Metagames, and Gimmickery

SPOILER WARNING: There will be major spoilers for Undertale and OneShot, alongside minor spoilers for Inscryption and There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension. If you have not played these games, by all means please play them. Play them all. Form your own opinion on these games, and then read what I have to say. You’ll find it much more impactful this way.

There’s been a trend among the indie gaming scene, which is the increasing use of metanarratives: while some are laughably primitive — for example, when a character expresses the awareness that they’re inside a video game (commonly known as “the video game knows that it’s a video game”) — other forms of more sophisticated metanarratives considerably enhance not only the gameplay experience, but also the emotional or philosophical impact of the overall narrative.

In my years of playing and experiencing indie video games, there are some uses of a metanarrative or demonstrations of meta-awareness that were absolutely stellar: Undertale, whose use of metanarrative techniques are so well-known and well-received even among popular media, is a textbook example of a metanarrative “done right” — through the use of detailed characterization and dialogue from characters like Sans, whose initial aloofness is subtly punctuated through moments of brilliance, that hint at him being far more intelligent and aware of the situation than he chooses to show. Small clues and hints are scattered like cookie crumbs throughout item descriptions, interactable objects, or even the design of the levels themselves as a part of environmental storytelling. Even a small scene like Sans facing the camera (and therefore, the player) contributes to the feeling that he is far more complex than he seems to appear, which sets the basis for an extended metanarrative that have been hinted at throughout the adventure.

Perhaps most crucially, the game withholds the existence of the metanarrative through most of the normal runtime for a first-time player. Sure, everyone who has played through Undertale at least once will tell you that Flowey eventually is revealed to be similarly cognizant of the player’s existence much like Sans in a very surprising twist, but it is not impossible to piece together the puzzle even through a normal Neutral Route playthrough. Of course, additional playthroughs through the True Pacifist and Genocide Routes would much more significantly reveal the “meta”, but by that point the player has been thoroughly primed to be on the lookout for meta elements, and so the increased inclusion of meta elements don’t come off as forced or unusual. Metanarratives should be naturally integrated into the flow of gameplay.

In other words, Undertale is an example where the metanarrative is connected to, yet still independent from the main, non-meta narrative. You can enjoy Undertale as simply a story of a fallen human who had to survive the monster-inhabited underground through whatever means they choose, the characters and stories they come into contact with throughout the adventure, and the interpersonal relationships that gradually develop and take the position as the centerpiece as the adventure slowly unfolds. None of that “Flowey and Sans know you, the player, exist”, or “Chara is able to curse your copy of Undertale so that you may never get the True Pacifist ending ever again” stuff that comes when you dig deeper. The metanarrative should be a condiment that enhances the entrée that is the primary narrative, and the primary narrative should continue to make sense without the supplementary support from the metanarrative.

There are some other metagames that make the connection between the meta- and the non-meta narratives much closer than Undertale’s approach: Inscryption, for example, is infamously nowhere like what it appears like on the surface, and to summarize its overarching narrative would take up even more words for an article that issupposed to critique metagames that are dissimilar to it. But much like all games from Daniel Mullins Games, like Pony Island and The Hex, there is still a game beneath the metagame. I’ve talked to critics who actually enjoyed the card game mechanics of Inscryption, and evidently many people feel the same way, judging by the fact that the developer later added an endless mode called Kaycee’s Mod, where players can just play the base card game over and over again without worrying about the meta layer that the base game relies on considerably heavily. In this sense, although you cannot talk about Inscryption without mentioning its meta elements like Undertale, as the gameplay and narrative are simply married too deeply to them, there is still a very solid game beneath the meta fluff with an addicting primary gameplay loop and well fleshed-out mechanics, much like how Undertale is still an incredibly innovative spin on the random-encounter RPG format, combining bullet-hell elements, tactical spellcasting and even involves the player deducing which spell would be adequate to dispel the enemy in front of them. The game should be fun, even without the meta elements.

Some games, however, break all three aforementioned observations of what makes a metagame fun. A certain genre of games, in fact, base all of their gameplay, structure, and even themes around the metanarrative, in a way that undermines its actual utility as a video game. Video games are supposed to be fun, after all. (There are some games that deliberately disagree, like Scorn *cough*, but those are thankfully in the minority.) Remember: the meta elements are the condiments, the garnish that are supposed to assist the game itself, not completely replace the game as the sole form of interactive media. Imagine a game where you have to close a popup every few seconds to progress. That’s not a game — that is a nuisance.

And this is where I’m going to shed the background and comparisons to other games, and specifically talk about the example I have for a bad metagame: OneShot. OneShot, in summary, is a game that is designed entirely in service of its metanarrative. The core gameloop (if one that can even be adequately described), revolves around navigating the protagonist, Niko, through levels littered with puzzles of various kinds, in order to get to their destination. The puzzles elicit a wide range of emotions, ranging from boring, frustrating, monotonous to completely illogical. You have the bog standard fetch quests (yes, plural: there are multiple of them); “turn lights on and off” style puzzles; puzzles that require assembling items together, puzzles that are designed to be only solvable via trial-and-error (to the designer who made the fucking lab color puzzle: I hope you feel very clever now for making something whose sole purpose is to literally only waste your players’ precious time, which could range from a few minutes to literal hours); and of course, puzzles that are impossible to solve without the involvement of the metanarrative.

OneShot takes the sarcastic critique “oooh, the video game knows it’s a video game”, takes it at face value, and makes it the primary way of delivering its metanarrative. It literally opens a popup saying that it knows that YOU, YOU the player is there, and it wants to talk to YOU. Niko often addresses YOU directly, delivering their lines while staring at the camera during cutscenes. Now, metagames that directly address the player are not rare. There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension (or just There Is No Game from now on), for instance, is a prime example of this. The whole game is structured around the central conflict between the Player and the Game, who ardently refuses to let the Player play the “game”, devolving into increasingly more elaborate measures that obstruct the Player from accessing “the game”, while the reason behind the Game’s refusal is slowly revealed via assisting characters.

