I never Meta-Game I didn’t like.

Okay, I admit it, I stole that title. Let’s not fight about it.

The term Meta-Game (or metagaming if you have a thing against hyphens) seems to have sprung from relative obscurity into the design spotlight as of late.

Achievements are the most visible and obvious representation of how the popularisation of the metagame has changed the design landscape. Some argue that achievements add nothing but a false sense of progression through a game, another hoop to jump through. While I agree that some achievements, like the ones you get just for playing the game don’t add anything, there are many that reward the player for attempting to challenge the rules of the game. To think to themselves “I wonder if I can…” and being rewarded for doing what we as game designers want the player to be doing anyway: being completely immersed in the world.

(As an aside, I can personally account for many hours lost in World of Warcraft attempting to find the perfect spot to fall 65 feet without dying just because there was an achievement for it.)

Of course, the reward is nothing but meaningless points or bragging rights, right? I think the reward really, is establishing a new train of thought for the player. “Yes, I can do that!” that awesome moment when the game does something completely unexpected by anticipating their desires and responding to them, even if they don’t advance the linear gameplay. The player learns that the attempt paid off, and will be more likely to try it again in the future.

In some examples such as Achievement Unlocked on Kongregate.com, the metagame is the game (or as they put it, “A game that’s a metagame about metagaming!”. Ironically, Kongregate recently added its own Achievement system to this game, adding another mind-twisting level of meta-gaming (or is that just back to regular gaming?)

There are many fantastic examples of games that allow for metagaming (the card game Fluxx comes to mind) but practically any game with a flexible enough ruleset can give the player that sort of freedom. My friends and I even devised a crude version of backwards Monopoly, a game I called “Housing Crunch Monopoly”, in which all the properties are already owned by the players, and the object is to get rid of them before the mortgages bankrupt you.

The question is: should we as game designers be taking the metagame into heavy consideration when we design? Is it a subconcious process, designing the game’s rules to be flexible enough to allow the player to find his own game? Or rather tack on features to an already established game? Fallout 3 is a game with seemingly limitless potential, but many of the choices the player can make, obvious or subtle, had a designer go “Let’s give the player the choice to do X”. Not every game can be designed like the Sim games, an attempt at perfecting the “metagame as game”.

As players become more and more comfortable challenging the boundaries of their games, game designers need to build with this expansion in mind, to allow the player to push what can be experienced in the world we get to create for them.