Gaming is Metagaming

Enough discussions of “immersion” and “metagaming” have sprung up recently that I wanted to write my thoughts, so I at least have a place to point to on the topic.

So – metagaming, what even is it? It’s a topic with many interpretations, but it frequently boils down to using knowledge or game mechanics that the player character is unknowledgeable of. Game mechanics that fit under this definition sometimes get labelled as “disassociated” or “non-diegetic” or many other such terms. Searching for concrete examples of metagaming exposes a spectrum of tolerance, with few recognizing their own actions as “meta.”

As a traditional adventure game enthusiast, a lover of old-school-styled play, “free kriegspiel” and Braunstein, etc., I understand why gamers dislike metagaming. The hobby’s fun comes from diving into a world and interacting with it in an authentic nature. We want to inhabit funny little weirdos and sometimes set aside our own world to rise to the concerns and challenges of another, or we want to see how scenarios play out differently than they are likely to manifest in reality. This makes a ton of sense.

However, when you examine where specific lines get drawn, the concept clashes with the physical reality of the social experience and that we are playing a game. Just as observation influences how a scenario plays out, worries about metagaming lead to situations where players act in a “metagamed” way.

Playing Dumb Isn’t Smart (or fun)

Let’s take the typical example of monsters in fantasy roleplaying games. We know classic trolls in Dungeons & Dragons regenerate unless wounded with acid or fire. At one point in time, this was a surprise for new players – they enter combat with some green, rubbery subterranean dweller, and barely survive. As they take a breather and bind their wounds, they are witness to the horror of this malicious creature standing up, its wounds having closed, as it holds its own severed arm to the mess of a shoulder joint – reattaching the limb in moments.

However, it has become common knowledge in the community, and you’re likely to have encountered such a creature multiple times throughout your gaming life. So the next time you’re playing and you run across trolls, you’re likely to use fire and acid to prevent this regeneration.

“But what if we’re playing new characters?” someone concerned with metagaming will ask. Well, what is the goal here? You know trolls are susceptible to fire, everyone else knows it, if you choose to ignore it, all you’re doing is likely to get your party killed and need to start all over – with another group of people who have not encountered trolls before, leading to the same scenario.

What made the troll an engaging adversary was encountering an unusual obstacle and needing to piece together how to defeat it. The highs and lows of discovering its abilities and how to counter them are based around you the player figuring this out. Performing actions you don’t believe in is just putting on a show, which might be acceptable, but I’d say that’s not the point of these games. If that performance comes at the expense of the play and decision making, I’d say get rid of the theatrics.

Why would a new character know trolls are vulnerable to fire and acid? These games allow you to craft reasons that fit the world, perhaps your character travels and hear tales of terrifying creatures. Perhaps your uncle was an alchemist or a biomancer, and they did experiments with the rubbery flesh of such creatures and mentioned it in conversation. If you’re a pious character, you could have gleamed onto the mantra of Saint Phosos, that fire purifies all. Alternatively, your character could have had a gut feeling to soak the monster in oil and burn it, which is just as plausible as any other explanation.

If you agree with the fun of the troll being the unconventional obstacle and learning how to overcome it – how do we get back to that if we already know the solution? Referees can design monsters with unique advantages and disadvantages. They can also always take the traditional monsters and mix them up – maybe trolls in your setting are big shaggy creatures who can’t stand getting wet for whatever reason. I recommend against using this as a gotcha – unless you’re running a Tomb of Horrors-style aggressive referee scenario that your players are looking to be challenged with, don’t shuffle monsters abilities but give them 100% of the same description and tells as their Greyhawk or Mystara variants – actually transform the creature.

If you’re a player, you should make it known to your GM that you’re looking for such discoveries, and recommend to them to create their own monsters and lore, or to recommend different mythologies, folk tales, and fantasy sources to draw inspiration from. Obviously this is work, but it’s work well worth the experience.

The Meta Nature of Not Metagaming

Here’s a paradox: deciding not to metagame is itself a metagame decision. The moment you decide to ignore information you, the player, have in favor of “staying in character,” you’re already stepping outside the fiction. You are reacting to something external to the game: a desire to follow a social norm, maintain immersion, or appear “pure” in your approach to roleplaying. You’re no longer acting authentically as your character would – instead, you’re playing a meta-layer game of not metagaming.

Let’s go back to the troll example. You know it regenerates, and you know fire stops that. If you pretend your character doesn’t know this, what’s really driving that decision? Is it because you think your character wouldn’t realistically know? Or is it because you’re worried about being called out for breaking some unwritten rule of roleplaying etiquette? Nine times out of ten, it’s the latter. Ironically, in trying to avoid the perception of metagaming, you end up making a choice that’s entirely influenced by meta-concerns: the opinions of other players, your idea of what “immersion” looks like, or some abstract sense of roleplaying purity.

This isn’t to say you should always act on player knowledge or blow off in-character limitations. The point is that the decision to purposefully limit yourself isn’t some higher form of immersion. It’s a meta-level performance, one that often feels more like trying to pass a test than genuinely engaging with the game. Instead of forcing yourself to compartmentalize knowledge, why not use that knowledge creatively? Find ways to incorporate what you know into the fiction, whether through history, intuition, or divine inspiration. The game is more interesting when you treat meta-knowledge as a tool to deepen the play rather than as a temptation to resist and a purity test everyone is walking on eggshells around.

