I had this sort of sad realization that Dominion as a digital version of a competative deck building board game reveals through its graceful implementation that all of the benefits of CCG's can be found through a board game with none of the setbacks usually associated with it. People mired in the discussion around game design cringe when hearing the word 'metaprogression'. It's a term that has become stapled to gaming as a whole but in particular CCGs and Roguelites. For those not in the loop its basically a term to describe how a player gets new advantages inside the game by doing various things outside that game space, be it microtransactions or repeated play. For instance, sometimes you might see a pop up appear that you unlocked a new card or item added to a run after playing a round, thats a textbook example of metaprogression.
Most people who are interested in games from either a design perspective fork into two categories: Those who love metaprogression and those who avoid it. It's the ultimate form of using games as treadmill entertainment, where you play the game to get more stuff to play the game better (Hades, Vampire Survivors, Binding of Isaac etc). This by design filters out most people who are impatient who want access to everything a game has to offer or want a cultivated experience like DOOM etc. Thus the distribution of player interest is people either avoiding them entirely in respect of their time or treating each game they pick up as a special interest to throw themselves at single mindedly for a while. Metaprogression has baked in a sense of continuous novelty, without leaving the player overwhelmed. It has some of the best onramping for getting players into the game and building their sense of confidence with it over time. One irony here though is that there's a degree of upkeep that often goes into that knowledge. If you get really far into a game that uses this practice and put it down for few months, you will usually come back stressed or bewildered wondering how you ever even got that far in the first place. This is without even getting into the fact that metaprogression design often throttles difficulty curve based on your familiarity with the genre its in.
CCG's seem chemically concocted to tap into this phenomenon, adding a competative factor to the ordeal. In order to get better at a CCG you have to slowly acquire more of the cards so you can use them in the next fight. This scarcity when combined with the social aspect means that there's a heirarchy of information. New players must rely on established players to figure out more about the game if the metaprogression is slow enough. On top of that, if the player feels like they are figuring out the game faster than the reasources they are begin given then that might urge them into wanting to buy cards to play at less of a disadvantage against other players. The need for information upkeep due to balance changes reinforces the hierarchy, causing established know at all players to look down on everyone else (I talked about this a bit in my Undercards for those that read it, but here I'm trying to illustrate that it might be even more fundamental of a process in CCG design).
I bring this dynamic up to say that we often don't realize what sort of curse we are living in until its too late. Dominion Online substitutes this ultimately cruel metaprogression hierarchy by simply giving all the players equal access to all the cards at the start of any game and putting a subscription fee on playing around with the advanced sets yourself. Each game every player has access to the same set of cards known as the supply pile, and your goal is to figure out how to build and buy to make a deck to beat your opponent then and there. The playing field is totally equal on that level, and with over 300 cards cards that can be mixed and matched before a game, the options of what to mix and match are near infinite. Meaning that there's a high skill cieling without all the gatekeeping and scarcity associated with it. Dominion Online is an excercise in alternative perspectives on competition. By opening up the floodgates and allowing everyone access to the same pool from the outset you don't have to worry so much about playing for a compulsory attainment of external resources.
Dominion represents a novel approach to a more 'old fashioned' board game understanding of game design: Be fair to all the players. There is no asymmetry or treadmilling to mess with players, the only distinction is just in how specifically knowledgeable a player is over the other and even that doesn't guarantee a game. It goes without saying I love the game, but there's an illusive modesty to it that is hard to put down. Even in spite of their obvious immediate unfairness and economically produced FOMO, I still have this urge to play and get good at a CCG. Perhaps one reason why is the idea of such self assured confidence in that hierarchy feels fun to try and upturn, but usually you just end up getting consumed into it or ostracized regardless. Perhaps it's also the history of CCGs as being related to high octane anime soap operas. The fact that you have to prepare and work towards a deck ahead of time adds a theatrical factor that disaffected quiet dweebs can hook onto. For millenials, YuGiOh showed us characters like Yugi an Kaiba duking it out for some esoteric set of purposes, the 'heart of the cards'. However when thought about within its more realistic competitive aspect this is just an advertising gimmick for a toy that has likely put me and a lot of other people in a state of arrested development with competition.
