Metagames and Containers

What the heck is this? Well, I wanted to try incor­po­rat­ing some of the ideas from this arti­cle into the design itself.

When you fin­ish read­ing a sec­tion, I encour­age you to click the lit­tle box in the bot­tom right to mark it as read, track­ing your progress in the article.

My favorite video games tend to have a very par­tic­u­lar, yet highly abstract, aspect to them. I love games with a clear set of rules com­bined with an envi­ron­ment to sup­port the explo­ration of those rules and the dis­cov­ery of their boundaries.

When this is done suc­cess­fully, you cre­ate the space for emer­gent game­play: new, unex­pected inter­ac­tions aris­ing from the com­bi­na­tion of smaller interactions.

One type of emer­gent game­play is metagam­ing. Tell me all about it, Wikipedia: “In sim­ple terms, [metagam­ing] is using out-of-game infor­ma­tion, or resources, to affect one’s in-game decisions.”

A com­mon form of metagam­ing is the speed run: beat­ing a game as fast as pos­si­ble. Speed runs fre­quently abuse bugs and physics sys­tems in ways the devel­oper never intended.

I fre­quently rely on metagames in order to enter­tain myself. Can I do these dishes in under five min­utes? Go!

When a game has built-in achieve­ments, explicit hid­den items, and other layered-in expe­ri­ences, it’s usu­ally pitched as added value. In real­ity, they’re only adding in time con­sump­tion — a mea­sure of value most likely derived from the era of arcades.

I believe the main rea­son games like Farmville main­tain a huge player base is the entice­ment of the metagame. The actual game mechanic of farm­ing — which com­prises most of the game — is unfath­omably dull. It’s the abstracted layer above the farm­ing that cre­ates the pri­mary moti­va­tion: rib­bons (achieve­ments), new items, leader­boards, etc.

But the blur of time-consumption and value is simul­ta­ne­ously dam­ag­ing Farmville. Because sat­is­fac­tion is derived only from the metagame, suc­cess is a mea­sure of how many hours you’re will­ing to play, not your abil­i­ties. Players who have invested a lot of time into the game end up feel­ing bit­ter about the fruits (or veg­eta­bles) of their labor.

Strategery is an iPhone game that I’m absolutely obsessed with for this rea­son. It has no fea­tures or mechan­ics you could remove (save for a few alter­nate game modes).

It’s like Risk, stripped down to it’s most basic. No real world map, no cards, no redis­tri­b­u­tion of units. It’s just attack­ing, defend­ing, and assign­ing units to territory.

My main Strategery metagame con­sists of win­ning the game with­out a sin­gle extra army on the board. An extra army rep­re­sents a resource I didn’t use to win and thus waste. I tend to only play large maps on the “Brutal” dif­fi­culty and I’m proud to say my best “score” is 6 sur­plus units at the end of the game.

Achievements — system-level awards for cer­tain game­play goals — are explicit metagames. Many play­ers find that they are sub­stan­tially less reward­ing than the metagames they cre­ate for themselves.

After all, part of the fun of a meta-game is not know­ing if it’s even tech­ni­cally pos­si­ble to accom­plish your goal.

It’s “Jump the van over the river: 30 points” vs. “Can I get this beat-up van with a popped tire to go fast enough to jump over that river? Let’s find out!” One is fol­low­ing instruc­tions, the other is inven­tion.

There’s an awe­some sat­is­fac­tion derived from games with no extra­ne­ous ele­ments. It’s a prin­ci­pal that applies to soft­ware in gen­eral, espe­cially task-driven soft­ware. The more fea­tures an appli­ca­tion has, the more uneasy a user can feel. This prin­ci­pal is one rea­son why Apple’s prod­ucts tend to be so sat­is­fy­ing to use. The more lim­ited a product’s func­tion­al­ity, the eas­ier one can mas­ter it. And feel­ing like a mas­ter of your tools is a won­der­ful thing.

The ordi­nary ham­mer occu­pies a spe­cial place in my heart. As a piece of design, it’s about as per­fect as any­thing. Incredibly sim­ple, immensely sat­is­fy­ing, and just plain handy.

How many times have you been using Microsoft Word and acci­den­tally trig­gered a fea­ture you didn’t under­stand? Unintentionally dragged mar­gins any­one? I have to believe a vast major­ity of Word users take advan­tage of an incred­i­bly small per­cent­age of the application.

Making use of some­thing in it’s entirety has a hearti­ness to it, and a whole­ness — like when you’re wear­ing clothes that fit perfectly.

And like per­fectly fit clothes, that feel­ing is empow­er­ing. A para­dox, then: the less you enable peo­ple to do, the more they will do.

One of my favorite pieces of soft­ware is Marco Arment’s Instapaper — an appli­ca­tion for sav­ing arti­cles so you can read them later. It’s a metagame for read­ing. I fre­quently find myself read­ing more arti­cles than I nor­mally would, just to clear out my Instapaper queue.

Now, the sat­is­fac­tion of “com­ple­tion” isn’t quite the same as “whole­ness” but it’s related.

I think it’s a sig­nif­i­cant rea­son why peo­ple get less out of read­ing for the web: there’s always more.

The mag­a­zine is the print for­mat clos­est to the blog: short arti­cles that come out seri­ally. The dif­fer­ence is the issue for­mat. The beau­ti­ful thing about issues is that they begin and end.

I love flip­ping through a mag­a­zine, read­ing the pieces that catch my eye, then dou­bling back and scan­ning for the morsels I didn’t notice. Again: explor­ing the walls of a con­tained environment.

I believe one rea­son the list for­mat is so suc­cess­ful is that it promises to con­tain a prob­lem. It’s also a way of pro­vid­ing check­points along the way, a sense of achieve­ment to main­tain momentum.

I think it’s also why round-up blogs like the Gawker Media blogs are so pop­u­lar. They promise to thor­oughly con­tain mas­sive chan­nels of information.

There are, of course, blogs that have exper­i­mented with the issue for­mat, A List Apart is a well-known example.

But I think there’s a lot of room left in the idea of con­tain­ing con­tent so that one enjoys the sat­is­fac­tion of finishing.

Steal this idea: using cook­ies, it’d be triv­ial to sort con­tent into read and unread. This could aid both the reader who has returned to find a post they’ve read, and the reader who wants some­thing new.

I love when a site has a “best of” list of their own con­tent. Take a les­son from the food indus­try: peo­ple like being told what’s good on the menu.

Limited run blogs are another rare for­mat. It’s counter to pro­fes­sional blog­ging cul­ture to let go of an audi­ence but tele­vi­sion has demon­strated how engag­ing a finale can be.

Achievement unlocked!

Click 23 boxes for no reason.

All the ways in which we build around and on top of our cre­ations greatly impact the way they’re used.

Boundaries may not be phys­i­cal any­more, but they remain powerful.

— David