The Metagame

Where do games end?

This is the first of three posts where I share work-in-progress writings related to my Roguelikes project. The following is the first pass at a reflection on metagaming, which will be edited and expanded.

What a generative AI understands as the metagame.

I have played countless hours of Spelunky, even more hours of Slay the Spire, and let’s not talk about Balatro. But when I think about the hours I spend playing a game, I think only about the minutes I spend in front of a computer or a console. But there is more play than just those hours providing input to a piece of software. There is more play in these games than when we play with them.

All games have a metagame. This concept is often used in game design parlay, but always in different ways. The best way of understanding it is as a liminal concept. The metagame is a form of play that happens outside. Around the plaything, which affects how a game is played, is related to the game design structure but does not directly interact with it¹.

OK, this is me being a game studies jargon freak, so let me give some examples of what I consider to be metagaming: discussing probabilities in Poker, talking about bats in Spelunky, writing fanfic about Fallout, practicing travels in soccer, calculating the odds in a particular deck of Slay the Spire. Some of these are forms of theory-crafting, and some are forms of practicing a game outside of the game, but they all have to do with experiencing a game when not playing it in a way that will have an effect when we play it again².

Videogames: worlds with games inside our world.

In roguelikes, the metagame is central to the experience. Because roguelikes are defined by their procedural content generation and the secrets in their gameplay, playing a run only gives a glimpse of a potential part of the game. In fact, in roguelikes, we never experience “the game,” just the sliver of possibilities presented to us at that particular time when we are playing the game. The metagame in roguelikes is a way of making sure that players can unwrap all the other possible games that are inside the roguelike. Suppose the run is an instantiation of a particular space of possibility. In that case, the metagame is the way players have situated that possibility space in the domain of all potential possibility spaces.

Metagaming is central to understanding the role of games in culture. Whatever happens when we play is vital from a phenomenological point of view. The joy of playing and the effects of playing are inseparable from the act of playing. However, the cultural object we call “game” exists mainly in the metagame. Streaming is a form of metagaming. Fanfiction can also be metagaming. However, threads of comments, discussions, reflections, rants, and opinions happen online around a game: those are also metagaming and key to understanding how we situate games in culture. The discourses and interpretations we make about games, how we use games to relate to others, and using these technologies as cultural commonplaces are both metagames and part of the cultural importance of games.

Due to their form, roguelikes require metagaming to be central to their experience. While playing Balatro is about learning how to traverse a possible space in a particular run, metagaming Balatro is reading, watching, theorizing, and sharing our play experiences with others. The pleasure of finding others and creating relations through the shared metagame of Balatro elevates the game beyond being a collective card game into the realm of a cultural phenomenon we enjoy together.

We cannot understand games without their metagames, and we cannot understand roguelikes without the shared experience created by talking and watching them. Roguelikes survived and thrived not just because of their aesthetic and technical characteristics. Roguelikes always establish a community of affinity through metagaming. For every new roguelike, a culture was created, sharing ways of playing the game and finding the intersections in the possibility spaces we traversed as players, initially alone but constantly together. From the feats of Bananasaurus Rex to the Slay the Spire subreddit, roguelikes are their metagames, as they are the game experiences they create. By sharing their secrets, discussing how the randomizers work, and how to leverage patterns of creation in each run, we become closer to each other.

I am writing this draft shortly after the official release of Caves of Qud. In some places in the discourse, observers are surprised by the game’s apparent commercial and popular success. Caves is a cultural feat, the kind of game we should celebrate everywhere if we take the “ludic century” seriously. It will never be an HBO series or a multiplatform transmedia franchise, but it has created and will create a cultural moment that will matter. It does so not just because of its technical achievements, the writing, or the world it creates. Caves of Qud takes from the roguelike form many things. The one I care the most about today is the metagame: how the game becomes something to discuss, talk about, share, reflect on, and connect with other people. Its success is not because it appeals to a community or a group of pre-established gamers. The success of Caves, and all great roguelikes, comes from how the metagame fosters the creation of a culture, of a people.

1. I am drawing on Richard Garfield and Chris Bateman’s understanding of the concept. I also recommend Mike Debus’s academic paper on metagames.

2. Annakaisa Kultima and Jaako Stenros nailed this idea when writing about the expanding ludosphere.