Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (Volume 53)

Electronic Mediations

by Stephanie Boluk, Patrick Lemieux

The greatest trick the videogame industry ever pulled was convincing the world that videogames were games rather than a medium for making metagames. Elegantly defined as “games about games,” metagames implicate a diverse range of practices that stray outside the boundaries and bend the from technical glitches and forbidden strategies to Renaissance painting, algorithmic trading, professional sports, and the War on Terror. In Metagaming , Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux demonstrate how games always extend beyond the screen, and how modders, mappers, streamers, spectators, analysts, and artists are changing the way we play. Metagaming uncovers these alternative histories of play by exploring the strange experiences and unexpected effects that emerge in, on, around, and through videogames. Players puzzle through the problems of perspectival rendering in Portal, perform clandestine acts of electronic espionage in EVE Online , compete and commentate in Korean StarCraft , and speedrun The Legend of Zelda in record times (with or without the use of vision). Companies like Valve attempt to capture the metagame through international e-sports and online marketplaces while the corporate history of Super Mario Bros. is undermined by the endless levels of Infinite Mario , the frustrating pranks of Asshole Mario , and even Super Mario Clouds , a ROM hack exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art. One of the only books to include original software alongside each chapter, Metagaming transforms videogames from packaged products into instruments, equipment, tools, and toys for intervening in the sensory and political economies of everyday life. And although videogames conflate the creativity, criticality, and craft of play with the act of consumption, we don’t simply play videogames—we make metagames.

Genres: Games, Nonfiction, Game Design, Academic

400 pages, Paperback

Published April 4, 2017

Reviews

[Harrison · Rating 2 out of 5]

more reference than insight or narrative // thanks but ill stick to just games

[Satu · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I hear the word meta one more time im going to scream

[E. · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book hides its ignorance of the complexity and heterogeneity of gaming culture by deploying a disgraceful amount of namedropping (most of which have nothing to do with its argument) and a hopeless over-reliance on uncritically borrowed terms from marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, disability studies, and so on. The arguments are predicable (if not trivial) for anyone who knows those terms/theorists and not in the least bit convincing (their own evidence shows clearly that the straw-man "ideology" they claim to deconstruct is a product of their own imagination), and the book's minuscule contribution to our understanding of gaming culture (which can be found in chapter 5) is not at all worth the effort of working through what is otherwise a text that should have stayed on an unsuccessful game journalist's personal blog. My only comfort as I close this book is the knowledge that the field at large has moved on from this mode of "scholarship."

[rory · Rating 2 out of 5]

*goes back to watching Dota*