I'm not real good at any game or genre. At best, I'm maybe a little above average at a couple of games that I've spent alot of time on (plastic guitars, Modern Warfare, Battlefield 2). Really, this is because I'm more or less what might be called a casual gamer, in that I simply play games to, well, have fun (and be pretentious every now and again). Topping the charts is a phenomenon that's cool when it happens, but not something I aim for. But what could a casual player, disinterested in being the best, like me ever be good at? The answer is the metagame.

A metagame, at least as I use it, is a player instigated game-within-a-game. You aren't playing a metagame when you guess what's in the chests in The Legend of Zelda: The Orcarina of Time. You're playing a metagame when you look at Volvagia flying around in the sky and wonder if it just might be possible to kill him with naught more than bombs (using the hammer only to make him vulnerable). When you play a metagame, the metagame's goal is now the game's goal. The game has provided you with a set of rules, abilities, supplies, whatever. The metagame supplies the goal to which these resources will be directed.

And that's where my expertise lies.

I love my metagames. For me, they usually take the form of personal challenges, beating levels in an unusual way, weapon/item restrictions and so forth. The key to the metagame is that it's composed of challenges/goals set by the player and not the game. If one of my friends says 'It can't be done' I take it as a personal challenge. If someone says "You can't beat this level in the A-10!", the goal for me is to no longer just beat the level. If that was all I wanted to do, I could use the best jet for the job, play the game as it was obstinately intended to be played. Now though, the goal is to use the A-10 to beat it. Beating the level only becomes important to me now if I do it in the A-10. Metagames can be more rewarding than the actual game itself in my opinion, because you set and beat your own challenges. Metagames are intrinsically more personal than the game's goals and objectives.

But why do I consider this my expertise? Why should metagames even be considered an expertise? After all, all you have to do is set some personal goal, and you're metagaming. That's not really so hard. It could even be said that creating and participating in metagames takes no skill at all (beating them is a different matter). If metagames are just some personal goal, how could anyone have an expertise in them?

The answer is that for me, whenever I'm playing a metagame, that metagame is more important than winning, or advancing the story, or what-have-you. It's a mindset thing. An expertise in metagames means that you are of the mindset that a game, any game, has more or less unlimited gameplay potential, and you apply this principle. It's just a question of working within the game's structure to create personal goals and objectives. If you don't have this sort of mindset, if you feel that a game's challenges are all included on the disk, programmed into the game already, then you don't have the mindset to have an expertise in metagames. If you think that the overriding objective of a round of Modern Warfare 2 is to win, you don't have the mindset. An expertise in metagaming can't be taught, and you can't really practice for it.

I haven't encountered many active gamers who share my kind of mindset regarding games and metagames. In the original Left 4 Dead, there were those who complained that the game was to easy. I suggested some metagames (pistols only, no medpacks, no melee, etc) for them to try to increase the difficulty of the game. My suggestions were usually shot down, for one reason or another.

In contrast with the Left 4 Dead example, limited though it may be, the Dwarf Fortress community is full of people with an expertise in metagames. The forums there are full of people trying to get a dwarf to max out his stats, drain the ocean, create moats of magma. They use the tools of the game to challenge the goal of the game. Dwarf Fortress may be different than Left 4 Dead in that it gives you all sorts of creation tools of course. But the difference is that in Dwarf Fortress people are more likely to treat the game's goal (get your fortress to survive) as merely an objective to be satisfied in the course of creating whatever their current mega project is. They use what the game has given them to create and beat their own goals in preference to what goals the game has. It's not a perfect comparison as Dwarf Fortress is somewhat designed to encourage these metagames, but I hope it did at least succeed in illustrating the sort of mindset that is required for an expertise in metagames.

At the end of the day, metagaming is about having fun in ways that the game didn't set before you. You find your own fun, and it might be at odds with what the game designers thought would be fun when they made the game. But a metagame is your game, not theirs. And that's where my expertise lies.