However, the reason why There Is No Game succeeded and why OneShot failed as a metagame, is that ironically it is a much better game. The point-and-click adventure format may be somewhat old-fashioned, but the creative thought that went behind the puzzles is truly unique and inspired, and most importantly is self-contained: it does not see a need for abruptly opening up a popup window for the user to react to, as the game interface itself already allows the player to interact with the puzzles directly. In that way it does not break immersion, and it is fully self-consistent in that yes, this is a fourth-wall breaking narrative, but it embraces that premise. OneShot, on the other hand, struggles to balance between its metanarrative and its properties as a video game, and as a result it failed in both aspects.

One of the most egregious puzzles OneShot presents to the player is a on-off light puzzle where you have to turn on and off certain lights. However, unlike the similar ice puzzle from Undertale, you don’t get any hints as to what the solution could be. There’s nothing to deduce from, and there’s nothing inside the game screen that shows what the solution could be. How do you know what the pattern is then? You look behind the game window, and peek at your desktop wallpaper. Now, I don’t know about you, but I find that highly disturbing but also just unnecessary. Why is a game suddenly granted permission to alter my desktop background? It could be displaying something truly horrible and disturbing as far as I can tell, or act like ransomware that turn my screen entirely black with all my desktop contents gone, aside from the game window itself. Sure, in this instance it turned out to be very benign and it would switch back to your original wallpaper when the puzzle has been solved, but it still unsettles me very deeply. (Perhaps it would have been less terrifying in 2014, when the game came out.)

Shifting away from a technical perspective and into a game design one, the design of this puzzle was also highly unnecessary and downright repetitive. Unlike some other on-off light puzzles where adjacent lights are turned on and off when you activate one light, requiring some logic deduction and thinking on behalf of the player, the puzzle in OneShot is entirely linear: pressing the button only toggles the button itself and nothing else. Therefore, from a mechanical standpoint, once the answer has been “cleverly” revealed, there is no further thinking or engagement from the player aside from robotically flipping switches on and off, which means that the sole source of fun or engagement is the process of discovering the wallpaper hint itself. This shows a complete clumsiness when it comes to designing puzzles and an overreliance on what is essentially a gimmick to support the entire segment. Without the wallpaper gimmick, the puzzle itself is purely manual labor, meaning that the whole value of the puzzle hinges on these meta-level tricks that the game loves to pull and are barely hinted at throughout the game. Many other examples like this sort of gimmick puzzle design also exist, such as requiring users to dig through a file in their home directory to enter a passcode, or requiring users to find a secret executable also located in their home directory, which obscures parts of the game screen that can instruct the player where to go in a maze. (Again, not a fan of a game that just dumps random files into my home directory, but maybe it was more acceptable back then.)

All of these puzzles, the backbone of OneShot’s core gameplay loop, are composed of tired puzzle archetypes plus some meta elements that usually involve, for lack of a better term, directly fucking around with your computer. Not only does this get old after once or twice, but it distracts the level designer and puzzlemaker from actually coming up with challenging and thoughtprovoking puzzles. That, I think, is the biggest crime of the gimmick: it makes people dependent on them, unable to come up with solutions that work without them. It makes the game designer feel clever, while completely ignoring the reality of how a player would perceive them. Once the player saw through the gimmicks, they’d come to realize that the puzzles are extremely shallow and mechanically uninteresting, bordering on wasting people’s time. (Or in the case of the lab color puzzle, intentionally and directly wasting people’s time. God I fucking hate that puzzle.) This is a direct consequence of making the metanarrative first and stuffing a game inside of it, completely opposite of the game being created first with the metanarrative in service of it, which is what the correct order should be.

What’s worse is that the player’s gaming experience is directly and negatively impacted by these sorts of metanarrative decisions, inconvenienced by all the contrivances that are there only to show the user how “meta” the game is. OneShot is an objectively worse game than it should have been, precisely because it is too in love with its premise. In the pursuit thereof, the developers forgot that there should have been an enjoyable game that serves as the foundation of whichever grand narrative they were initially aiming for, which is a shame, really. I really liked the art style and the portrayal of Niko as a protagonist — there is a reason why they’re so popular as the subject of fan arts and other fanmade creations, because the interaction between them and the player is ultimately heartwarming and heartbreaking at the same time. That story should have been the core of this game. That relationship should have been the focus of the game’s narrative and mechanics. All the metanarrative fluff should only serve as supplementary material that add to the game’s narrative and themes, instead of distracting both the player and the developers from them.

There’s an idiomatic saying, or chengyu in Chinese, called 「喧宾夺主」: most literally meaning to have a guest’s voice overtake the host’s in a feast — figuratively taken to mean that something secondary has erroneously surpassed the primary focus in terms of importance and priority. Another chengyu, 「本末倒置」, describes a tree whose roots and branches have switched places — metaphorically taken to mean that the priority had been unduly reversed between what is supposed to most important, and what is to be less important. I think both sayings describe the error of OneShot quite succinctly. It did not show the narrative restraint of Undertale, the solid foundation of Inscryption, nor the completely self-aware attitude of There Is No Game. What we have is a jumbled mess of a game which is trying to be clever on a meta-level, while simultaneously attempting to be an emotional, deeply personal tale, while also being an engaging puzzle game. The end product is one that fumbles in all three aspects. Let it be a cautionary tale for any aspiring game developer who wants to incorporate meta elements into their stories: don’t make the meta overshadow the core.