Some readers may know me from quotes in features and stories about the gaming industry, particularly for market forecasts and predictions and data used to back up or dispute contentions about the games business.  I still do that, and I may do some of it here, but I’ve set this up to cover fundamental changes that impact the industry: the emergent gamer, emergent gameplay and the phenomenon of metagaming.  By emergent I mean the organic deviation of consumer preferences and expectations from the assumptions, plans and designs of developers and publishers.  Emergent gamers and emergent gameplay evolve in the gap between the intentions of the developers and of the players.  Will Wright effectively plans for this player contribution, while most designers discount, ignore or plan to prevent  emergent behavior in gaming. Many of these emergent gamers are part of an audience the industry may have hoped for, but didn’t plan for — the mainstream.

The term “metagaming” also requires some qualification.  In the context of games rather than game theory, metagaming can and does mean exploiting inherent weaknesses in a system to influence the outcome.   This is a form of more planned and less accidental emergent gameplay that could include activities that some would consider hacking or cheating.  My definition of metagaming (meta meaning “beyond”) includes making a game of playing one or more games, typically by aggregating scores and statistics to raise relative status to competitors. This type of metagaming occurs within Xbox LIVE, PlayStation Network and in some social networks and virtual worlds.  To win in metagaming, a player completes more game goals and achieves higher scores not only in one game, but in multiple games on one or more platforms in one or more genres.