The Illusion of (Deep) Immersion

“Immersion” is often treated as the holy grail of roleplaying – a state where you completely become your character and feel fully engrossed in the their perspective and their view of the world. Since the earliest days of the hobby, there has been debates around how much the purpose of play is to determine how you might act in a fictional situation, and how much you should be embodying a hypothetical individual from that time and place (among a thousand other debates). Read Elusive Shift by Jon Peterson for a good discussion on this topic.

Immersion and metagaming are related, but not entirely overlapping concepts, so I won’t go into a full on critique of the idea of deep immersion (in this post), but I do find that most players cite the idea that metagaming breaks immersion, and that being immersed can be a framework to prevent metagaming. I want to perfectly frank that I don’t think wanting being immersed is a bad desire. I definitely want to be immersed (to a degree) in the games I run and play. The issue I somewhat regularly run into is a sort of extremist view of immersion, one in which I do not feel is even possible given the material nature of our games.

We all humans with whatever background we have in our real life, not having experienced being an immortal elf, throwing a fireball at a pack of ravening undead, experiencing faster-than-light travel, or coming to the conclusion that reality is going to be consumed by a giant squid man with tiny little bat wings. We agree to get together around a table (or computers) at a specific time, we juggle schedules and constraints, and we settle on large set of conveniences to get the game going. When we decide to make dungeon delvers – we are projecting a desire from ourselves into the game, we want to play dungeons and dragons, so we’re going to make someone who on some level can, in theory, deal with both of these things. We aren’t sitting through some world simulation hoping to be fictionally born into the body of an adventurer, we’re cutting to the chase and making one.

When we play, we’re always going to be interjecting our own preferences, biases, and outlook onto our characters. I’m not someone who thinks you can’t imagine what its like to be someone different from yourself, but I think “you” will always be reflected to some aspect in your character. I view this as a good thing, because this actually gives your character soul and the feeling of authenticity, rather than a projected approximation of what someone “should” be.

I also think so much of our day to day is driven by external and unconscious pressures – I know I certainly succumb to temptations like junk food and procrastination if I’m tired or stressed, I often respond to people in ways I don’t want to out of some character failing of my own, and half the time I find myself pursuing ideas and goals without making too many conscious decisions to do so. I think if we were to really embody a character in a fantasy world, there would be a whole lot more to the feeling of wanting to go home because you’ve been in a dungeon for too long and the feeling of your boots chaffing your ankle is getting annoying.

This isn’t saying you shouldn’t try to imagine playing as someone else – if you think your weird dwarf would have certain preferences or prejudices, go ahead and decide to play those out, but I don’t think you can really claim “it’s what my character would do” as if you had no input into the matter. We are already beyond most of the internalized pressures that would exist in this fantasy world, so deciding you “have” to perform a certain way is never going to be separate from a decision you – the human being at the table, has made.

So What is the Real Issue?

If metagaming isn’t really an issue, then why do we even flavor our worlds to have a specific setting? Why isn’t everything thematically neutral challenges devoid of these worlds we can never truly experience? Why not make every decision as a committee and completely obviate the necessity of playing a character?

It comes down to the features of roleplaying, rather than its weaknesses, that we choose to play in alien millieus and as strangers in strange lands. We roleplay because it offers something unique: the blend of narrative, game mechanics, and social interaction that no other medium quite replicates. It’s not about perfectly embodying a character or adhering to an abstract standard of immersion. It’s about experiencing a world and making decisions within it in a way that feels meaningful—both to the player and to the group. The settings we play in, the characters we inhabit, and the challenges we face are tools to create a shared narrative, not tests of how well we can suppress our out-of-game awareness. The world and the characters gives us a context and a shared understanding by which to engage with. It gives us an aesthetic that appeals us, that inspires us to direct our contributions.

Roleplaying games have a secret weapon that makes them distinct from pure storytelling or abstract strategy games: tactical infinity. You’ve probably read me writing about this quite a lot, but to summarize – its the idea that a player character may attempt any logical tactic in the world within reason. At their best, adventure games allow players to approach problems with creative, open-ended solutions rather than being confined to a predefined set of actions. You can ask questions, try unexpected tactics, or come up with ideas that no one else at the table—including the referee—saw coming. This freedom is what makes adventure gaming so compelling, and it’s fundamentally tied to every aspect of play – including the “meta” level that is “outside” of the fictional world.

But tactical infinity doesn’t exist in a vacuum—it thrives in the tension between what’s real to the characters and what’s real to the players. You aren’t just a detached decision-maker in a neutral puzzle game – you’re someone making choices within a fictional world. That world shapes the way you approach problems, not because you’re perfectly immersed but because it provides a framework for creativity. A troll that regenerates unless burned isn’t just a mechanical challenge—it’s a problem that feels alive because it fits into the context of the world, and the solution that comes from “player knowledge” is also easily reincorporated into the fiction as character knowledge.

So instead of hand-wringing over whether or not you or someone else is metagaming – ask how such actions work in the world, why something is the way it is, look to tie your characters to the fictional situation, and help the referee realize a more lived-in world by looking at possibility, rather than filtering based on some impossible metric.