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Hi there, my name's Felan. I'm a Pix Fu/Derek Yu stalwart and a longtime TIGSource reader. I used to post on the old forum but life caught up to me.

So, I've just begun my Master's in Film Studies at Carleton University, and I'm doing a directed reading/independent study on the thrlling topic of video games and video game studies.

A significant portion of my proposed project is about the rules and rule sets which gamers impose upon themselves. This is sometimes considered a facet of "emergent gameplay." Some examples include Jeep Jumping in Halo, playing a specific alignment in a role-playing game which does not enforce alignment behaviour, speed runs, River City Ransom baseball and Cat and Mouse in certain racing games.

Let me stress that I'm not talking about creative solutions to in-game problems, nor am I talking about modding. I'm interested in rulesets which exist only in the minds of the players, implemented entirely within the game. Any instance in which the player imposes his or her own rules onto the game and onto themselves.


An example from my own experience is Halo Jeep Tag. The players start with a basic Tag-style multiplayer match, with vehicles enabled and all rocket launchers, and the extra rules go like this:

- The player who is "it" must be in a jeep, and can only kill people (and thus score points) by running over the other players.
- The other players, equipped with rocket launchers and frag grenades (sticky plasma grenades are not allowed) must try to stay alive and kill the player who is "it."
- If the "it" player is ejected from his jeep and survives, nobody is allowed to shoot him until he re-enters the jeep and two seconds have passed (in order to give him a fair head start).



What other examples have you guys seen or experienced? You will obviously get credit for your contribution if this paper goes as planned. (Also, if this got a mainpage nod, I'd be much obliged. :P)

There was a thing in Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2 online matches, where the players would always turn off their lightsabers and bow to each other before each match.

There's the usual stuff - playing through Deus Ex without killing anyone (or at least, as few people as possible), trying to play through Super Metroid with the smallest percentage of items possible, "knife fights" in Counterstrike...

Hell, even a simple speed run involves the player creating his or her own addition to the rules as "time played" is not traditionally seen as a score for most of the games that get sped through, but they change the rules to make it so.  "Beating" Super Metroid with a speed run is no longer a boolean "have I beaten it yet or not?" but rather a "How quickly can I beat it?"  That's a pretty fundamental shift in the way the system is interpreted.

Unfortunately it's a relatively rare thing in multiplayer games because it's so damned hard to get an entire server operating under the same rule set.  The second you and I get on board a Battlefield server and try racing jeeps around, we're going to get shot at by other players. 

The most awesome thing about this stuff is that it shows players (and their internalizations of the systems we design) are inherently a part of those systems.  We can't forget that players aren't necessarily abstract things that just come in and "play" our games, they're as much a part of our systems as anything we put into it.

Well, I know many members of the Elder Scrolls community enjoy roleplaying their characters in Morrowind and Oblivion. Some actually take it very seriously, spending hours decorating their character's house(s), pretending (or actually doing it, with the help of some mods) they're eating, and even creating actual routines for their virtual selves.

Absolutely right, and in a way that's the ultimate angle of my project: sort of a valorization of video games as a [mass] art which creates meaningful and significant aesthetic experiences.

Multiplayer examples tend to exist more in context of real-world presence (LAN parties, console split-screen) but as you say, knife/pistol/shock paddle-only servers do engage in the same sort of rule-making. Even "no-swearing" servers change the experience.

The Oblivion/Morrowind example is valid only when the player is imposing limitations (all rules are, after all, limitations) on what his character can do, but it's also a good point.

This is very intriguing! Lots of these things happen in MMO's (or perhaps thats because I played it a lot. :P). Most "emergent gameplay" in MMO's spawn from superstition, which is in turn caused by the random nature of drops.

The most intriguing example is the Diplomacy Treasure Chest example in Dungeons and Dragons Online. Others include "world" races. ie run from spot A, to spot B (the fastest). On certain Role-playing realms in World of Warcraft, they even created a separate game with a leatherball. 0_o

I would love to hear how your research turns out.

Holy shit, how come I've never heard of this? What is it?

Also, to actually try to help you, my friends and I often play with self-imposed rules in Super Smash Bros Melee. In fact, the instruction booklet for that game actually suggests you should make up your own games and even includes a couple examples.
For instance, a shoot-out game where you play with the HP-health option and only use characters, items, and attacks which are ranged. So everyone plays as like Fox, Samus, and Ness and we shoot around at each other until only one person has HP left.

Tr00jg, could you elaborate on the Diplomacy Treasure Chest example you mentioned? Leatherball is another very good example, though, I'd forgotten about that one.

