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.

YAWN

[QuantumG]

Yeah, that's way more entertaining than, say, reruns of the X-Files.

Re:

[morari]

Maybe if the rerun has Agent Doggett in it...

Waste of Time

[Jaqenn]

You know that scene at the beginning of Space Oddessy: 2001, where the monkeys dispute over the water-pool? By screaming nonsense at each other? MTV recreated that here.

I didn't think either side made a compelling argument for the entire competition. I want my 20 minutes back.

Re:

[TellarHK]

Y'know, I was really disappointed by the quality of the arguments put forth. Seriously, the game idea is fairly weak on its own, but mix that in with people that don't really have any idea how to debate and discuss trivial crap in anything other than a way that sounds like a cancelled Comedy Central gameshow? No.

I would have utterly obliterated the arguments against Half-Life versus Halo, which is as far as I watched - the first segment anyhow. And honestly could have made a good case in the other direct

Re:

[CommunistHamster]

Actually, it was Half Life 2 that didn't have a Gordon model. You could go into third person view with a cheat in Half Life 1 and you could see Gordon.

His hair was ginger though.

Still a Waste of Time

[Jaqenn]

Sorry to repost, but I just finished the last clip, and I am so filled with rage that I have to post again saying how much of a waste of time this is.

Question: "Which game better integrates theme and gameplay: Adventure, or Street Fighter 2?"

Team one: "Adventure gives you...adventure. You have this, like, adventure. You get to have an adventure."

Team two: "Street fighter gives you fighting, in the street! You're fighting, in a street! And there is two of you!"

Both teams repeat themselves over and over until time runs out.

Why didn't I just give up and stop watching? Because I am an idiot.

Re:Still a Waste of Time

[_Sprocket_]

Why didn't I just give up and stop watching? Because I am an idiot.

Shhh! Not so loud. You'll give away the secrets to MTV's success.

Re:

[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

Re:

[neomunk]

Fewer car analogies.

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:

[Fian]

I suspect the metagame is really to see if they can get lots of people to watch their crap. If you watched the video, you were "gamed"

Wow...just wow

[RichPowers]

How low are your comedic standards if you can call this crap "hilarious" and keep a straight face?

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.

Clips Removed

[bateleur]

Is it just me or are all the clips now inaccessible?

all your feedback

[stephentotilo]

I'm the guy you can blame for this. It was my idea. We crunched a 70-minute session into 20 minutes of video. The points of comparison between games are randomly chosen by a computer program. The games being compared are selected off of a game board by the players. I've seen this game run twice. First at GDC and then in the one I participated in on MTV. Both times I thought it was both fun and enjoyably illuminating. Sure, we aired some of the more ridiculous arguments, but I think we achieved something th

Re:

[TellarHK]

I've been trying to think of a good response to your post, Stephen. I'm even going so far as to assume this is really you, which is a first for me. What's been hanging me up though, is that I'm really torn on what the idea of good game material for television could be.

Should it be something that offers the industry a little cachet of trendiness? Perhaps something a little more sophisticated? Maybe a good sense of humor, with an undercurrent of sincerity? I think there's room for all of these - but that th

Re:

[Cookie3]

If the flow of games were more natural (either because the games were in the same genre, or because the comparisons between the games made sense), that'd've probably helped a bit.

Crap.

[MaWeiTao]

It's junk like this that makes me embarrassed to play games.

If this is the best anyone can come up with for debating games there's little hope gaming will ever be taken as seriously as novels or films.

This Was Better at GDC

[Castar]

This one was pretty lame. But there was a great one at GDC 2007. I think there used to be video up, somewhere, but I can't find it - the arguments were much more believable, though, and the moderation was better. Plus, the crowd judging them was larger and made up of game developers.

So... The Metagame is cool, MTV sucks.