Serious Games Live in the Metagame

(A brief disclaimer regarding terminology: I do not use the words "metagame" and "serious game" in the ways that they are always used. "Metagame" apparently has a multitude of different meanings in different parlances. Please use the definition I've provided for discussion of this post. "Serious games" has a different accepted meaning than that to which I refer--I knew it when I wrote the article, but "serious" was the most appropriate word I could muster. So please use my definitions for these words in this article until I come up with better words for this stuff. Thanks. (And thanks to Psychochild for pointing it out.))

The metagame is the evolution of gameplay strategies outside of the game itself, including  the gathering of game knowledge from external sources and players studying others’ strategies.The progress of the metagame represents the players exploring the multitude of strategic opportunities a deep game (“hardcore” deep, not “casual” deep) presents. Only deep games have rewarding metagames.

The metagame strips away all but the ludic elements of the game. All fluff, be it story or even the transitions between levels in platformers, is skipped over because it does not contribute to the strategy-space of the game. As soon as a part of the game’s story is tied to a game mechanic, awareness of the metagame will erode the narrative elements until the player is left with only a conception of the mechanic as a piece of the game rules.

Company of Heroes (prior to the release of the first expansion, Opposing Fronts) was a great “RTS” game. It had a relatively rich metagame that shifted over time based on swapping replays of interesting matches and talking on forums about strategy. Many different strategies had their time in the spotlight. For a while the game was a contest of who could get to the end-game heavy tanks, the Pershing for Allies and the King Tiger for the Germans,  and harness their power the fastest. Some serious patching completely changed the fabric of the game, leading to infantry-heavy strats dominating. The brief era of pioneer-spam saw many frustrated players until it was patched. The strategy-space was fairly well-explored by the time Opposing Fronts released, but people were still playing the game plenty and finding new and creative ways to win—even after many months no one had reduced the game to a simple spam strat for any meaningful amount of time. The metagame was vibrant and, though not as deep as a elder statesman like Starcraft, provided me with many hours of entertainment in itself.[In retrospect, this is not a good example because I make it seem as if the metagame should rely on changes to the game rules--a game with a deep metagame does not need such changes to remain interesting. In a way, patching changes the game enough to force the player to recalculate their view of the metagame. This doesn't really correlate to adding depth, just moves the players to a different part of the proverbial strategy pool. -Ev]

There is Fun in Games Sans Metagames

But not every game has a healthy metagame—or any metagame at all. For some games, metagaming ruins the gameplay. A player may enjoy playing through a game in a natural, unaided fashion for one and only one time. Brenda Braithwaite’s Train is an example of this: once the player understand the game, the meaning of the game is significantly altered and the game is compromised as a game, though perhaps not as a piece of art. Entering such a game with a very attainable degree of metagame knowledge renders the game uninteresting. Learning about the game outside of the game itself breaks the natural process of exploration that some games rely upon. These games cannot be good games of strategy. Strategic thinking is not a primary goal of such a game, or, if the game does aim to have serious depth, the game mechanics are not well-designed. [Knowledge of the "twist" in Train does change the gameplay--I was way too aggressive by stating that the game is compromised by multiple playthroughs. The real point here is that some games don't focus on strategy and don't need depth to be fun or affecting. -Ev]

I am not decrying games that do not have meaningful metagames. Such games have other roles to play in the pantheon of entertainment. They are entertaining in a decidedly limited (though that limit may not necessarily be low) fashion, like a good action movie might be. This doesn’t mean that they are inferior or to be frowned upon. They can lead to as much, if not more, entertainment than a serious game in the hands of certain players. They’re games that most players can sit down and enjoy, they simply are not games to be taken seriously by the player as a game. They played “casually”. Players do not study such games and they are given no real reason to study. A player will proceed through the game in 10, 20, maybe as many as 40 hours—perhaps even playing through a few times—and then disregard the game because the game is “finished”. Most games are like this, and the vast majority of people who play games spend the vast majority of their time playing such “casual” games.

(I put “casual” in quotes for a good reason. I do not mean to relabel or reinterpret the idea of casual gaming, but in comparison with the kind of gaming that goes on in metagame-intensive games, players approach less deep games in a decidedly casual way.)

