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AndrewJ
11-08-2009, 04:01 PM
http://www.sleeperhit.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=77&catid=53

An interesting article about playing games in ways that the weren't meant/envisioned to be played.


I do it because it's fun and exciting, even bordering on the "rebellious" to bend and almost break the game's intended method of play. And you?

DukeOFprunes
11-08-2009, 04:10 PM
I enjoy stacking things, mostly furniture in any game that lets me. Dead Space most recently. It's a nice little diversion from having xenos yelling in my ears and ripping my head off.

Others rake a zen garden. I make a tower of chairs.

Chippit
11-08-2009, 06:01 PM
I enjoy stacking things, mostly furniture in any game that lets me. Dead Space most recently. It's a nice little diversion from having xenos yelling in my ears and ripping my head off.

Others rake a zen garden. I make a tower of chairs.

Oh, you must've adored Half Life 2.

Nandrew
11-08-2009, 08:05 PM
I regret to say that I've steered away from metagaming recently.

I think it's because I tend to play a lot of quick-fire or casual games nowadays (I raid Flash portals and review sites) and focus on working towards the game's goal rather than taking the time to explore more. Stuff like achievements, mini-games and simple player experimentation have limited appeal.

I guess I'm rather goal-oriented and a little impatient. Heathen and stuff.

._.

AndrewJ
12-08-2009, 06:07 AM
In Carmageddon I used to try and go as fast as possible, ususally using the hotrod (speed) and jupiter gravity (so that my car doesn't flip) cheats on a downhill.

When I got bored with that (my fastest speed was approximately 719mph! :-) on the first city map that the player played on, there is a shortish straight stretch of road and then a sudden dip/change in altitude that became a long deceivingly gentle curve. Far down after that change in altitude a signboard went halfway across the road. It became my mission in life to 1) Go as fast as possible on that shortish stretch before the jump and then 2) hit that billboard.

It was so brilliant when I finally hit that signboard!!! Hitting it over and over kept me occupied for about a week one holiday. Really great memories. :-)

Gazza_N
12-08-2009, 09:24 AM
When I was in Primary School, a friend and I would splitscreen Need for Speed 2 with traffic on. The rule was that we would race normally, but every time we saw one of those big yellow buses, we would scream "SCHOOOOOOOOOLBUUUUUUUUUUUUS" and both ram it at full speed to try to tip it over and/or get it airborne. It worked. It was awesome. :D

We also had an odd way of competing at Unreal Tournament without a LAN. We would take turns playing ten-minute deathmatches on the same map at the same difficulty with no frag limit, then tally the kills vs. deaths at the end of each match. The one who got the most frags with the least deaths won the round. Rinse and repeat with the next map until we had a "best out of three". Many a Friday afternoon was spent this way.


Other than "enforced" metagaming such as achievements (well, the ones that don't require hours and hours to get), I don't do it much anymore either. It comes down to time: I barely manage to finish games normally nowadays, never mind experimenting to find neat hax, sploits, or messing around with physics.

dislekcia
12-08-2009, 12:08 PM
Oddly enough, most of the games that I really enjoy these days are games whose structures follow some sort of metagaming angle. An example would be Fallout 3, which isn't so much a linear game as a metagame with sections of story thrown into it for you to discover. Or Burnout Paradise, every time you do some sort of random metagame thing, the game appears to have been waiting for you to do it so that it could reward you or unlock a new challenge, etc. (AndrewJ, I highly recommend this game after what you've said!)

My own metagaming addiction is collection and completionism. I love collecting things in a game, even if they're completely useless - but it's better if they're awesome and relevant to the game. You do not want to see my Diablo 2 mule collection. I also like trying to find situations in a game that are funny or odd, I think that's me trying to understand the game's rules. In Quake 2 I found the "walking in the sky" bug on Q2DM1 and rocket/grenade/barrel jumping has always been something I enjoyed because it was such an unexpected thing when it first appeared in Quake. In Starcraft when observing (you'd play terran, ally with everyone and float your CC to a corner of the map) I also managed to get 0 SCVs time and time again, if you got your final two SCVs to attack at exactly the same time, they both popped :D