Is this a problem outside of multiplayer games, does it carry over at all? I'd say so. For instance one game that has a pretty hefty relationship to metaprogression is Vampire Survivors, a game I'm rather infamous for writing on. In that game, you have to choose from a series of options and wait around for 30 real time minutes for a game to complete. The treadmilling though is that when you start playing nothing is unlocked, no character buffs or options, you see a screen where every character is loocked out but 1. Even if you win you still get 'killed'. If we consider this seriously, this is no different from when you're playing an incremental game and have to press that button to 'start over' with a small buff. The 'real ending' is webbed behind layers and layers of metaprogression. You know even if you beat the game, you didn't really beat it, there's so much more to see. It might not seem like there is an issue here but this slow doling out of new tools and information means that in order for you to make progress on the games terms you have to almost adopt it as an identity, a hyperfixation. I bring this up because when I wrote about this game the first time around, there were quite a lot of people who felt defensive in support of it, unusually so. Of course, it take 30+ hours of very grating and monotonous play in order to unlock everything so of course they felt that way. Realistically I'm not that far different, for a long time I was defensive about Binding of Isaac, because that game had become a 2nd skin, completing its increasingly opaque challenges became my life, I spent years playing it, I felt invested. Which is exactly the problem, that's unusual, or at least should be. This hyperfixative quality has caused an intense myopia on a realistic discussion.
In both instances, metaprogression design is the primary culprit here. There are engines of YuGiOh you can download and play that give you access to all of the cards instantly, but then it sets in immediately just how overcomplicated the game is. For social games it seems in theory like it should make sense to suppress this urge with meta progression design but that's only an illusion in form, because the other player you're fighting now has a high variance of access to that information and may know the game inside out better than you at any point. It's just a warm blanket for the eventual information overabundance you'd have to take on. If it's not that then its timegating, causing you to want to obsess over the game to anybody in speaking distance. One of the best games to utilize metaprogression I've seen is Desktop Dungeons (2013) which had a simple 5-10 puzzle game session and only 4 - 6 hours worth of unlocks to do. That game came out 10 years ago now, and roguelike games with such a small span of time to get through it now is rare.
Now that I've highlighted it in the depth I have, its no wonder that most of my friends these days avoid these sorts of games to my bewilderment. They often just see through this illusion and don't appreciate what's behind the curtain. That's not to say they are right or 'superior' per se, all art is ultimately about illusions. They just prefer their illusions to not corrode at their time so much or hide as much of the mechanical depth from them. They would rather up front the cost of having to read through a manual so they can enjoy the tools at their disposal more. I think there is room for CCGs and metaprogression to work right, but it would have to be much more thoughtfully designed. For instance you would have to replace the F2Play model of most CCGs with buying the multiplayer game fixed price for everyone from the outset, and then just using metaprogression as a fast onramp into the game rather than as a way to gatekeep players from progress (...from a side glance this seems to be what Friends vs Friends (2023) is doing but I can't say for sure). More to the point is that as now this approach is incredibly rare because its not the 'profitable' approach). The same is likely true for roguelikes in most instances. If we are going to have metaprogression mechanics at all, it should correlate to either the complexity of the game and probably should not take so long to unlock. In the meantime I think it's worth reconsidering on a more fundamental level games with metaprogression elements, they've become so normalized over the years I think we forget they are supposed to be the exception, not the rule.
Most people who are interested in games from either a design perspective fork into two categories: Those who love metaprogression and those who avoid it. It's the ultimate form of using games as treadmill entertainment, where you play the game to get more stuff to play the game better (Hades, Vampire Survivors, Binding of Isaac etc). This by design filters out most people who are impatient who want access to everything a game has to offer or want a cultivated experience like DOOM etc. Thus the distribution of player interest is people either avoiding them entirely in respect of their time or treating each game they pick up as a special interest to throw themselves at single mindedly for a while. Metaprogression has baked in a sense of continuous novelty, without leaving the player overwhelmed. It has some of the best onramping for getting players into the game and building their sense of confidence with it over time. One irony here though is that there's a degree of upkeep that often goes into that knowledge. If you get really far into a game that uses this practice and put it down for few months, you will usually come back stressed or bewildered wondering how you ever even got that far in the first place. This is without even getting into the fact that metaprogression design often throttles difficulty curve based on your familiarity with the genre its in.
CCG's seem chemically concocted to tap into this phenomenon, adding a competative factor to the ordeal. In order to get better at a CCG you have to slowly acquire more of the cards so you can use them in the next fight. This scarcity when combined with the social aspect means that there's a heirarchy of information. New players must rely on established players to figure out more about the game if the metaprogression is slow enough. On top of that, if the player feels like they are figuring out the game faster than the reasources they are begin given then that might urge them into wanting to buy cards to play at less of a disadvantage against other players. The need for information upkeep due to balance changes reinforces the hierarchy, causing established know at all players to look down on everyone else (I talked about this a bit in my Undercards for those that read it, but here I'm trying to illustrate that it might be even more fundamental of a process in CCG design).
I bring this dynamic up to say that we often don't realize what sort of curse we are living in until its too late. Dominion Online substitutes this ultimately cruel metaprogression hierarchy by simply giving all the players equal access to all the cards at the start of any game and putting a subscription fee on playing around with the advanced sets yourself. Each game every player has access to the same set of cards known as the supply pile, and your goal is to figure out how to build and buy to make a deck to beat your opponent then and there. The playing field is totally equal on that level, and with over 300 cards cards that can be mixed and matched before a game, the options of what to mix and match are near infinite. Meaning that there's a high skill cieling without all the gatekeeping and scarcity associated with it. Dominion Online is an excercise in alternative perspectives on competition. By opening up the floodgates and allowing everyone access to the same pool from the outset you don't have to worry so much about playing for a compulsory attainment of external resources.