“Hardcore” is not Serious

Themepark MMOs almost universally are not serious games. A game is not a serious game simply because it requires a significant time investment to reach some goal. Themepark MMOs are very long multiplayer games—they are “casual” games that have more content than most others and an environment of social competition that urges players to continue playing through grinds and boredom.

“Hardcore” games are not necessarily serious games. Games that punish excessively and reward sparingly—games that make mundane goals ridiculously difficult to achieve (I’m thinking primarily of bullet-hell games and games like Flail), are not necessarily serious games, either. Difficulty does not dictate if a game is serious.

A game’s strategic depth—having more to learn about strategy within the game—as signaled through its metagame indicates if it is a serious game.

Serious MMOs

MMOs bother me because they delay a player’s participation in any kind of meaningful metagame for a month or two while their character levels. I don’t want to arbitrarily wait a month before being able to experience the fullness of the game. Even when I do get there, the metagame is often a flat expanse of memorizing raid strats and FOTM builds. PvP is the only facet of MMOs that usually offers much strategy worth considering, but this strategy is often overwhelmed by gear differentials, and gear differential breaks down into time spent, not techniques learned and mastered. MMOs are a composition of many different games—but most of these games are “casual” or casual.

I’m primarily interested in bringing a serious game mentality to MMO design. In this way MMOs can become almost endless in playability as a game as well as a social experience. Not only would a serious MMO offer plenty of content to players at different skill levels, it would offer years of material to learn and recontextualize content.

Around serious games societies bloom.  A substantial game provides a common ground for diverse players with unique goals to come together for a common cause. This will build communities that are tighter and stronger than themepark MMO communities. A serious MMO does not need to have 100,000 subscribers to stay around, because a group of 10,000 dedicated players could sustain the game. There would not be much tourism and turn-over from such a game, because it presents a deep and unique opportunity that is differentiated from other games in the genre. Serious games cannot be a rehashed with success, because the mechanics must be well thought-out and maintained to promote a strong metagame.

It’s not easy to design serious games, but I think that serious MMOs can make money. They will definitely be better for players—more fun for longer—than the current trend.

Abstract Game Criteria, Revisited

All games worth discussing for their ludic merits are strategy games. All such games involve planned set of actions that players attempt to execute in order to achieve some kind of goal set by the game through the use of a set of rules. The genre distinctions used in the media are primarily differences in the interface the player uses to participate in the game. First-person shooters, RPGs, puzzle games, and Poker are all games of strategy—they just use different ways of expressing the aspects of strategies and the effects of strategies. Because all games are strategy games, one end of the spectrum should be those games considered more “purely” games of strategy: abstract strategy games.

Why are abstract strategy games considered the purest? Because they most emphasize

• Player agency. The players should have a direct say in what happens within the game. Game results should be the results of the players’ actions alone.
• Mechanic-based Strategizing. The only strategies should be those that operate within the context of the game mechanics. In this way, the strategy-space is uncluttered by external factors that change independent of the game mechanics. The game mechanics themselves are all that need to be considered in order to invent a successful strategy.

There are three factors that can detract from these emphases:

• Imperfect Information. If information knowledge is asymmetric within the game, players do not have sufficient evidence to strategize successfully while maintaining full agency.
• Chance. Elements of chance reduce player agency by removing the guarantee that a simple strategic action (like moving a piece in chess) will complete. If there is a chance that an action will fail independent of player choice and stategy, player agency is damaged.
• Non-dyadic play. If more than two people are playing a game, politics seeps into any successful strategy. Politics is outside of the mechanics of the game, and therefore violates the mechanic-dependence of the strategy-space. (The word “dyad” is awesome, too.)

Sid Meier’s Civilization as a Concrete Strategy Game

In the beginning of a game of Civilization, I have no knowledge of the world beyond the borders of my one city. How do I chose my strategy going forward? I chose a strategy here that will have profound effects on the rest of the game, yet I’m severely lacking in information about the world and the other players. Over the next 30 turns, I will make decisions that could entirely doom me without my knowledge, even if I have a perfect understanding of how the game mechanics work. If I choose to tech rapidly and forgo upgrading my military and three squares into the fog of war is Tokugawa with 4 archers that are twice as strong as my strongest military unit (of which I only have 2, one that is acting as a scout), he will declare war on me and destroy me as soon as he finds me. I cannot make informed strategic decisions because of imperfect information in this example and it has a significant effect on the strategic outlook of the game.

