Meta-Video-Gaming and you

John Warner

hey folks. i've been thinking recently and figgured i'd throw this blurb out there for anyone who'd like to to tear it appart/add to it. i've been tryinh to look at games from a different perspective, and the amount of fun i'm having playing them has totaly sky-rocketed.

anyway, i finaly realized that the reason i look back at the games i played as a kid as being so good is because i could accept them so completely back when i was still innocent i suppose. as far as this goes, recently i've been trying to really force myself to believe that what i'm doing in a game is acctualy REAL. that this location i'm at is really a location, the people are real, and that i'm genuinely worried about my well-being. this really brings me in to the game- i get a real sense of emotional connection and genuine adventure. i FEEL like i'm on some alien planet in massive battle... at first, i just got a subtle feeling of a stronger connection, like the type that i might have felt playing something like doge-ball as a kid in gym class.. but as i get better at it i'm really able to absorb myself into the game

I'm noticing that there are definate strategies for getting into this mind set. some easy, some obscenely difficult. I've become absolutely facinated with this new way of experience and am trying to figgure out what's acctualy going on, so i can really grab a hold of it.

my friend suggests to me that the process of objectively looking at a game is refered to in the D&D community as "meta-gaming", and is something to avoid. what i'm facinated with is to identify what meta-gaming is and then try to identify specific strategies for subjective gaming.

my question is this: is there anything writen out there about the subject? any one have any personal experiences to add? does anyone acctualy know what i'm talking about or do i sound like a complete babbling loon?

cheers.

oh and btw-- after trying to play quake 4 in this altered state, i'm acctualy convinced that the developers are bloodly brilliant. i haven't played a game yet that really does as good a job at addressing all of the issues that you might base a 'meta-gaming' standpoint off of.

EDIT: i should add that i dont think that this is nessisarily any better of a method than what anyone here does. it's something im interested in, and if you guys aren't... cool!

KeyserSoze

I don't look at videogames any differently now then when I was a child. I don't remember ever being immersed to the point where the game environment seems real, and I don't particularly care to experience videogames in that way.

John Warner

totaly! i'm not suggesting that any way to play is correct, this is just something i'm interested in it. by all means! do what ever ya want

cholden

Making a game out of playing a game? Yes, I do this all the time. A little pretending or re-writing the story as you play can make a game a lot more entertaining. For example, I liked to pretend I was remote controlling a robot sent to kill everything when I played Doom 3.

KeyserSoze

Sorry, I didn't mean for my post to seem hostile. I was just mentioning how I'm different and have never had that sort of mindset you were describing. I've always been more fascinated by things grounded in reality, which is probably why I've never had much interest in fantasy/epic stuff. I've never completely fit-in with my nerdly cohorts, because I don't share many of the stereotypical interests of my peers (I've never been into anime, comics, fantasy novels, etc.), which seem to go along with the "meta-gaming" thing you're talking about.

Mark Dygert

I go so far as to talk to characters as if I was the main character. For example when I play WoW and I get a crappy quest reward item I might type something like "thanks for these oven mits I know this is all you can give me but can't you see I wear mail armor. I mean this is cloth!? I'm going to sell these to your hubby who is right outside. I expect you to be flogged by him when he finally comes inside"

But I hear ya loud and clear about pretending. The games I have the least fun in (but learn the most) are the games I look at from a developer stand point.

shotgun

john warner's "return to innocence"

don't reserve "living the moment" just for computer games..

John Warner

KeyserSoze- totaly bro, don't wory, i didn't think you were upset, i just figgured i'd take the oportunity to clarify.

hah shotgun.

cholden and vig- haha that's cool. totaly agree on the whole developer stand point thing too. it's so hard not to notice awesome artwork but if you do i find it totaly ruins the game.

anyway it's funny. they say that for people that have a hard time going into a deep hypnotic state, they need to really just try and 'pretend' that they're accepting the suggestion that's being given to them, and that if they can do that consistantly, there becomes a level where somehow you cross over and acctualy experience the suggestion genuinely..

Foehammer

i know what you mean! for example, i am currently playing GTA: Liberty City Stories, and while driving in the game I find it fun to actually adhere to the traffic laws (sometimes) stopping at red lights and such, of course when someone hits me or wrecks my car i hop out of mine and yank them out of their car, but i dont kill them, i just hop back in and go to the repair shop if it's close. anyways, you should try it sometime, it adds something to the game, of course while on a mission you can't really do that, but in between them you can. i do the same for battlefield 2 in a way. i more or less concentrate on surviving, you don't get as many kills that way but at the same time I enjoy the game more because i like to think i'm a real soldier with a mission and i dont die nearly as much.

just my 2 cents

gauss

games that have any character, even an obviously tutorial character that say "press this button to do this" or make any other overt references to the control scheme take me right out of the game. on-screen instructions are ok, but don't break the fourth wall with a game character. for as brilliant as it can be in places, the MGS series has always seemed a big offender in this category. but there again, in MGS 1, when you put the vibrating controller on your arm, the game breaks that fourth wall so thoroughly that you start to believe it almost in spite of itself.

i think the game that gives me the fullest suspension of disbelief (which is the experience that you're talking about, being "in the game") in recent memory would have to be Shadow of the Colossus. it's a shining example of great design in many other respects, but for instance one of the reasons Ueda says he came up with the reflecting-sword dynamic for finding Colossi is because he's always felt that any time you talk to a villager NPC in a game or like character and they repeat one line over and over, it breaks the immersiveness of the experience. it's just another reminder that you're playing a game and that this villager is a set of very short scripts, not a person. so he solved that problem in addition to finding a very elegant, visually interesting solution to the problem. to me, that epitomizes the kind of game design the really promotes immersion and suspension of disbelief.

adam

Uhm, I meta-game when I play any WWE game. I've been watching wrestling since I can remember so I enjoy these games a lot. (Say what you will). The story-mode gets boring at times in these games so write my own shows and story lines as I go along - in my head, of course. This experience goes hand-in-hand to making up situations when I was 6 playing with my GI Joes.

