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Funding Successful
This project successfully raised its funding goal on April 9, 2011.
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A full Metagame deck - more than 100 unique game cards, plus game rules
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A full Metagame deck + a stylish Local No.12 t-shirt
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The Metagame megapack: 5 full decks of the Metagame - perfect for a design class exercise, a gamer party, or for gifting to your game-playing friends
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A full deck, a t-shirt, and a limited edition Metagame poster featuring all of the cards
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A Metagame at your conference or event - enough cards to support 1000 players, plus consulting from Local No.12 on making your game a success
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Local No.12 is an experimental game collective. Veteran designers and technologists, the members of Local No.12 came together to invent new forms of emergent social play. We are Colleen Macklin, John Sharp, and Eric Zimmerman.
Colleen Macklin is a design spaz. She is a professor in Communication, Design, and Technology at Parsons, and runs the PETLab, an experimental game lab that has nothing to do with pets. Personal site: www.colleenmacklin.com
John Sharp sports a PhD in Art History, a former career as a DJ, and ongoing work in game scholarship, media design, and game development – plus a full-time professorship at Savannah College of Art & Design in Atlanta. Site: www.supercosm.com
Eric Zimmerman is addicted to game design. He has been working in the game industry for more than 15 years and has created far too many games, both on and off the computer and also helped found the NYU Game Center. Personal site: www.ericzimmerman.com
Posted this on the last update, but I'll post it here too. I got my cards in the mail today. hopefully going to be setting up a meta game party soon!
Michael, the cards are at the printers and we expect them back in a week or so. Things are moving forward on the schedule we outlined in our last update.
I'm starting to feel like it's time to put out the cards or send the money back, guys. It's now December and no word since October?
Michael & Tyler, thanks for your questions. Please see the latest update for the most recent news on the Metagame schedule. Thanks for your support!
So..... how's it going?
Any update regarding a shipment date or span of time we can hope to receive our Metagame package?
wow, 20,183 200%
How does this game compare to "Who Would Win"?
A simple iOS app could achieve the same goal of this card game.
$10,040 .... well done guys :)
Fantastic work! I recently workshopped a similar idea where a video game "expert" grills an infamous and controversial video game "reviewer" George Wood.
http://www.youtube.com/watch…
Imagine a Metagame adaptation where one team has to give a George Wood-like argument and the other team has to give a "mainstream" reviewer argument.
Another favorite moment: on the question "what game is more culturally sophisticated?" I play Passage versus opponent's ICO. I reference memento mori, opponent references a traditional Chinese poem. One of the judges is Chinese; I lose by her tiebreaker vote 2-3. The most interesting thing was that then the *judges* got in an argument with one another about Chinese culture and video games, building off of the players' arguments. We debated having the players then judge the judges' analysis of the player debates, to make it a meta-metagame...
My Metagame moment in the spotlight was on a big stage. Eric, Colleen and I were telling the 400 GDC conference associates (the folks in blue shirts checking badges and handing out evaluation forms) during their kick off meetings. Colleen and I demonstrated the game for them. She challenged me with Duck Hunt and "which game has a more satisfying core mechanic." I countered with Cow Clicker. Her argument consisted of, "Shooting is fun." I, on the other hand, gave a deeply moving soliloquy on Cow Clicker's essentialist character that was rippled with equal parts humor and insight into the true character of games.
At first, it seemed I had won, so I began raising my fists in modest acknowledgement of the forthcoming win. But the sea of CAs turned against me, and gave Colleen an ill-gotten win. She took my Uncharted 2 card, and left me with hand of Drop7, Cow Clicker, and "which would make a better novel."
Had an epic 4-way match at GDC, around the question "what game is the most demanding of the player?" I chose Scrabulous, up against Rogue, Sim City, and Doom. My argument was that my game was the only one that couldn't be beaten just by looking it up on GameFAQs, and that the sheer amount of data you needed to know to play a perfect game was orders of magnitude higher than the others... but everyone else made solid arguments too and it ended in a four-way draw. We decided to exchange a random card with one another.
I'm still reeling from my Metagame victory on the Tuesday night of GDC: I was defending Atari's Adventure as more poetic than Ico. It seemed like an impossible challenge. I'm sure it was only my description of Adventure as a "systematized poem about seahorses who have lost their house keys" which won over the assembled judges. The comedy vote, in conjunction with the audience's old-school purism, won the day, despite my opponent pointing out that I was on public record describing Ico as the most poetic game of all time.
In all seriousness, the Metagame is not only a darn fun game; it can function as an important tool for engaging in new kinds of criticism about the videogames we play. Please support this great project in any way you can!
For "Which game is more elegant?" I threw down Bejeweled and was countered with Minecraft. So, to me, this is an apples/oranges debate -- both are equally "elegant," but for very different definitions of elegance (for me, it was paucity of mechanics; for him, it was in modeling a world). We had a table of about 8 others judging us, and tied. What's fun, though, is that on the way back from lunch we had a half hour discussion of definitions of "elegance" in game design that really stuck with me. My favorite Metagame moment so far!
Here's a GDC Metagame story that game designer and researcher Katherine Isbister emailed to us:
"The best round I witnessed was Tracy Fullerton playing against a grad student of hers over lunch - the challenge was what game to put in a 1000-year time capsule. Tracy chose Myst and made a strong case for it, but then the student laid down Flower and gave great arguments as well. The table was split but voted for flower, and Tracy said she sort of won either way. and shortly thereafter Kellee sat down and the whole story got retold to her :)"
What you have to know to appreciate this story is that Kellee Santiago, who co-founded the company that made Flower, is a former student of Tracy's. Win-win situation indeed!
Ian Bogost gets challenged with "Which game is a better way to waste ten minutes?" Challenger says Angry Birds. Ian plays Cow Clicker. Draw.
Really enjoyed playing MetaGame at GDC! I think my favorite memory is backing away from a challenge someone laid down at lunch. "Which game is more beautiful?" paired with Katamari Damacy. I just walked away from that one. :)
When in doubt, the answer is always Pac-Man. :)
How does this game compare to "Who Would Win"?