{"id":239,"date":"2020-02-25T06:08:11","date_gmt":"2020-02-25T06:08:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.phantomknightgames.com\/news\/?p=239"},"modified":"2020-02-25T06:08:13","modified_gmt":"2020-02-25T06:08:13","slug":"in-defense-of-the-meta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.phantomknightgames.com\/news\/in-defense-of-the-meta\/","title":{"rendered":"In Defense of the Meta"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Keith Burgun is a game designer, and like most game designers, he has some very strong opinions. One of his most famous articles discusses\u00a0asymmetric gameplay<\/a>, especially gameplay where the asymmetric powers are chosen before the beginning of the game (like choosing a character in\u00a0Street Fighter<\/em>). More specifically, he intensely dislikes these systems, claiming that an asymmetric game can never be truly balanced and that it limits strategic options on the part of the players.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I read this article a couple of years ago and I tried extremely hard to disagree with it. If you\u2019re reading this, you most likely know me from my work on\u00a0Magic: The Gathering<\/em> (or you\u2019re a personal friend who saw me share this on Facebook, thank you!), and\u00a0Cosmic Encounter<\/em> is my favorite game, so obviously I\u2019m fond of asymmetry. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that he was right to an extent. Asymmetry, and the concept of a \u201cmetagame\u201d where you pick a character or build a deck before beginning your games, bring very little to the table strategically and can often make games that are supposed to have high stakes feel flat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that doesn\u2019t mean that asymmetry is useless \u2013 in fact, outside of the realm of strategy it serves many valuable purposes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Onboarding<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A common response to Burgun\u2019s article is that using asymmetric player powers makes an easier learning experience because it sections off game elements so new players only have to master part of it to play competently; for example, in fighting games, a player can choose to practice a single character over and over again instead of learning the ins and outs of the whole roster. Burgun\u2019s response to this argument is that achieving true understanding of the game system requires players to know what all the characters can do in detail anyway. Though this counterargument is sound, it doesn\u2019t take into account the amount of information a player needs to retain at the same time, which asymmetry can significantly alleviate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even in games with low asymmetry like Chess, the sheer number of possible moves is so high that players beyond absolute beginners parcel them into typical opening, midgame, and endgame tactics. High-level gameplay becomes less about making the right decision at the right time and more about memorizing as many possible \u201cdecisions\u201d as you can, upon which the \u201cright decision\u201d will frequently be obvious depending on player skill.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What asymmetry provides in games is the ability to only have to concentrate on a tenth or a twentieth of all of the possible moves, which, in a system with an already large enough degree of complexity, could already pose a substantial cognitive load to the average player. We\u2019ve seen that games where all moves are available to players in every game have a high skill ceiling, but they also have a high skill floor. Not every game is going to want that, whether for commercial viability or for the sake of a more casual play community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Relatability<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

People wear shirts with their favorite\u00a0Magic\u00a0<\/em>color, favorite\u00a0Street Fighter\u00a0<\/em>character, or favorite\u00a0Pok\u00e9mon<\/em>\u2026uh, pok\u00e9mon. Despite Go being a game with more strategic depth than any of the three, nobody wears shirts with their favorite Go opening move.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is because of a combination of two things: First, separating game elements into discrete packages, especially ones represented by a character or faction, allows players to pick a side they like. Second, people\u00a0LOVE<\/em><\/strong> picking sides. I don\u2019t know whether tribalism is something baked into human psychology or if it\u2019s the product of a competitive society, but if you give players the option to decide between multiple distinct factions, they eat it up. I\u2019m pretty sure a huge part of the appeal of the\u00a0Harry Potter\u00a0<\/em>franchise is the Sorting Hat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Games are frequently more appealing, more impactful, and better able to retain players for longer when the player can fold an element of the game into their identity. Discrete asymmetric elements, either in the form of a defined style of play or in a character or faction with a personality and visual aesthetic, go a long way into a game appealing to the heart as much as it appeals to the head.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Experiential Vigor<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A while ago I wrote a post separating games into\u00a0\u201cstrategic\u201d games and \u201cexperiential\u201d games<\/a>. Strategic games are evaluated among the lines that you most commonly hear from reviewers: Is this challenging? Does it offer a lot of different lines of strategy? Can you play it repeatedly without finding a \u201cbest\u201d strategy that makes it boring?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Experiential games, on the other hand, are judged based on whether they produced an experience<\/em>. Betrayal at House on the Hill<\/em>is the game I most frequently use as an example of a successful experiential game that\u2019s fairly poor on a strategic axis: It doesn\u2019t matter if the game is mostly about luck if it creates an engaging story about a motley crew trying to uncover the terrible secret about the house on the hill. Asymmetric character stats help with this, making the elderly professor feel like an elderly professor and the dimwitted track star feel like a dimwitted track star.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Asymmetry is very useful for experiential games because it defines a \u201cside\u201d or \u201ccharacter\u201d in a clean way that prevents confusion. If you have every option in the game available to you at all times, it\u2019s more likely you\u2019ll make inconsistent choices in the name of strategy that muddy the narrative. That said, there are ways that a \u201cside\u201d can be developed by choices supporting like choices \u2013 for example, in Terraforming Mars<\/em>, if you build projects that give you titanium, you\u2019ll probably want to spend it on more projects that want titanium, cementing you as the \u201ctitanium strategy\u201d for the rest of the game. But start-of-game asymmetry is a seamless way to make the player feel like they had a real identity for the entire play experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If super-deep gameplay with a huge number of options was all it took to make a successful game, we\u2019d all be in a room playing Tigris & Euphrates<\/em>over and over again until the end of time. Games have more to offer than being able to scratch your chin and go \u201cah, good move,\u201d and asymmetry is a very useful way for your game to reach these alternate goals. But be careful that you don\u2019t create a system that\u2019s so hard to balance, the whole thing falls flat, and consider other options than just \u201cdeal each player a power at the start of the game.\u201d Don\u2019t take anything for granted and discover what works best for your game!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Asymmetry might not be great for a game’s strategy, but that doesn’t mean it’s useless.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10,3,11],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.phantomknightgames.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.phantomknightgames.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.phantomknightgames.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.phantomknightgames.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.phantomknightgames.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.phantomknightgames.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":240,"href":"http:\/\/www.phantomknightgames.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions\/240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.phantomknightgames.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.phantomknightgames.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.phantomknightgames.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}