Later in that game, I build up a military that consists primarily of knights, a quite strong unit of the medieval era. I go to war with a Catherine, who has been expanding too fast and hasn’t defended her frontier cities well. I have a stack of three knights invading her frontier. My strategy is to grab the high-value cities on her frontier where she has not had time to muster a defense. At the first city, I pit a knight against her measly defenses: a warrior. A knight has triple the attack of the unit she has defending this city (even modified), so I gladly send my knight to crush the city.

But my knight dies and the warrior is unscratched.

What should be a surefire victory has turned into a miserable and costly defeat due to nothing within my power as a player. Chance has stripped my agency.

I’m not suggesting that Civ games should have deterministic combat, I’m simply showing how chance takes away from the strategic agency of the player. Chance can be used appropriately and to good effect in games, but it’s important to understand that it has a deleterious effect on player agency.

Back to the game. Let’s say that I’m playing Civ over a network with a few friends. As the game progresses and we start to encounter one another in the game world, we begin to talk in private conversations about what we should do. Players begin lying to one another about what they have and what they plan to do. Strategies are formed in conjunction and with reference to the relationships players have outside of the game (though the relationships are in reference to the game). The weaker players form an alliance against the strongest player and crush him. Politics, not game mechanics, lead to the defeat of she who was formerly the strongest player. The player with the most skill and knowledge of the game, due to no failing of her manipulation of game mechanics, has been defeated. The strategic space that effects the game expanded beyond the mechanics into the realm of politics—the game mechanics do not mediate the whole scope of gameplay anymore.

Civilization is in two ways a concrete game: Its mechanics are given meaning through their representation of real world phenomena, and its mechanics contradict the “pure” mechanics outlined here and in my previous post on abstract games. Civ is not, though, a “perfectly” or “purely” concrete game because it’s not a particularly good simulation, but it is certainly on the concrete side of the spectrum, well away from games like Chess and Go.

Depth Perception: Casual and Hardcore Views of Depth

A game’s depth can be defined as the amount of “stuff” that the player can learn about the game.

A shallow game has few things to learn. Think of when you first learned algebra. Because you didn’t understand the concepts of algebra, you would engage in a guessing game to find the value of x in simple expressions like “x - 10 = 3.5”. Not long thereafter, your teacher taught you that there was a method you could employ that could obviate the guessing: simply “undo” the operation on the left side and carry its effect over to the right side (“x – 10 + 10 = 3.5 + 10”). Now the guessing game isn’t a game anymore, it’s a rote task. If someone gave you 50 problems of similar complexity to solve, you would previously have had an interesting (debatably) task of excitedly guessing what x might be. Now that you know how to do it, you just mechanically run through the problems subtracting or adding numbers to both sides and receiving an result. There’s nothing left to learn there. So clearly simple algebra isn’t a deep game.

The scary part comes when you realize that you can think of World of Warcraft as algebra. You’ve got a few abilities that you can use and you’ve got enemies to kill. The first few times you fight, you’ll try different methods—essentially trying to guess the answer to “how can I make my relative DPS greater than theirs?” But once you’ve figured out a reasonably effective method, you no longer have to think. You only have to press 1-3-4-2-4-… until the enemy is dead or you are dead. The monotony is only broken when you move to a radically different kind of enemy (usually it’s a difference in magnitude of enemy DPS, so your remaining health will be the only thing to change between the old “easy” enemies and the new “harder” enemies) or when you level up and gain new abilities which may or may not actually impact this process.

Playing WoW through the course of one level doesn’t have much depth. The little bump in depth you get out of advancing doesn’t help for long, either. It’s just like learning that you can undo division with multiplication on the next homework after you mastered undoing addition with subtraction. Regardless of that bump in complexity, you still must solve those same problems (kill those same enemies) 50 times before the teacher will give you a passing grade and let you move on to the next-most-difficult homework (move on to the next level).

There’s a crucial distinction here: Depth is not the number of problems you could conceivably solve, it’s the number of conceivable techniques you could viably use to solve problems.

Players perceive these two different phenomena in MMOs and attribute both of them to the concept of depth.

In easy games like WoW, depth is artificially created through making enemies always too easy. Players are never forced to explore much of the game’s strategy space—even in the kiddie pool there can be a “deep end.”

