Is Playing to the Meta Always for the Betta?
In which we question a few assumptions about just what the metagame of a game is for.
Hey all!
The idea for this article came to me in particular based on some thoughts and conversations I’ve been having in Discords I’m in around the viability of certain builds in a game I happen to like very much and didn’t expect to get so deep into: Capcom’s Monster Hunter Rise. Someone I knew was talking about their stated dislike for the metagame and the idea of just following the popular guides for how to use certain weapons because it feels like it turns their own instincts about how to play against them.
Now, I supported them in their best life because quite honestly I don’t believe in telling people how they should be playing games, but the discussion sparked off some things that I wanted to elaborate on further in an article and share with people, so feeling fresh off the heels of my approachability and accessibility piece, I’m doing that now!
This particular article will split up into a couple major sections: first and foremost, we’ll discuss why your goals as a player matter for how you choose to interact with the metagame for a particular game. Then we’ll look at why some people take this tendency to follow the metagame into the idea of the metagame being the only “correct” way to play the game, and then wrap it up with my counter-perspective on why that’s incorrect.
So, let’s start by talking about goals.
MetaGoals
A quick primer before we start in case anyone is unfamiliar with the term metagame, or “meta”: functionally, it’s used to describe “the game about the game”, or less poetically, the ways in which people engage with knowledge about the whys and hows of how a game operates in terms of strategy and tactics while playing it. Things like “what builds are the best builds?”, ranked tier listings of characters/weapons/etc., how-to-play guides, and more all count under metagame knowledge.
Now, the reason why the idea of “goals” as relates to the meta is my first point of call is because I think there are two questions that people should ask themselves when they look at playing a game with an extensive metagame:
Do you actually care about competing or testing the viability of your strategies?
Are you in an environment where metagame knowledge is either valued or common?
Maybe you don’t ask these right when you start playing, maybe you play a game for a little longer first before you consider and decide them — but the reason why I treat these as the questions to ask at some point is because they help set the tone for how you temper and manage your expectations about whether you should care that deeply about the metagame for the game you’re playing. There are no wrong answers to these questions in a very literal sense, because they are meant to be tailored to what you are pursuing, no one else.
I’ll use myself as an example and frame these questions around Monster Hunter Rise.
When I play Monster Hunter Rise, I do have at least a partial interest in testing the viability of my builds and strategies, and so for a long time I’d just build up my armor sets around the things I found the most useful since different armor pieces lend different skills to your character, which have their own utility depending on your chosen weapon.
Eventually, though, I hit a wall, and decided, on the advice of a friend, to start looking at a website called Game8 for “builds” that were already pre-assembled by the community and focused on what was most effective at various levels of progression throughout the game. I’ve found, in the time since then, that the suggested skills were in fact far more beneficial to the playstyles that I wanted to pursue, but also that not every build suggested was in that particular category, so I decided to limit my interaction with build guides only to the guides that felt most relevant to my needs. In short — I do care about testing the viability of my strategies, but not to the degree that I need only the most optimal knowledge to work, just enough of what matters to me.
I also happen to play or be friends with a number of people that do have a fair bit of knowledge around Monster Hunter in general, but everyone has different levels of interest in the metagame knowledge and its value. I know people who are perfectly fine with off-meta builds in both the “I don’t care to follow the meta” sense, and the “this thing I built works exactly as intended even though it’s not popular” sense. And on the flipside of that, I also know people who are following the same guides I am or have found even more in-depth information that I didn’t know. So, in that sense, the environment I’m in has common knowledge about the metagame, but not everyone has the same level of value investment in it.
Based on those two questions, I wind up in this spot where I can say, insofar as Rise goes, I care about the metagame only to the point that I need to know enough to facilitate the builds I want. I’m not looking to do the most optimal of all equipment and so I don’t have to engage it at the same level as someone who might, for instance, want to be speedrunning it, or is looking to clock no-cart, sub-15 minute hunts against most monsters.
Knowing that, and having that boundary as an implicit understanding (“I do need to know some of this metagame knowledge just to sort out my builds, but I’m not chasing the perfect endgame builds either and I’m not trying to go for speed hunts”) has helped me manage my expectations around the game in a way that lets me interact with the meta healthily. It lets me interact with it, gain knowledge from it, and, most critically, question it and push back against it when I feel it doesn’t fit what my goals are, which I’ll go into more detail about in the third section of this article.
Now, if I answered these questions differently — say, for instance, if I was talking about a fighting game, and I made it very clear that:
1) I want to compete professionally, and
2) I’m in an environment where metagame knowledge is in fact common and to some degree favored
— then, yes, my expectations and my interactions with the meta are far different than they are with Monster Hunter Rise. And it’s this type of situation where we often see the next issue occur quite frequently: the idea that the Meta is the Only Way.
Following the Meta into the Pits of Hell
The problem is pretty much exactly as it sounds: a lot of people who play games with an extensive metagame will argue that completely refusing to engage with the metagame means that you’re playing that game “incorrectly”. Fighting games, MOBAs, first-person shooters, and so on — the genre is irrelevant in this particular problem, the more important thing is the core conceit of “follow the meta or you’re playing the whole game wrong”.
I think the reason why this issue keeps coming up and becomes extremely contentious is relatively straightforward: people who tend to fall into this have either failed to ask themselves the two questions, or did ask those questions but failed to consider that other people don’t have the same answers they came to.
With the first point of failure — not asking the two questions — I think of it like this: because the person hasn’t set their goals with the game, they’re not sure if they really need the meta that much. In absence of having goals of their own for what they want out of the game, they default to assuming that the meta must be correct and infallible, so there’s no point in doing anything else but following it.