Dominion represents a novel approach to a more 'old fashioned' board game understanding of game design: Be fair to all the players. There is no asymmetry or treadmilling to mess with players, the only distinction is just in how specifically knowledgeable a player is over the other and even that doesn't guarantee a game. It goes without saying I love the game, but there's an illusive modesty to it that is hard to put down. Even in spite of their obvious immediate unfairness and economically produced FOMO, I still have this urge to play and get good at a CCG. Perhaps one reason why is the idea of such self assured confidence in that hierarchy feels fun to try and upturn, but usually you just end up getting consumed into it or ostracized regardless. Perhaps it's also the history of CCGs as being related to high octane anime soap operas. The fact that you have to prepare and work towards a deck ahead of time adds a theatrical factor that disaffected quiet dweebs can hook onto. For millenials, YuGiOh showed us characters like Yugi an Kaiba duking it out for some esoteric set of purposes, the 'heart of the cards'. However when thought about within its more realistic competitive aspect this is just an advertising gimmick for a toy that has likely put me and a lot of other people in a state of arrested development with competition.
Is this a problem outside of multiplayer games, does it carry over at all? I'd say so. For instance one game that has a pretty hefty relationship to metaprogression is Vampire Survivors, a game I'm rather infamous for writing on. In that game, you have to choose from a series of options and wait around for 30 real time minutes for a game to complete. The treadmilling though is that when you start playing nothing is unlocked, no character buffs or options, you see a screen where every character is loocked out but 1. Even if you win you still get 'killed'. If we consider this seriously, this is no different from when you're playing an incremental game and have to press that button to 'start over' with a small buff. The 'real ending' is webbed behind layers and layers of metaprogression. You know even if you beat the game, you didn't really beat it, there's so much more to see. It might not seem like there is an issue here but this slow doling out of new tools and information means that in order for you to make progress on the games terms you have to almost adopt it as an identity, a hyperfixation. I bring this up because when I wrote about this game the first time around, there were quite a lot of people who felt defensive in support of it, unusually so. Of course, it take 30+ hours of very grating and monotonous play in order to unlock everything so of course they felt that way. Realistically I'm not that far different, for a long time I was defensive about Binding of Isaac, because that game had become a 2nd skin, completing its increasingly opaque challenges became my life, I spent years playing it, I felt invested. Which is exactly the problem, that's unusual, or at least should be. This hyperfixative quality has caused an intense myopia on a realistic discussion.
In both instances, metaprogression design is the primary culprit here. There are engines of YuGiOh you can download and play that give you access to all of the cards instantly, but then it sets in immediately just how overcomplicated the game is. For social games it seems in theory like it should make sense to suppress this urge with meta progression design but that's only an illusion in form, because the other player you're fighting now has a high variance of access to that information and may know the game inside out better than you at any point. It's just a warm blanket for the eventual information overabundance you'd have to take on. If it's not that then its timegating, causing you to want to obsess over the game to anybody in speaking distance. One of the best games to utilize metaprogression I've seen is Desktop Dungeons (2013) which had a simple 5-10 puzzle game session and only 4 - 6 hours worth of unlocks to do. That game came out 10 years ago now, and roguelike games with such a small span of time to get through it now is rare.
Now that I've highlighted it in the depth I have, its no wonder that most of my friends these days avoid these sorts of games to my bewilderment. They often just see through this illusion and don't appreciate what's behind the curtain. That's not to say they are right or 'superior' per se, all art is ultimately about illusions. They just prefer their illusions to not corrode at their time so much or hide as much of the mechanical depth from them. They would rather up front the cost of having to read through a manual so they can enjoy the tools at their disposal more. I think there is room for CCGs and metaprogression to work right, but it would have to be much more thoughtfully designed. For instance you would have to replace the F2Play model of most CCGs with buying the multiplayer game fixed price for everyone from the outset, and then just using metaprogression as a fast onramp into the game rather than as a way to gatekeep players from progress (...from a side glance this seems to be what Friends vs Friends (2023) is doing but I can't say for sure). More to the point is that as now this approach is incredibly rare because its not the 'profitable' approach). The same is likely true for roguelikes in most instances. If we are going to have metaprogression mechanics at all, it should correlate to either the complexity of the game and probably should not take so long to unlock. In the meantime I think it's worth reconsidering on a more fundamental level games with metaprogression elements, they've become so normalized over the years I think we forget they are supposed to be the exception, not the rule.
2 Comments
added substance
Erato_Heti
9 months ago