This definition of depth only serves the “serious fun” or competitive style of gamer. To a casual player, such depth is just annoying. A casual player can’t spend the time to explore the strategy-space—he just wants to move inexorably forward and be tickled by something interesting occsionally as he receives a stream of ego-boosting rewards at a regular clip.

To the casual player, depth becomes the sheer amount of content. The casual player does not care about the advancement and evolution of strategies. They don’t want to have to think that much; games are distractions and ways to pleasantly pass time. Casual players only care that there is more to do—that the pleasant rollercoaster ride continues until he wants it to stop.

So we’re left with two definitions of depth that are useful when designing games for different kinds of players:

• Having more to do.
  • Character advancement.
  • Game as meditation.
  • Relaxed play.
  • “I must lay 300 more bricks to finish this wall.”
• Having more to learn.
  • Personal advancement.
  • Game as intellectual exercise.
  • Serious play.
  • “I must learn how to effectively approach enemy positions in Go to improve my early-game.”

Visualizing the Interactions of Depth

I see these two kinds of depth as two faces of a shape that represents the amount of fun that can be had in a game. Casual players look down one face of the shape, their depth is the shapes’ width, while hardcore players look down another face, their depth is the shapes’ height. The two are manifestations of different ways people enjoy games.

This means that games can be seen as two-dimensional objects in “depth-space”. The x-axis represents the amount of content completed, and on the y-axis is strategic understanding. Each shape represents the depth profile of the game—the width of the shape at a certain value of y indicates the amount of content that can be completed with that level of understanding; the height of the shape at a certain value of x represents the amount of knowledge that the player can gain having completed a certain amount of content in the game.

A game like WoW stretches a long way on the x-axis, but only gets high on the y-axis later. Chess, on the other hand, has a significantly taller shape, but there is not much width at any one point along the y-axis. This is because you have to engage with more of the strategy-space (learn more about the game) in order to unlock more content in chess. WoW is wider at all points on the y-axis because there is a lot you can accomplish with even a severely limited amount of strategic knowledge.

This visualization technique is not perfect. Aside from the general abstractness of it (a lack of metrics), it’s definitely not true that the two kinds of depth are orthogonal. Playing through more content usually increases your understanding of the strategy-space, which will gradually advance you along the y-axis naturally until you reach a saturation point that’s probably dictated by your intelligence.

These Depths Converge in the Long-Run

These two conceptions merge as the casual player plays the game more and must confront either the fact that the game is no longer stimulating or the fact that they cannot achieve their goals without digging deeper into the strategy-space. So games aimed at casuals do need to have some degree of traditional depth to sustain them long-term—though casual games are usually aimed at children and non-gamers—people who are not going to spend enough time in the game to hit the “no learning left” issue.

Suddenly, Bioware is Incompetent.

This is one of the few times I’ll jump on an issue that is a hot topic on MMO blogs. I’m doing it now because certain prominent bloggers’ opinions on this topic have been too ridiculous for me to bear. Perhaps Keen’s numbers haven’t been good recently and he wants to start a huge debate to draw links and views?

Bioware has released information on companion characters. For some unknown reason, this fact has led people to believe that Bioware cannot tie their design shoes anymore.

With very little actual information available, people are assuming that Bioware are going to mangle the design of companions and ruin their game by removing one or more “M”s from “MMORPG.”

Arguments against companions:

1. It throws off rewards because you will get loot as if you were two players.
2. Who would choose to bring someone along if they’ve already got an AI companion?
3. Everyone will always have their companion out, so the game will be balance for that, rendering non-companion strategies non-viable.
4. The game won’t be balanced for rampant companion use, so the game will fall apart as everything becomes extraordinarily easy due to companion use. This makes non-companion strategies non-viable.

All of these complaints are ways of saying that Bioware suddenly is incapable of good design. With even a modicum of thought I can come up with ways to counter every one of those arguments with game mechanics that are easy to implement. This isn’t difficult work or hard thought—this is basic stuff that any self-respecting game designer (or MMO pundit) should be able to figure out.