When these types of people meet people who have in fact learned how to question and push back against the metagame, the cognitive dissonance becomes extremely disconcerting and grating, and it causes the metagame dogmatist to get caught in the trap of not leaving themselves the space to question and push back against the meta when it fails to work for them.
The second point of failure — not considering that other people didn’t come to the answers you did — is a bit simpler to boil down by comparison and breaks back down to a basic tenet of human community: no two people have the same needs.
Using myself as an example, circling back to Monster Hunter Rise again: a large part of the builds I go for usually aim for high Affinity, which boosts the chance of getting critical hits when attacking monsters at parts of their bodies that are soft enough to damage. There are skills that, for example, give your character more power but drain life or cause other drawback effects. Technically speaking, as far as the meta is concerned, some very strong high-end builds lean more towards these riskier skills than toward Affinity, but as I’ve already established earlier on I am not personally looking for the most optimal equipment, and in the particular case of the high-end builds aiming toward the riskier skills, I do not want to offset my playstyle by having to work around life drain. By comparison, other players may prefer to exploit elemental-damage focused builds, or strengthen some other aspects of their character that are either deliberately pursuing the best of the meta or are intentionally diverging from it.
The friction point for this second failure case, then, is a case of projection. People who asked the questions I outlined before but don’t stop to consider that other people have different answers will just assume that everyone shares the same values around competing, testing strategies, and valuing metagame knowledge, and get a nasty shock when that’s not the case. The metagame dogmatist in this second failure case may be more willing to question the meta, but hasn’t internalized the concept that differing goals means that the person who’s going “off-meta” never had goals deeply involving the meta in the first place.
Now, what is my counter-offer to this idea that the meta is the only way?
Well, it sums up in six words:
Perform More Consistently, Play Less “Correctly”
The main conceit of this counterpoint is really this: the ideal interaction with a game’s metagame is not to learn to play the game more “correctly”, but use it to learn how to perform more consistently, whatever consistently means for you.
That’s really it.
We come back to Monster Hunter Rise one last time to illustrate this point — like I said earlier, I have no interest in the most optimal of weapon builds for that game because they involve using armor skills I don’t find to be useful for me and/or rely on resource management that I don’t like to keep track of. However, there’s another granular point to consider in all this that I haven’t talked about yet — the use of Switch Skills.
Switch Skills are a feature built into Rise that lets you customize specific parts of a weapon’s moveset with pre-loaded alternatives — for example, a Great Sword user can choose between the Hunting Edge attack to fly into the air and attempt to attack a monster with a charged midair slash, or the Strongarm Stance to try for a parry, and on success, more quickly enter a series of charged-up stance slashes that the Great Sword is known for.
There are certain Switch Skills for some weapons that I simply do not use despite how good they are or even how valued they are in the meta. For my Insect Glaive, for example, I’ve weighted my Switch Skill selection toward moves that will make it easier for me to extract monster essences quickly and efficiently, as well as moves that give me more movement in the air, and so my interactions with metagame elements are to find builds that help improve my consistency — which for me, means I want to maximize my crit damage, stay in the air, and keep my uptime for my Insect Glaive powerups as high as I can.
Other games come back to this idea too, not just Monster Hunter. In many of the competitive genres we listed before (fighting games, MOBAs, etc.), an individual character might be exceptionally strong in the metagame or generally hard to beat, but relies on making extremely precise decisions or executing on some extremely demanding inputs in order to enjoy the success that they do. Now, as someone who may not be using those characters but may be playing against them, it may help you, if you’re struggling against them, to look up strategies on how to fight against them and interact with the metagame that way, but from my perspective it should only be used to inform how consistently you perform against that character if your goal includes being better at beating them.
Once you frame your interactions with the metagame less around doggedly following it and more about using it to inform the whys and the hows of improving your consistency (to whatever degree that means for you), then it actually brings real value to why the metagame is there: to discuss the game itself and how it can be played, not how it “should” be played per se. More critically, looking at the meta as a tool to improve your consistency and not “play the game correctly” helps you understand when to question and push back against the meta if it is hindering your consistency.
This last bit is especially important because of one critical thing about metagames that I haven’t touched on until this point: metagames are an aggregate human construct, and therefore can’t fully suit all the people who interact with it.
Now, there are some aspects of a game’s meta that are immutable. This is notable when looking at the aspects that are built on factual observations (e.g., “this move is the fastest move in the game because its startup frames are extremely short”, “because you cannot do x thing, y is impossible”). But, once humans are factored into the equation, especially the imperfections of human performance in games and especially the particular nuances of how you play and what you’re good at, then it becomes clearer why the metagame has to be a guide in broad strokes and not always “the only way to play”.
While you can glean something from aggregate wisdom, how you execute on it will always be uniquely you, and if your approach to the metagame does not account for that, you will ultimately cause more problems for yourself when playing. And if the meta itself does that, then it may indeed be best to ignore it completely if that helps you focus more on enjoying the game as it is! There are no wrong answers to this, only things to think about in relation to what you want out of the game you’re playing.
And that’s pretty much all I really have to say on the player-oriented side of dealing with a game’s metagame. I believe that metagames are valuable tools not just for understanding the game but also the community around said game, and shouldn’t be treated as a poison pill — however, the key thing is to know what you want from a game so that you can also know how you want to interact with its metagame, if you want to at all.
At the end of the day, the deciding factor is what brings you enjoyment, I think — and that doesn’t have to be about being good, or winning. Sometimes the fun is just in playing how you feel is best.
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Thanks for reading!
