My Life As A Gamer: Meta Is Murder

I'm going to use this video to talk about a game design matter going back to the '70s.

World of Warcraft is to MMORPGs as Dungeons & Dragons is to tabletop RPGs. Therefore much of what afflicts WOW afflicts D&D, and that's because WOW is a direct inheritor of D&D despite being in a much bigger medium.

Back in the old days, when we kids got into D&D in the late '70s and early '80s--yes, we were the same age as those punks on Stranger Things--we weren't stupid; we wanted to maximize our odds of succeeding because we knew what we wanted the game was about: getting the best gear and slaying the baddest monsters. To that end, we went with the most powerful character options we could get our hands on and could get the Dungeon Master to allow.

Races are Character Options. Of course many of us went--especially once we dove deep into Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition--with playing Elves for that sweet Fighter/Mage synergy, followed by playing Dwarves for that sweet Fighter/Cleric action. Most of us didn't play in campaigns that lasted long enough, and so never got high enough in level, for the Human benefits to kick in; Level limits, slowed XP gains, etc. were not felt properly due to the short campaign lengths we had so we got the power boosts without the pain ever being felt.

That's a tabletop RPG environment, and we were kids who weren't that up on playing as a team so we weren't thinking in terms of group utility. We quickly figured out what races, classes, spells, etc. were best and ranked the rest in descending order of usefulness by our success metrics. Meta-gaming was there from the beginning. This did not go away. It only got worse over time as RPGs spread to other media. Especially so in MMORPGs, "having something to bring to the table" matters because groups of all sorts are no different about maximizing success odds and minimizing risks of failure.

So you get videos like Kelani's here, talking about the racials for a new pair of playable races. The developers know that one race isn't as desired as another, so they put in those powerful racial abilities as flat-out bribes to get players to pick it; they took what TSR did by accident and made it work as deliberate design policy, and they are not the only design team--in any RPG medium--to do so.

It does matter. In World of Warcraft, the meta-game is defined by the top streamers on Twitch and the top raiding guild: Method. Everyone wants to top the meters, so they follow the lead that this cohort--we're talking less than a dozen people for a scene with millions of players--sets, as put down in video and written guides hosted online at places like WOWHead, MMO-Champion, or Icy Veins. Once a guide is down and generally accepted, it becomes hard to deviate from it in any group situation where the play is meant to be challenging: the metagame state for World of Warcraft's Mythic Dungeon Invitational demonstrates this to a tee; all but a few groups Night Elves with a class composition of Warrior/Druid/Roguex3, and that is THE composition because of the maximum useful synergy of class and race abilities to minimize risk of failure in a competitive environment where real money is on the line.

Gamers are people. People want to trivialize challenges whenever possible, especially if the risk can be removed while the gains are unaffected. This is a process that might as well be an application of the Pareto Principle in another context. If there is a best option, that becomes required if it possible to turn that best option into a hard requirement; "Best Or Benched" is a thing.

Which means that the way to deal with it is to make certain that the meta is consistently disrupted. For a tabletop RPG this is best handled by the Game Master at the table, making use of the liminal quality of the medium to ensure that playable character options--class, race, gear, powers, etc.--are constrained by the natural outcome of the actions players take during play. (You can't play (X) if you're not where you can recruit (X), and so on.)

Videogames can't do that. It's on the developers to make those calls and execute those duties, and that requires a ground-up design that facilitates disruption as a mechanic; Mark Kern's Mecha-v-Kaiju game Em8er has at least one of these as a way to govern access to gear, and if Kern's the savvy man I think he is he'll do that. This is not the case with World of Warcraft and many other top MMOs; other factors conspire to make metagame disruption difficult, and deliberately making stuff overpowered as a means to break up a metagame status that's not good for the business of the game is the best they can do.

If you get into game design, remember to murder the meta.