1. Parties get loot based on the number of PCs in the group, as done in DDO.
2. AI companions will always be inferior to players because AIs just aren’t that good at positioning and tactics. As long as NPC companions occupy group slots that players would otherwise occupy, PCs will be preferable over NPCs.
3. Pet classes already exist in MMOs. Even if the design isn’t great, you could just treat every class in SW:TOR as a pet class. This isn’t great design—but it’s the worst case scenario.

DDO has already implemented a feasible and functioning companion system and the world hasn’t exploded. Why can’t Bioware do the same?

This is yet another instance of people throwing a tantrum because they are incapable of seeing past the tip of their noses. Here, on bold display, is the common approach that everything with which I am not familiar is poison and evil. This kind of punditry is damaging to the discussion and progress of MMOs.

(You should also read Andrew’s great concise post at Of Teeth and Claws. There's also a strong post over at Player vs Developer that further shows good signs for companion systems.)

Concrete and Abstract Games

I also arrive at a design philosophy of moderate simulationism in MMOs through an analysis of features that define MMOs as concrete games.

Games can be classified along a continuum from abstract to concrete. The most abstract games, you might call them “pure”, are abstract strategy games. The most concrete game would be life itself. The gamism-simulationism dichotomy that I engage with frequently in my abstract design discussions is parallel to the abstract-concrete continuum. Gamism tends toward abstraction—rules for the game’s sake—and simulationism tends toward the concrete—rules for the metaphor’s sake. MMO design is locked in a struggle between the game and the metaphor; the debate is the center of many design discussions and also the source of many ill-conceived arguments.

Abstract Games

“Abstract” as used in “abstract games” means a lack of reference or relation to the real world—Abstract games’ mechanics do not model or have a significant intended relationship with the real world. Think of an abstract game as conceived and played for its own sake. Any similarities we see between it and the real world are not the sources of design decisions, but simply exist because people relate their world to everything they see (a classic reformulation of “if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”).

A good example of this is the abstract strategy game of Go (also known as Weiqi or  Baduk). Legend states that Go was invented some 4000 years ago by an counselor to the then emperor of China. The emperor had a son who was a bit dull. He commissioned the counselor to invent a game that his son could play so that he might pick up some degree of mental acuity. How would you design a game if put in the counselor’s situation? It makes the most sense to try to invent a game with simple rules that requires deep thought to play well. To design the game, we’re starting from the very abstract and working our way to mechanics that can be implemented using a few stones and a board with a grid scratched into it. This is demonstrative of how abstract games are conceived.

Abstract games are games designed for the sake of gaming. They do not seek meaning through association with the real world. They give meaning to themselves and their peers. In this way board games can seem utterly trivial to a mature human being unless they genuinely enjoy games (disregarding the social aspect for the sake of discussion).

The “purest” and most extreme abstract games are abstract strategy games. These games have three crucial features:

• Perfect information is available when the state of the game is fully known by both players. (Note that the state of the metagame does not matter here.)
• No element of chance can be present in the game mechanics. This means that only the strategizing of the players affects the outcomes of individual in-game actions.
• Only two players must play the game together. If more players are added, the game becomes political and no longer is purely strategic based on the game mechanics.

We can discern the abstractness of a game by judging how far away from these three features the game strays.

Concrete Games

Concrete games are metaphors for parts of real life. Concrete games create the illusion that the laws of the real world exist in the game. Extremely concrete games are in-depth simulations that allow the player to interfere on behalf of some element in the simulation. These games cannot be played on boards or with pieces of wood or stone, they need the computational power of computers to allow them to provide a model of some part of the real world that can allow players to suspend disbelief.

Concrete games have many players, very limited information flow, and are perpetuated by chance.

If you took all chance away from a concrete game, it would most likely fall apart as a game and become quite boring.  Each player would be able to precisely forecast the result of each of their actions, so all of the complex mechanics would boil down the number of viable strategies to a mere pittance. All of the highly situation decisions made in real life that necessitate the use of rare capacities and patterns of thought would be removed from the game, because chance models the interactions of the myriad minute details that a game cannot hope to simulate effectively. Quantum physics has shown us that even the most basic fabric of reality is subject to the whims of fortune. So to simulate (and therefore to be concrete) requires chance.

In real life, information flow is choked by the limits of our perception. A game that hopes to simulate real life in any way must model this stunted flow of information that may be incomplete or outright incorrect.

