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When Videogames Know They're Videogames
An anonymous reader writes "In 'I Never Metagame I Didn't Like', AllRPG.com goes into a discussion of metagaming - what it is and some games which feature it. The piece explains: 'Metagames show awareness of their nature as games. These games ignore all pretense of being a representation of a reality--rather, they know that they're polygons on a screen', and goes on to reference titles such as Earthbound and Metal Gear Solid as examples." Are there other examples of titles which address the player in this awfully postmodern way?
"and some games which feature it"
Metagames exist in every game. This term has been coined long before this author thought it up, but really he's just talking about particular games' self awareness (to which the term Metagame does not apply).
A Metagame is the game that goes on in the players mind, when *they* step past the suspension of disbelief to tackle the actual game mechanics, and not the fantasy scenarios involved.
A good example of this would be a First Person Shooter. The "game" is where you, as John Doe Mercenary must blow your way past the Evil Terrorist Organization, using all available weaponry to eliminate your foes and survive.
The "Metagame" in this example is really how quickly and acurrately you can move the mouse and click while using the arrow keys to avoid incoming hits. That is the *true* challenge of the game; hence: "metagame".
I think this author should read up a bit on common game design theories and philosophy before tackling another subject like this. All he's really doing is trying to coin a term that has been in common use in the game design field for several years.
umm... in EarthBound they make many mentions to the player, the controller (you know the top yellow button, *whoops I said that! I meant to think it* AH I'm saying what I'm thinking and thinking what I'm saying! *oops!*) and in mgs they made multiple mentions, one of the main parts of the game relies on you to find your cd case so you can find meryl's radio frequency.
I had a great laugh in Max Payne when in one of the dream sequences, a phone rings and (I believe it's Mona) says: "It's a video game, Max.". He then proceeds to rattle off all the features of Max Payne, complete with various screenshots, mentions being under complete control by some nerd, and finishes off with something along the lines of "It was the most horrifying thought I've ever had".
I really got a big kick out of that.
My English teacher once told me that two positives don't make a negative. Two words for her: Yeah, right.
You seem to have the twisting level of the storylines of .hack mixed up. Considering their intertwining, it's easy to do. You're confusing .hack//SIGN with the .hack games (saying one of the .hack games is also misleading, as they are all continuations of the same game, just serialized).
.hack//SIGN, one character, Tsukasa, is stuck in the MMORPG world, "The World". In the game(s), you play the character, Kite, who is *not stuck* in "The World", but his friend, Orca, who introduced him to the game, is in a coma in real life (IRL) as a result of the game, and really if also from an event that occurred in "The World". This is to say nothing of .hack//LIMINALITY, which is all based IRL, trying to discover why players go into comas when playing in "The WORLD". Also there is .hack//legend of the twilight (aka .hack//udeden or .hack//dusk) where the story is about two twins who are in different parts of a divorced family IRL, and meet up in "The World" under equally confusing circumstances.
.sig has said it for a couple of months now, and I'm about to dive back into the games.
.hack//info center. A well dubbed version of the anime is on the Cartoon Network at the not great hour of mignight on Sunday.
.hack//udeden who want to be together IRL, meeting in "The World". I can type and analyze this for hours. Give in to it, as it will change the way you look at games, especially online games. Not to mention, it's a damn good RPG game by itself.
In
It is the best combination of storyline, multiple media (anime and gaming - there are magna I don't have), and so many other concepts such as game levels, philosophy (what is reality anyway?), identity on the net vs. IRL, escapism, creating a better life for yourself IRL via online, etc. I've ever experienced. (Plus the music is excellent, so the OSTs are definitey worth listening to). I have 2 more games to play, but I've taken a break at the request of my family so they know I'm still alive myself. My
The best site I've found to sort this all out (and it took me a while myself) is
It is the best gaming experience I've had, and I've given (some might say lost) about 1/4 of my waking hours to video games, and the best video experience I've watched. It is also a great example of going way beyone the barriers of traditional game "walls", as you are forced to think on more that just the level of one player, one controller, one identity. The concept of playing a simulated MMORPG alone breaks that barrier well. You interact with other characters that have not only in-game personas, but converse with you about their IRL issues and talk to you as if you were conversing with them IRL. You play Kite, who is an 8th grader IRL, and has his own interests, and friends (he knows Orca IRL). The twins in
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
The earliest memory I have of somethin metagamish, is probably Playing the mini-games in System Shock. They were really a game in a game, since you had to have a physical game pad to upload the games to. And in the games themselves, which showed up in one of the left or right screens, you battled against SHODAN and she had all the insanely high scores... When I first found them, I was wondering whether it was pre-cogniscient or cogniscient SHODAN I was playing against. A nice diversion from the game.
A more recent example is something that was mentioned in another post: Character response to player (in-)activity. I've noticed in a couple of games. Prince of Persia has a really good one, which doesn't break the atmosphere or the premise of the story.. "shall I go on?"
There's commander keen, of course (which I know is older than system shock....) who read a book and fell asleep and did stuff, if you left him in the middle of a level. Sonic, I think did it too. It's most common in scrollers, since the premise is frequently simple enough that you can get away with breaking the game world conventions like that.
More and more game NPC's comment on their own world, often reflecting on the absurdity or irrationality of game constructs. I recall a morrowind NPC worrying about the fact noone goes to sleep at night. That's interesting considering there was a sleep cycle in Daggerfall.
More and more games have this habit, as the worlds they create become more complex, yet with obvious limitations. It's a measure of the sophistication of gamers and developers, that limitations are not only accepted, but deliberatly pointed out.
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.
In Eternal Darkness, Sanity's Requiem, your character has a sanity meter. When your sanity gets low, certain in-game effects happen, such as hearing strange voices, having the camera angle tilt crazily, walking on the ceiling, or even hallucinating battles that don't really happen.
However, certain effects break out of the game. In one, for example, the screen goes black, it looks like the game system reboots, and displays a "controller error" message screen. The first few times things like that happened, I thought my game had malfunctioned, but later I correlated these to losses of in-game sanity. I think this was very effective in making sanity loss seem real, by making the player (as well as the character) think he's losing his mind.
Another example from Square RPGs can be found from Final Fantasy VI (or III for the American players out there). There's a puzzle in a tomb where an airship is being stored (IIRC), and you need to form a phrase out of groups of letters.
The phrase turns out to be: THE WORLD IS SQUARE. Makes sense when you look at the typical world map of an FF game, never mind the connotation of megalomania on the developers' part. :)