How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Meta

Rock. It's my favorite sign to throw because I don't have to budge a finger. I think I'll throw Rock most of the time. It's an easy 50-50 win-loss ratio anyways.

Paper. Shit, it looks like my friends caught on to my Rock-only strategy. They're throwing Paper most of the time now. This isn't looking good.

Scissors. Well if I just switch to Scissors for five rounds in a row, I can beat their Paper strategy. They'll never see it coming.

Rock. OH NOW YOU ENJOY THROWING ROCK? I THREW ROCK BEFORE IT WAS COOL.

Not sure why I Google Image'd an RPS diagram. Also not sure why one exists.

That's the metagame in a nutshell, folks. One day you're rocking the game with your favorite items, and the next day you're being flamed for using an underpowered build.

I have quite a few complaints about the metagame. Firstly, and most importantly, the meta changes far too quickly (or in the case of Starcraft 2, it doesn't change at all and becomes stale). Keeping up with the meta in multiple games becomes impossible if you don't want to sit down and read strategy discussions every day. On the other hand, if you choose to dedicate your time, most of it will be spent reading and memorizing instead of playing and winning.

Secondly, the meta forces you to play in ways that may not be fun for you. As a glass cannon DPS player, buying extra health rather than damage makes me a sad panda. It doesn't make much sense to be a tanky assassin either. The worst feeling is when you start a game with the expectation of having fun, but your teammates pressure you into taking the safe route.

See those cards? I bet they would hurt if he threw them at the enemy...very very very quickly.

Without going on about every little annoyance, I can say that metagames have turned me on and off of a few addictive games in the past. Whether it's turn-based strategy games or MMORPGs, there is no running away from the metagame. You can either be so bad at a game that you don't even understand it on a fundamental level, or so good that you contribute to the shifts in the meta. Most of us, however, are simply followers of the latter group. We are sheep fighting for patches of grass.

It's okay though. As sheep, we don't have to do much thinking, and we never run out of grass before we're herded to the next pasture.

The good news is, the existence of a metagame is a sign that the game is healthy and somewhat balanced. Rock, Paper, Scissors is so balanced that you might as well have a random number generator play the game (no offense to the U.S. Rock Paper Scissors team.) And when the metagame shifts to a state where one strategy consistently dominates the rest, then the developers of the game will know that something needs to be changed.

My reaction when I realized that Ash Ketchum was a Little Cup master.

Behind all of the frustration of keeping up with the metagame, I understand that it is created by players and it changes because of the players. For that reason, I embrace it as a part of the gaming experience, wins and losses alike. Tonight, though, I will teach my friends to appreciate my...quirky playstyle.