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Metagaming and Transgressive Play Patrick S Purdue University Purdue e-Pubs Open Access Theses Theses and Dissertations Summer 2014 Playing on the periphery: Metagaming and transgressive play Patrick S. Love Purdue University Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/open_access_theses Part of the Mass Communication Commons, Reading and Language Commons, and the Rhetoric and Composition Commons Recommended Citation Love, Patrick S., "Playing on the periphery: Metagaming and transgressive play" (2014). Open Access Theses. 650. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/open_access_theses/650 This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact [email protected] for additional information. Graduate School ETD Form 9 (Revised/) PURDUE UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL Thesis/Dissertation Acceptance This is to certify that the thesis/dissertation prepared By Patrick S Love Entitled Playing on the Periphery: Metagaming and Transgressive Play Master of Arts For the degree of Is approved by the final examining committee: Samantha Blackmon Thomas Rickert Nathan Johnson To the best of my knowledge and as understood by the student in the 7KHVLV'LVVHUWDWLRQ$JUHHPHQW 3XEOLFDWLRQ'HOD\DQGCHUWLILFDWLRQDisclaimer (Graduate School Form ), this thesis/dissertation DGKHUHVWRWKHSURYLVLRQVRIPurdue University’s “Policy on Integrity in Research” and the use of copyrighted material. Samantha Blackmon Approved by Major Professor(s): ____________________________________ ____________________________________ Approved by:Nancy Peterson 07/18/2014 Head of the 'HSDUWPHQWGraduate Program Date i PLAYING ON THE PERIPHERY: METAGAMING AND TRANSGRESSIVE PLAY A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Purdue University by Patrick Love In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts August 2014 Purdue University West Lafayette, Indiana ii This work is dedicated to players, gamers, and people who play. To people who play to escape and those who need escape from the harshness that finds them in play. To my girlfriend, my brother, and my mother who all know I appreciate a good challenge and that I cherish my time with them. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author would like to thank his committee for their generous patience and support. To Samantha Blackmon, who always keep me honest with myself and in my work and whose feedback and support has been invaluable to the project from start to finish. To Thomas Rickert for giving me freedom to play with so many ideas and challenging me to develop them all. To Nathan Johnson for being so chill and so brilliant in his critiques at the same time. Additional thanks to Pat Sullivan, the Purdue Rhetoric and Composition program, and my graduate cohort in particular. To my fellow Masters students John Sherrill and Carrie Grant as well as Daniel Liddle, Liz Lane, Nick Marino, Tyler Carter, and Katie Yankura for all their loyalty and support. Thank you to all my friends as well. To all the people I’ve played games with through the years and to the people whom I’ve learned from through gaming. To Wizards of the Coast, Upper Deck Entertainment, Nintendo, and Blizzard for making games I love. Thank you to The White Stripes, Low Cut Connie, Koji Kondo, Yasunori Mitsuda, Nobuo Uematsu, J Dilla, Daft Punk, The Long Winters, Tune Yards, Kendrick Lamar, iv Anamanaguchi, Macdonald Duck Éclair, and all the Hotline Miami artists for providing the soundtrack to my writing process. Thank you so much to my wonderful girlfriend Brittany Biesiada for having such patience with me, for taking genuine interest in my work, and for being an awesome scholar in her own right. And finally thank you to my family. To my brother, James, for being my best friend, greatest accomplice, and most invigorating critic. To my father, Brian. for teaching me to never give up no matter what. To my grandmother, Midge, for showing me that what’s worth doing should be done well, especially if it affects people you care about. To my uncle, Steve, for helping me get the Master Sword on many occasions and always dropping what he’s doing to carry me through a game of Super Mario Bros. 3. And most of all to my wonderful mother for teaching me to play games, for showing me that details are important, teaching me that mistakes are not endings, and who taught me that magic comes from helping others. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................. vi LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... vii ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... viii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... 1 1.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 2. GAMING AS MOBILITY, METAGAMING AS SOCIAL PRODUCTION 9 2.1 Gaming, Politics, and Transgression .................................................................. 9 2.2 What is Metagame/Metagaming? ..................................................................... 24 2.3 Metagaming as Infrastructure ........................................................................... 32 CHAPTER 3. THE HEARTHSTONE METAGAME IN ACTION ............................. 39 3.1 Background ....................................................................................................... 39 3.1.1 Basic Design ..................................................................................................39 3.2 The Competitive Structure of Hearthstone ....................................................... 58 3.3 Methods............................................................................................................. 59 3.4 What Makes a Good Deck? – An Example of Synergy .................................... 62 3.5 The Unleashed Meta That Hounded Blizzard Developers ............................... 65 CHAPTER 4. CONCLUSION ....................................................................................... 74 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................... 78 vi LIST OF TABLES Table .............................................................................................................................. Page Table 1 .............................................................................................................................. 46 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure ............................................................................................................................. Page Figure 1 ............................................................................................................................... 3 Figure 2 ............................................................................................................................. 55 Figure 3 ............................................................................................................................. 66 viii ABSTRACT Love, Patrick S. M.A., Purdue University, August 2014, Playing on the Periphery: Metagming and Transgressive Play. Major Professor: Samantha Blackmon. Gaming and play exist in connection to forces outside of the game systems themselves. Together, all these intersecting forces make up a metagame that informs and enables variance in play as well as creates barriers to entering play. This thesis fleshes out the framework of a metagame and shows how players can take a metagame perspective to transform, transcend, or even transgress barriers. This thesis discusses sources of metagaming and encompasses examples from video and traditional games. 1 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 Introduction The world record for completing The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (Nintendo), the 2003 Gamecube game, is held by Demon9 at four hours, 23 minutes, and two seconds. From the time a player presses [Enter] at the name selection screen until the final blow is dealt to Ganon at the end of the game, no player has completed the game faster than Demon9, a Swedish gamer. Completing the game under ordinary circumstances (visiting all the locations and collecting all the items the designers intended) takes between 30 and 60 hours (“The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker”). Demon9 “speedruns” the game, making use of “sequence breaks” to make his time much faster by skipping cutscenes and sections of the game. Speedruns are recordings gamers make of themselves playing a game from start to finish in the fastest amount of time possible without modifying the game itself or the gaming hardware. In many ways, speedruns are the contemporary height of pursuing gaming capital, the value system that gamers use to define good games and good gaming. Mia Consalvo in Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames adapts the idea of “gaming capital” from Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “cultural capital” (Consalvo 4). Cultural capital is a system of preferences that serve to classify groups into classes, and gaming capital is a system of values that gamers use define themselves as “gamers” or define “good” gaming. In 2 Cheating, Consalvo shows that gaming capital’s definition originates in triumphing over difficult challenges without outside help--victory through skilled play in a well designed system of challenge--breeding the idea that good gaming is defined by proving
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