As for River City Ransom baseball, it works like this. One player picks up the bat or just a stick) and the other player picks up the baseball (or just a rock). You find a secluded area, and one player pitches the ball at the other player, who tries to hit it back before it cracks him in the face. Bonus points if the batter manages to hit the pitcher with the ball and/or rock. If you wanted to get really fancy, you could have the batter run "bases" across a level while the other player tries to nail him with the ball. :P

Hey, Felan!  Good to see you. ;)

I think the term you're looking for is "metagaming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metagaming)," but I could be wrong.

One of the most obvious ways to metagame is to limit yourself in ways that the game does not enforce.

The so-called "ironman" challenges in Roguelikes are a good example of this.  In Angband, the ironman challenge means you can't go up stairs once you've entered the dungeon.  In Nethack I know people try to play "vegan" games, where they don't eat any meat.

Beating Zelda 1 without picking up the wooden sword in the first cave is another example.

One personal metagame that I play is in Street Fighter III, when I try to win matches by hitting people with a rose (Dudley's taunt) or a basketball (Sean's taunt).  Good for a laugh, especially when your opponent realizes what you're trying to do. :P

Anyway, interesting topic.  I'll consider frontpaging it if it really gets going. :)

I like beating the first stage of Streets of Rage 2 using only one specific move - Alex's backhand or headbutt, for example.  Hilarity ensues!

Super Smash Bros. is chock full of metagames, though the game is constructed to encourage that sort of thing.  My favorite is "edge chasing" or some other similar variant, where a perfectly healthy victor chases the "definitely going to die anyways" loser off the edge in order to get one more brutal down-smash in before you both fall off the screen.

Or rocket racing, where a massive explosion kills everyone on-screen, and its basically just a matter of luck deciding who leaves the screen last, thus becoming the level winner.

I think the challenge is really to find anyone who plays any game WITHOUT applying any of their own little rules or challenges.  How long can I go without using THIS special move?  etc etc.

Metagaming is actually a term I'm deliberately avoiding, because much like "emergent gameplay" it's just too broad, and includes a wide variety of diverse concepts. What I'm talking about is exactly as you put it, those ways in which gamers limit themselves outside of the enforced rules of the game. I tend to refer to these(at this stage, at least) as imposed rules/rulesets.

Atomic, the Smash Bros. edge game is borderline, because it's not really adding any new limitations to the game, nor is it formalized in any significant way. Certainly it's an example of emergent play/metagaming, but that's case in point why I'm avoiding those specific words. The rocket race could be a good example, though.

You're absolutely right, however, in saying that all gamers do this in just about any game, and that's an important point I'm trying to make. There's more to my research than just compiling ways in which this occurs- I'm just at that early stage right now. ;) It's very important to my thesis that average gamers do this, not only eccentric ones.

It was based off superstition in Dungeons and Dragons Online that if you had a higher Diplomacy skill you would get better loot when opening a treasure chest. It got so bad, that people were not even invited to a party because of their low (or non-existant) diplomacy skill.

The developers claimed that diplomacy had nothing to do with getting better loot when opening a chest... I dont know how the situation currently is though.

http://www.playmmo.com/mmoworld-details.php?id_article=394

Im not entirely sure if this fits your "idea".

I don't think confirmation bias is a self-imposed rule.

That's what I was thinking... Oh well. It is still intriguing though.

Well this is definitely too much fun to ignore. I think the erliest example I can think of is probably playing Goldeneye on the N64. Me and my brothers used to play a game called 'Get the Bastard'. One person was Oddjob because he was literally half the size of everyone else, and he was given a massive life-bar, where as everyone else was playing per-normal as regular characters. Oddjob couldn't use guns and was limited to just the hand-to-hand attacks and sometimes throwing knives too. It then became 2/3 against 1, with the team trying to hunt down Oddjob before the sneaky bastard beat you from behind or threw a knife at your face. Haha.. good times.

It was unintentionally upped in Perfect Dark, with Elvis the alien being just as damn small, but now with the new effect that being attack physically meant the screen would blur massively. This game the Bastard the new power of being able to sneak up to people unawares before beating the guns out of their hands and smacking them unconcious without them being able to fight back. I can't really think of much else just now, the creation of Mods sort of killed a lot of experimentation in that regard. Undoubtedly the console gamers are much more likely to invent their own rule-sets, I guess out of neccesity more than anything else. One thing that I do still do though is in regards to 2D-Shoot 'em ups like Mountain of Faith or Perfect Cherry Blossom, where I won't continue after my first death, I used to do that at the arcades too. It's maybe more about trying to go back and hone my skills on the basics, because if I don't get that down right then trying to carry on from where I died first will just mean I'll die again and much sooner.

