills are objectively better.

Especially for MOBAs, meta is inevitable. Best developers can do maintain balance as much as possible.

Practicing specific gameplay routes

This type of metagaming is often —but not only— practiced by speedrunners. It is about mastering a way of playing that consists of abusing mechanics, glitches, or simply looking up to a walkthrough. Since it’s practiced on player-versus-environment (PvE) encounters, this type of metagaming is usually not shunned. The only harm in this type of metagaming might be for players since they don’t experience the game as a whole/as intended.

Metagaming outside borders of a game

Playing to the person’s weaknesses behind the player and breaking the fourth wall is metagaming.

It’s no surprise that this term emerged from pen-to-paper RPGs. One good example of this act is playing in a certain way when a character is unaware of the situation. If the player knows the case, he can command his player in the desired manner. In their first encounter, a metagamer can cast a specific spell that his opponent is weak to. His character doesn’t know that, but the player does.

Another good example can be playing according to the other players’ behavior. In games like Town of Salem, learning the playing pattern of other players will give metagamer an advantage. A metagamer can come down on his friends to benefit from their short tamper or interpret the movement sounds of other players in a game where they have to close their eyes for a period.

In short, using anything beyond game mechanics and knowledge is considered metagaming. People can exercise this type of metagaming in almost any competition. If such behavior is exercised in sports or similar events, it’s called gamesmanship.

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