Game Journalists Go Head to Head in 'The Metagame'

The Metagame event, held this past GDC in San Francisco, garnered a good deal of buzz ... even if not that many people had a chance to see it. The folks behind GameLab set up another session of the inventive game-knowledge gameshow, and pitted two pairs of journalists against each other to see who could better argue their (randomly determined) cases. The results are not only hilarious, but viewable on the MTV website.

This was really bad...

[Anonymous Coward]

The designers of the game were pretty high and mighty about their 'invention', which is pick an argument and have two sides debate it, then decide based on audience reaction. This is going to sweep the nation, then conquer the world. I've never seen anything like it. It truly deserves the name 'Meta game' because it is the game of all games.

And I have to agree that this was really really boring. Not necessarily bad topics of debate, but awful, awful arguments.

Re:Still a Waste of Time

[cicatrix1]

Yeah. I got 2 minutes into the "randomness" clip (the 3rd one?) before I gave up. There are so many things wrong with this that watching it made my skin crawl. All I have to say is that one team "won" a challenge by saying that Resident Evil is more random than Tetris -- based on the fact that it's controls are sluggish? Excuse me, WTF? Tetris *is* a bunch of random blocks and RE is on rails!!

The arguments made by either side are completely laughable at how bad they are, and they judgement system is worse. An applause meter? Come on. In a debate style game there should be qualified judges and some majority or ranking system.

I guess it could have some potential if they fixed the scoring and found teams that have any clue. On the other hand, it's hard to call a series of debates with semi randomized qustions a "game show".

Needed a better scoring mechanism

[Dutch Gun]

I watched the first few clips, and couldn't really take much more than that. The arbitrary nature of picking a winner based on "applause" completely invalidated any sort of game mechanic they came up with. More often than not, it seemed like the winner was chosen randomly because the applause levels were essentially split. A simple electronic voting system would have solved this problem elegantly, and made it feel like a real competition.

I think the concept has some potential, as people generally love getting into these sorts of arguments anyhow. It feels a bit too much like a 'beta' release at the moment, though.