The vibrancy and ever-newness of our world is due to the fact that billions of people inhabit it. We are able to communicate with millions of people every day using technologies that were invented only decades ago. The effects of millions of individual interactions between diverse peoples leads to en endless stream of situations that would be fun to model and toy with in a game. Concrete games take advantage of this reality.

MMOs are Concrete Games

MMOs are virtual worlds—in no way are they abstract games. Every individual indicator in MMOs is in favor of their classification as concrete games. As such, they benefit from designs that allow simulation to happen. In this way a game can harness the natural processes of the real world that lead to endless fun and interesting situations. To choke an MMO with abstractness is to take away the very best and most natural fun that can be had in worlds full of thousands of people, saddled by necessity with limited information, and brimming with opportunities for serendipity and chance to reap havoc.

Thought: “Lived-in” Worlds

Solo players in MMOs point out that they enjoy MMOs because the world feels like people are living in it. Much different than the boring worlds in single-player games, all of those other characters, (probably) with people at their controls, add a certain vibrancy that can’t be found in all those NPCs that stand around all day and repeat themselves to anyone nearby.

Imagine this: A game has AI that can play as effectively as human players. As far as you can tell, humans are at the helms of all these characters—they simply don’t talk much. Would your MMO soloing desires be filled by this game?

Could we create worlds that feel lived-in within single-player (or multiplayer non-massive) games that would then capture a sizable part of World of Warcraft’s market?

Reducing and Translating Games

A game, in the abstract, is a set of game bits (like individual actors in the game world) and rules (what those actors can do and what the world does in response). The player uses an interface of some kind to interact with the game. This interface could be any collection of physical or virtual objects: a board and special pieces, cards, a ball, or a computer program and the graphical assets associated with it.

Consider tic-tac-toe. We recognize this game because it consists of a three-by-three grid that is filled with Xs and Os by different players in turn, one per grid slot, until Os or Xs are aligned three-in-a-row. But we can create other games that can be translated directly into tic-tac-toe. Here’s one: we take the numbers between one and nine (inclusive) and take turns picking numbers until one of us has a set of three numbers that sum to 15. The same mechanics underlie these two games—the only difference is the interface.

More complex games cannot be directly translated into other games as easily. They must be broken down into constituents that then are simple enough to be translated.

All this translation shows us that a game’s interface can be separated from its mechanics, but how do we actually describe the mechanics of games? Translating one set of abstractions into another, as we did with tic-tac-toe doesn’t seem to get us anywhere in this endeavor. Mathematics is, in fact, a language in which we can concisely and completely define game mechanics. Mechanics can be torn from the game’s interface and described as an abstract mathematical problem that the player is attempting to solve. I will spare you the exact mathematics here, but any game can be reduced to some composition of mathematical problems.

Math has had several more millennia of exposition than game design, so it can provide our young field with some useful language. Problems in mathematics (more than just “1+x=2”-style problems, but problems like sorting a list of numbers without knowing the exact contents of the list) have varying degrees of complexity. The complexity of a problem is basically its “difficulty” to solve, usually expressed in how the time required to solve the problem grows with respect to the “size” of the problem (the size is, for example, the number of numbers that are in the list we’re trying to sort). Non-trivial games can be reduced into math problems of a complexity class of higher than NP.

(Math nerds please excuse me. This isn’t going to be super-precise because I’m trying to make it understandable without taking 1,000 words.)

NP stands for “Non-deterministic Polynomial”, a polysyllabic train-wreck that alludes to how long it would take an “oracle” machine to guess the solution correctly. A problem of complexity higher than NP (I’m thinking particularly of NP-complete problems here) is intractable for a computer to solve—it would take a computer millions of years to solve even modest varieties of the problem. Computers can only verify that the solution is correct in a reasonable amount of time. Reasonable in the theory of computability is a polynomial relationship between problem size and time. It may take a computer 8 million years to solve a certain NP problem, but the computer would only take 8 seconds to check that a solution is correct.

Great games ask you to solve problems that are NP-complete or harder. It has actually been proven that tetris is an NP-complete problem. You’re doing some very heavy lifting when you play these games—your brain works hard to get as close as possible to solve the problem. The startling part is that this is fun!

Raph Koster talked about complexity theory and games in his AGDC presentation this year. I think it’s a profound truth about games that more game designers should understand and utilize.