Quote:
Originally Posted by maskedmelon
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Well, emergent play does sound so much more engaging than meta. Meta feels overly judegemental, like it carries deragotory connotations, like inferior or something, ya know? What activities would you consider meta? Is FQ meta? Seems too unrelated to be meta. How about leaderboard competition?
What if form a group and we meet up at the Wafarer's Roost for some fun :3 We all decide to play monopoly and take turns /randoming and declaring our moves (placing three houses on Parkplace for example) and update our boards at home accordingly. Is that meta? Or does it have to be more about EQ, like maybe magelo gearing competition?
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The point (my point, anyway) about meta is that it means a self-reference, one level up. Data about data is metadata. Rules about rules are metarules. A language grammar about grammar rules is a metagrammar. A program that writes programs is a metaprogram (those exist). The self-reference is key, not just that it's outside of or parallel to something else. Metagaming would be playing a game about playing games, I suppose, but not playing some other game IN a game.
But, like I said, I guess it's come to be used to fill a void as to what to call stuff like playing some other game within a game, talking about a game, using advanced knowledge of a game to play better, etc. We didn't really have non-awkward phrase, so 'meta' got tagged from what I claim is a misunderstanding. So be it, language changes all the time from stuff like that.
Emergent describes something that comes out unexpectedly from a simple ruleset. Remember conway's game of life? It generated expanding patterns of colored pixels that had all kinds of different shapes and forms from a VERY simple ruleset written in like 10 lines of BASIC code. Or take ants, they are very simple, they just follow smell trails around and each ant doesn't actually know jack about what the hive is doing, but somehow all their individual actions add up to behavior that institutes and protects a complex hive. That's emergence, unexpected complexity out of apparent simplicity.