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Designing the Metagame
Magic's rich metagame emerges from a handful of key game design decisions. The essential structure of the game is that players create their own collections of cards and bring them to a game. Because preparation is a necessary part of play, players quickly understand that the planning metagame of Magic goes hand in hand with the game's face-to-face dueling. The rules of play revolve around a simple turn structure. The complexity of Magic doesn't come from these core rules but instead from the many special cases that the thousands of different cards make possible. Magic is what game designer Greg Costikyan calls an "exceptions game," a game that contains many variants on a simple set of standard rules.[26] For example, Magic contains a simple set of rules to resolve creature attacks, but individual cards detail many special kinds of creatures, such as walls, which can only defend, or flying creatures, which can bypass any non-flying defending creatures. These "exceptions" lead to new creature-combinations, such as flying walls, which can intercept flying creatures, but can only defend. This kind of classificatory complexity, combined with variability in creature "stats" (casting cost, attack rating, defense rating, color type), plus numerous other "special case" abilities, makes for thousands of different kinds of possible creatures. And creatures are only one of several types of Magic cards! The modular, specialized nature of Magic cards ensures that part of the metagame is exploring the range of cards, card combinations, deck constructions, and play strategies. As game pieces, the cards are portable and collectible and lend themselves naturally to trading and wagering. On innumerable levels, Magic: The Gathering facilitates and encourages metagaming play. That is one of the reasons why, more than ten years after its release, it still continues to engage players. To guarantee a game's long-term success, the designer must take the metagame into account. As game designer François Dominic Laramée writes, "Metagaming can drastically increase a game's life span. I remember an online adventure game where players stayed on for months after solving the mystery, serving as 'elders' and giving clues to newbies.[27]" Without a metagame, a play experience will provide its own short-lived intrinsic pleasures, but will not affect meaningful play in contexts outside the game. Designing meaningful social play, usually means designing a meaningful metagame. But how? As we have noted in earlier chapters, game design is a second-order design problem. Game designers only directly design rules; the play experience is an emergent, indirect outcome of the rules. In a similar sense, social play, and the metagame in particular, are only indirectly linked to formal game design. In fact, most of any given game's meta-game is beyond the reach of the game designer, for it emerges from play communities and their larger social worlds.
Yet careful game design can contribute to the emergence of a rich metagame. In many online games, web community features such as chat systems transform play via the metagame by allowing players to establish and nurture in-game social relations that gain life outside of game play. For example, the online gaming group homemakers spends hours online playing Hearts and Bridge while devoting most of their attention to chatting with friends. Players who make friends playing Hearts with homemakers will value the game not only for the formal play experience it provides, but also for the social community developed as part of the metagame. The strength of this community, like that of Magic, largely derives from the designed context in which it makes it meanings. Although the metagame can only be indirectly designed, it is up to you to encourage the experiences you want for your players, both within and around the games you design. Richard Garfield might not have designed a particular player's style of Magic trash-talking, but he helped provide the play context in which it is put to use. Too often, game designers get caught up in the intricacies of design and production, losing sense of the larger social contexts where their game will be played. What will players bring to and from your game? How will they metagame between and during play sessions? What structures can you provide that will encourage the right kind of metagame? Will it be narrative worlds that open up imaginative metagame play? Deep formal structures that reward players for boning up on strategy before a game? Physical economies that encourage social trading and playing for stakes? Tools that let players create their own play communities? There are endless game design approaches. One key: remember to observe your players. As you go through the iterative design process, pay attention to how your players interact before games, after games, between games. Ask them how they'd play if you let them take your game home. Let them take your game home—and see what happens. It is true that you can't directly design the metagame. But by understanding that you are always already designing within and for social contexts, you can do your best to cultivate rich metagaming play. [26]Greg Costikyan, "Don't be a Vidiot: What Computer Game Designers can Learn from Non-Electronic Games." Speech given at the 1998 Game Developer's Conference. Archived at: <www.costik.com/vidiot.hmtl>. [27]<http://www.gignews.com/fdl_mainstreamdesign >.
