Online anonymity is generally faulted for all manner of evil. Nowhere does this hold more true (except, maybe, on message boards) than in gaming. But with respect to gaming, it offers at least one redeeming quality that I’ve come to appreciate more and more as my experience with married life continues to grow.
You see, my wife is a ruthless gamer. While she doesn’t possess the hand-eye coordination and speed to compete in FPS, RTS, or fighting games, she’s got quite the turn-based strategic mind, which she employs quite effectively at the table during one of many different boardgames. She will stop at nothing to ensure that she secures a victory during such competitions. But after beating her one too many times in Settlers of Catan, she’s come to find something far more desirable than even the sweet taste of victory – and that is to see me trampled, dejected, and utterly defeated. I assure you all that she savors every moment of my injured silence, knowing that I know that I cannot win the game. She may not even be aware of it, but in such games, I can see her looking over at me and observing my disbelief each time my situation worsens – a settlement blocked, a road interrupted, another resource stolen by the cursed robber.
Her tool of choice to achieve this end revolves around exploiting something I’ve come to call the “diplomatic metagame”. The diplomatic metagame is the act of deciding or manipulating alliances based on the outcomes of previous games. This occurs outside of the normal gameplay and thus does not depend at all upon player performance within a particular match. Keep in mind that exploiting the metagame often destroys all semblance of fairness because it involves one or more players abandoning the basic assumption that most games are built upon – namely, that a player plays to secure victory for himself/herself. When that motivation is replaced by something else entirely, then that delicate symmetry of balance is broken and the game easily tips in another player’s favor.
In the realm of multiplayer videogames, the metagame appears to be quite rare. It is far more prevalant in the world of analog (board/card) games, where matches are face-to-face and are often played between a consistent subset of players. And given that I’m married to my most vicious opponent, the metagame has become for me a glaring and ugly reality. For weeks – even months – after my five-game winning streak in Settlers, subsequent games would begin with my wife informing the other players that I “always win” and that they should make sure that I lose the game. This continued even after my record had plummeted into the gutter. Of course, no one paid any heed to my pleas that they not believe her disgusting lies. Instead, they’d refuse to trade with me. They’d block my expansions. And guess where the robber always went. It didn’t matter if I was already in last place. She’d still egg them on – just so long as she (and they) got to see me lose. Again. It’s a sick pleasure, and I can assure you – it is no more despicable than mass online griefing. I can hardly even stand to play 3+ player boardgames when she’s present – she doesn’t even have to be playing, as she can still manipulate the alliances from the sidelines, pointing out that a particular strategy would work especially well because, well, it hurts me the most. When it comes to 2-player games – games in which such wiles cannot save her – the tables are often turned and it is she that is repulsed by my participation.
While the diplomatic metagame is an ever-present reality in the analog world (at least among my circle of friends), the digital one possesses a saving grace – anonymity. The very thing that many of us despise for other (legitimate) reasons is actually what allows us to play without having to worry about the situations described above. After all, how many times have you seen a random, online free-for-all devolve into a humiliating N-versus-1 massacre? Let me answer that question for you – less times than I’ve seen my wife talk other players into an embargo. I can guarantee that. Even when the top scorer is miles ahead of the other players, I’ve never seen the losing players band together to unseat him when it means sacrificing their own victories. And even if they did, it would not technically be an instance of metagame exploitation, as their alliances would have been decided in response to a logical threat assessment – an assessment that the metagame precludes.
In reality, however, the online electronic medium’s lack of a metagame can be attributed to at least three other reasons: 1) the majority of popular multiplayer modes revolve around two competing parties (in which case, as I had mentioned earlier, there is no diplomacy in which to engage), 2) random matchmaking drastically reduces the number of times the same players will compete against each other, and 3) effective communication between competing players is often absent, making it difficult to coordinate alliances. But even if these three assumptions were to fail – even in a situation in which three or more players who’ve played against each other before can communicate openly and easily – anonymity acts as a general failsafe. This is because anonymity ultimately seeds distrust, and with distrust, there is none of the collusion that lies at the heart of the metagame.
Designing an analog game to circumvent the abuse of the metagame is difficult and would warrant an entire study of its own. I can think of many 3+ player board/card games that can be destroyed by metagame exploitation. It almost seems inevitable that solutions would require restricting the mechanics to either: severely limit player-to-player transactions/interactions, or explicitly write anonymity into the game. After trying to recall the boardgames I’ve played, my mind settles on Ticket to Ride, which presents an elegant solution – hiding player objectives. One cannot thwart a player when one cannot intuit what that player’s goal is. The ticket cards provide just that kind of secrecy. In addition, the rail graph is finely tuned in such a way that even with the knowledge of an opponent’s desired route, entirely blocking the completion of the route is almost impossible due to the number of different paths between any two given points. Even a concerted effort to preemptively block a route tends to be futile until late-game.
But such solutions are few and far between. Maybe you’ve experienced my Settlers woes. Or maybe conspiring players stripped you of your fields and castles in Carcassonne. Or maybe you were crippled by everyone’s catastrophe tiles in a game of Tigris and Euphrat. Or maybe everyone took their pot shots at you in a game of Bang, killing you before your first turn. The list goes on and on… But whatever the case may have been in the analog world, be glad when you’re playing a pick-up match on one of those online ports. You’re just another name. Everyone’s a threat. Your win streak will never count against you. And besides… you’ve probably muted everyone already, anyway.
[...] hubby writes very long blog posts that he works on for days. Today he finally published a new one in which he colorfully described how I play a “diplomatic metagame” to make him lose at [...]