I do this a lot with games and agree with Mr. Warner that it can increase the gaming experience ten-fold, in any situation. I also agree with gauss in that certain videogame qualities can take away from the experience. Finding a game with this sort of balance is hard, but when you do its _awesome_.

KDR_11k

Gauss: I remember running into a philosopher in Anachronox that said something like "We are all just puppets in a play, only repeating the same things over and over again".

jzero

I think it's a matter of focus. I am a person who can hard-focus very easily, and so once I'm accustomed to how to move around in a given game, I'm absorbed in it. The monitor becomes my field of vision, and, while I do notice a distinct lack of peripheral vision, the game environment more or less becomes my environment while I play. I buy into it, completely. The experience may suck ultimately, but I am in that world for the duration of play.

Now, I should counterpoint that by saying that since I was a teenager, I have been able to do something like an "abstract objective zoom-out", where I can perceive that I am observing the world from behind my eyeballs (trapped?), and I can expand my awareness conceptually, to where I can understand that I am sitting at a computer on the 18th floor of a skyscraper in the downtown area, and that skajillions of other things are going on in the world, clearly outside of my range of perception...

It's ALL in your head, baby. All of it.

/jzero

rawkstar

it was alot easier to do this with older games because older games had alot less background, like I could imagine myself being the terminator while playing doom... etc stupid shit like what i'd do as a kid.

MoP

I'm like jzero when it comes to games, but without all the freaky stuff about being trapped behind my own eyeballs.

John Warner

awesome! jzero, this is the type of thing that i'm talking about.

how you talk about the process of accepting everything in the screen as a reality and croping everyting out, stuff like that. specific deep-level structure, process and strategy for this kind of thing is what i'm interested in at the moment. i think i kinda know what you mean about a zoom out. if accepting a reality on the computer screen crops out everything outside of it, it's funny to think that we're cropping what's outside of our vission...

and yah, i agree gauss, there's definately aspects of games that help this, and some that ruin this. that's why i think quake 4 is so good (the beggining anyway, i'm finding that it quickly fell to shit).

rockstar- totaly dude. i think what this is is the same type of thing that people do when they read books, or play D&D. the difference is with books and D&D is that they're vauge, so that you can warp that reality to fit yourself, same with old games with blurry graphics. it's just vaugeness.

now if instead of warping the input to fit yourself, if you could learn to be suggestable to the point where you accept the reality that you're presented with... man. i can only get half way, and only for brief periods. but..

jzero, would you mind trying to explain what it is that you do? even if it sounds totaly, totaly insane, i'd love to hear it. that goes for anyone.

haha look at how giddy i'm getting. there's something about this topic that's the exact same thing that drove me towards studying hypnosis...

nealb4me

I have always thought to myself that developers should put guidlines on the back of the game boxes for how to best experience the game. For example, I still have not finished Doom3, but only because I refuse to play it in less than perfect conditions. I only play late at night and in the dark, when I'm totally alone at home. These are the conditions I require to fully enjoy the game or I just won't bother.That hardly ever happens though.

Darkness is really what makes the monitor become your field of view, I find this improves the experience when playing racing games from cockpit view too. When playing singleplayer I try to immerse myself as much as possible but any kind of online multiplayer I enjoy at any time. I never try to imagine whats happening in multiplayer is real (that I'm in the game). I consider it real from the point of view that I'm playing a game against real people and you can talk to them and get a different response each time. Somehow I am able to be utterly immersed, yet at other times accutely aware of reality.

I have always found this very interesting and am glad someone has brought it up.

btw, I consider HL2 be the most immersive experience I have ever had in a game. Largely due to the lighting and texture quality. Although I think the added interaction and sound are equally contributive, especially when you've got 5.1 going on

ElysiumGX

If you really have to force yourself to imagine that the world on your screen is real...the game has failed. If that was their goal of course. It's like watching a theater performance. You shouldn't feel like you're watching a play. You must be drawn into the story. Games like HL2 really pulled me in without any effort.

In other situations, games are simply games. Which is why I can't seem to put myself into a world like WoW.

Marcus Dublin

Haha good stuff, turn on Panzer Dragoon saga and I simply loose my self within the world that was created.

Marcus Dublin

PS: "Every now and then I have to physically do a dragon uppercut!"

cep

I know exactly what you mean. For me, good movement physiques really help.
I've had it happen playing battlefield 2. And all the time when I play Quake tf. Halflife 2 was a good one.

John Warner

nealb4me - heh that's a cool acctualy. guidelines on how to see the game from the perspective that the developers intended heheh. and totaly, half-life 2 was awesome for that.

ElysiumGX - that's true acctualy, i agree. i guess then the question is weither or not you want to lower your thought level to the point where you can accept the stuff you're playing...

Downsizer

http://www.3dvisor.com/

I've been in some military simulation machines, an no matter how horrible the graphics were, the physical experience made them incredibly intense and fun.

If you've noticed, most companies have gotten away from the old full imersion arcade experience. remember afterburner and it's moving cockpit cabinet?

Those are fun, pc and console games, are lacking that. which is why i enjoy going to Ocean City Maryland and running up the boardwalk playing all these classic arcade machines they manage to save there. Sound is a big imeersion issue too. I just got a pair of Turtle Beach HPA 5.1 headphones, and now doom 3 scares the pants off me. Though oddly Everquest 2 uses the audio technology better.