Despite my general WoW fatigue, I enjoyed these readings quite a bit (a big improvement over last week). The readings made me think in particular about Metagaming through their various arguments for continuing game studies as critical necessity.

Metagaming (which I wrote my MA thesis on and still is a constant obsession of mine), is generally definable as things from outside a game affecting the play within; the outside or intersecting play impacting the inside. The Mortensen piece made me think of Metagaming in its discussion of online role playing because Metagaming, by its nature, is despised by hardcore role-players. Because (hardcore) role-players strive to “become” their character, they often scorn those who bring any knowledge from real-life into their game, even things like using “real world” nicknames for items or phenomena (Grok the Orc warlord would know what shampoo is, Dave). Role players, in seeking to protect the pristine play-world, actively seek to keep the real world out.

The irony of this viewpoint, at least from my scholarly vantage point, is that Metagaming is precisely what enables role playing (and all play for my money). In order to immerse oneself in a character of someone other than oneself, you have to get the knowledge of how that character would act from somewhere, whether it be one’s own experiences or some (however stable or faulty) perception of the other.

That is why I think Leonard’s piece is so powerful and Metagaming is still worth studying. The arguments of those who wish to portray gaming as a-political or who want to “de-politicize” gaming are ignoring the inherent links gaming has to the “outside” world and the reciprocal relationships they have with each other. They make the same argument the role-players do: that the game world is separate and doesn’t/shouldn’t affect the “real lives” of anyone (as evidenced by TOA’s argument that they were only rewriting “their” story, not anyone else’s). To Leonard’s point, Where do racist and sexist depictions of women and minorities come from if not the minds of their creators?  The racial and gender tourism that Leonard critiques, as presented in quotes from Collins, is enabled by the players dismissing the destructive metagame it plays into by refusing to interrogate the white-male viewpoint. Acknowledging the presence of metagames and the way they interconnect issues and discourses along with studying the processes of Metagaming can provide critical inroads to studying this destructive behavior as well as examining the positive educational effects games can have.