With the second installment of my commentary on games and the players that ruin them, I will address board and other tabletop games, continuing from the first part which addressed videogames and how players online can completely hinder an otherwise amazing game. At the tabletop, this becomes a much more personal issue, as you can easily consider someone a jerk when they are miles away without a face to go with their game presence. However, when you are face to face, interacting directly as you play a game, a player can disrupt a game much more effectively and painfully then ever could happen in the virtual world of videogames.
The first example I will discuss is from a prevalent game in many of our lives for a long time, and obviously a very influential game, Dungeons and Dragons. Since many people grossly disconnected from reality feel that such a game is akin to worshipping Satan, I imagine someone role playing badly would equally affect an evil cult’s ability to “get into the fantasy”. Possibly the worst interference with a D&D game is the shunned and feared, yet utterly unavoidable, Meta-gamer; a type of player who uses their own knowledge of the game world to make decisions inside the imaginary universe in which everyone is engrossed. A typical example of this could be: You are playing in a fantasy world as a character who is young and uninitiated in the world, yet upon seeing a menacing troll for the first time lumbering toward town, you quickly grab a torch and lob it at the troll with the complete understanding that fire will not only burn the troll, but prevent it from regenerating and being an otherwise fun encounter.
Many Meta-gamers, upon realization of the grave crime they have committed, will quickly attempt to rationalize their omniscience with luck or sheer coincidence. “I simply reached for the closest thing to defend myself, which happened to be a torch!” This is a very common occurrence in any D&D game, but typically it is a very small offense and easily overlooked. However, there are many people who simply cannot get themselves into character and repeatedly make decisions based on otherworldly knowledge. This type of player, while generally tolerated or dealt with in some way, can be detrimental to a role playing group. They can ruin a GM’s planning, they can spoil a long running plot, or they can completely circumvent a lengthy puzzle or mystery by blurting out the answer.
Unfortunately, there are too many forms of Meta-gaming to address here, but simply put the best games I have been in are ones where all of the players stay in character for the majority of the time, enjoy their characters, and act almost entirely based on how their character would act. Continuing on with other types of tabletop games, the most obvious case with board games being ruined by a player would be when someone cheats. Be it stealing money as the banker in monopoly, or playing the word “Kwyjibo” in scrabble, cheating in a game can be entertaining and quite funny depending on the players, but in the end it can sully the game for everyone.
Not surprisingly, the chances of a player ruining a well designed board or tabletop game are much lower then they are with an online videogame. This is a result of the fact that we generally only play board games with our friends, and when playing with friends often game-breaking actions are either expected or anticipated and generally dealt with or simply laughed off. Intimate knowledge of the other players provides a flexibility that can allow games to be enjoyed no matter how each person plays the game. I have even played a game of risk, which was enjoyable simply because of the hilarity, where all we did was set up the board and pieces, and then the game was never even played. From then on, with that group of people, setting up a game of risk became an ongoing joke. Many board games suffer from instances of King-making (when one player’s best move simply provides another player with the ability to win) or of Pile-driving (misinterpreted or misunderstood rules which result in a nearly unrecognizable game), these are typically not game ruining and are usually avoidable.
This concludes my brief analysis of games and the people who can ruin them. The prominent example in my mind is still Counterstrike, which is an amazing game in almost all respects, and can be extremely enjoyable when played with a good crowd. However, with the online group of people that is standard to the game, it becomes a painful and utterly horrible experience as people are rude, inconsiderate, and completely idiotic. Please let me know what you think of my observations, and I hope that you all have happy gaming in the future!
There were some parts of Settlers of Catan: Piledriver that I prefer.
What, you ask?
I don’t recall, just trust me.
Meta-gaming is a problem. The problem with it is that, in order to properly not metagame, the player needs to enter a kind of semi-psychotic state. A type of doublethink wherein the player knows something, but is able to keep it entirely seperate, mentally, from the character he or she is playing.
This type of mental partitioning skill is difficult for a lot of people; these are the same people who don’t understand why the woman ALWAYS goes into creepy door in horror movies. It’s a conceit of the fiction that people will do incredibly stupid things and you have to put your mentality into the same one as the character.
I think some exercises can help. When watching a horror movie like the one above, or any in which a character does not have the omniscient powers of the viewer, try and put oneself into the character’s shoes and guess what they will do next. This also works when reading fiction; having people of very different perhaps even alien mindsets and trying to predict their actions is a very good way of training this doublethink.
Do it enough and you’ll find that partitioning out knowledge and personality becomes second nature. It’s a kind of controlled multiple personality disorder.
Kwyjibo is a perfectly cromulent word.
While we all sometimes fall into the meta-gamer persona every now and then (usually unknowingly), it is seriously annoying when people do it consistently. My favorite experience with such a player was with that guy Hunter at BCon (the one who went from 500 to 850 lbs in one year). We were both involved in a Mage: The Ascension one shot adventure that took place in Baltimore. He kept saying how he knew where to go and how bad certain areas were with crime simply because of his own area knowledge of living there. Such a display crawled up my nerves enough to begin with, but he said so in an arrogant manner. Ever since I’ve been pretty hesitant to do pick-up games at cons because of such players.