What Does “metagaming” Mean?

Metagaming is acting on knowledge your character does not have, using what you know as a player instead.

Part of speech

noun and verb

Category

LARP terminology

Meaning in context

The whole idea rests on a wall between two kinds of knowledge, which is why in character and out of character is the first pair of terms anyone learns. One British club’s glossary draws the line by what can be perceived: out of character covers everything the characters cannot notice, in character covers what they can. Metagaming is leakage across that wall in one direction. Something you know as a player reaches into what your character does, and nothing inside the story put it there.

The knowledge need not be sought out. You catch a briefing for a scene your character slept through, or you recognise a mask from last season. Wikipedia’s article covers tabletop rather than live play, and its examples carry across anyway: bringing a mirror to a fight with Medusa when your character has no way of knowing her gaze turns people to stone, or playing cautiously because the gamemaster is known to be merciless rather than because anything in the fiction warned you. It happens in tabletop games and live ones alike, and it is harder to hide when your body is in the scene.

How harsh a word it is depends on where you are standing. That club glossary calls the behaviour “generally unsporting”, strong language for a hobby that forgives most things. Wikipedia notes that many role-playing communities disapprove of it for denting suspension of disbelief and skewing game balance, and in the same entry that certain narrativist indie games invite it and build shared storytelling on top of it. It is not a synonym for cheating, just a thing each game decides how to treat.

The sanctioned version has its own name. The Nordic Larp Wiki gathers meta-techniques: devices performed by the player rather than the character, among them the meta room, the monologue and shadows. One reason they exist is to hand players things their characters could never have learned. Same wall, crossed in the open with everyone’s agreement, which is why nobody calls it metagaming.

Where it comes from

The construction is meta- bolted onto gaming, and Wikipedia’s general definition stays close to that: a game beyond the game, covering both a game built around some other game and the strategies people bring to playing one. That second half is what competitive players mean by the meta, and in search it drowns out the role-playing sense almost entirely.

Who first used the word about role-playing, and whether it came from wargaming, from tabletop or from live play, is not recorded anywhere reliable. Nobody can point to a first use. Wikipedia’s entry on the word does not mention live-action role-play at all, so the sense described above is taken from what larp groups write down for themselves, and different groups word it differently.

Examples

• Refusing the duke's offer because you overheard the plot team laughing about an ambush is metagaming, however smoothly you play it.
• He apologised for metagaming, agreed his character had no way of knowing the seal was forged, and went back in to make the wrong choice on purpose.
• Our briefing said the one unforgivable sin was metagaming, and the second was arguing for an hour about whether something counted as metagaming.

More from the dictionary

This entry is part of the LARP dictionary, which covers the vocabulary of live-action role-play and the internet slang that grew up around it. The two pillar pages are what LARP is and what larpmaxxing means.