It's a damn interesting project, and I'd love to keep up with it's progression. I'm actually a Film Student in England myself, about to start my second year, so it's very interesting getting to see the kind of work involved in the Masters section. Sounds like awesome stuff!

Yes, there's a lot of space in Film Studies for all kinds of media criticism, and usually Film departments have good inter-disciplinary relationships. What school are you studying film at? I also got into the universities of Cambridge, Nottingham, Sussex and East Anglia for my MA, but the fees for foreign students are just exorbitant, and I couldn't afford it.

Sorry, I keep thinking of possible examples that might fit.

In Savage (a multiplayer RTS/3rd person mix), there is about 1-5 min before the match starts. In this short time, all you do is try to own your team-mates. I know its not a complicated ruleset, but this is not really apart of the game's official rules.

GTA is also a ripe playground for "emergent gameplay". These include the obvious like  using only a machine gun and seeing how long you can last before the police owns you.

In City of Heroes, I also occasionally flew to the top of huge buildings. I jumped and then tried to see how close to the ground I can fall, before opening my jetpack.

Then there is also more Role-Playing examples in World of Warcraft that I experienced. The realm set a date where members of each faction would meet for a war (say Hillsbrad). Loads of people lined up, and fought. The biggest rule was that you werent allowed to resurrect yourself as it was a "real" war.

Okay... I talked too much.

Yeah, tuition fees are rediculous for us anyway, but for international students it's insane. But damn, Cambridge? I think I suddenly feel even more intimidated, haha! I'm studying at UWE in Bristol at the moment, which is a blast, though I apparently have nowhere to live yet since they haven't finished building my accomodation so I'm stuck at home a little longer. Perfect for being an Editor here though (and Valkyrie Profile 2 just came out!), but I'm starting to get that craving now. I do like how the course seems to inter-twine with a lot of other fields, one of my modules this year is about 'Screens in Digital Media', and as I understand it is mostly about how we interact with screens constantly on a daily basis, with TV, Film, Games, Mobiles, Train Times and damn near everything else as it turns out. It's going to be a good year!

I liked the Pre-Round Savaging, it's a nice way to just work all the mindless violence out of your system before getting back to logically thinking about the battle ahead. Savage was a good game, but a little limited in the end. Also way too many people just ran around beating mobs in the face with axes. No doubt though that being a 20ft beast with a tree as a weapon was just awesome.

I think we metagamed Goldeneye more than any other game in history; we had border runs on the "bunker" level (run past two angry players into the door that leads outside), for instance.

me and my friends used to go rock climbing in halo 1 and 2.  We would play multiplayer and try to climb into area's where you weren't supposed to be.  We would stack ourselves up and there was also some glitch by switching weapons that could give you an extra boost when you jumped I think.  It was more fun fun than the real game.  Gary's mod is a mod of half life that is built for this.  Me and my friends have done tons of stuff in there like building our own cars and jumping gaps or just working together to build flying pieces of junk.

A friend of mine was telling me once about how he and his brothers used to play Duke Nukem 64 when they were fairly young, but instead of killing, they'd treat it more like the Sims - going round each others' "house", having parties, and just generally not killing each other until the end.

Like I said, they were young. It was almost like a playhouse, except not.

I know in a few different racing games, me and a friend decided to race backwards around the tracks for the hell of it.

Haha, that was also the way I took to the Forza 2 demo when it first came out.

'Realistic Damage Modelling, huh?... 8)'

I'm doing something similar, but it's not exactly what you're talking about.

I've hooked up the platform game I'm building so that the game engine reloads the map file if it's updated. since I'm using a png-files (at 1/8 scale, each pixel representing a tile in-game) for level design, I can simply draw platforms in front of myself using Pro Motion as a drawing tool.

It's like debugging the map in real time and it becomes a game in itself when you box in enemies or remove the floor under their feet.

Finally I had to make myself invincible/untouchable because the enemies got to me all the time when I was multitasking playing the game and making the map as I went along.

That's very cool Robotacon, but I have to point out that it's not the same thing. You've crossed the line from player to "user" of the software- you've changed the game on the level of its programming, rather than using the programming from within to create new ways of playing. It's an important distinction.

I'm surprised no one's mentioned going through any Zelda game with just three hearts.  Unless I missed something. Also, in OOT and TP getting the wooden shield, having it burned, and going through the game shieldless.

Inversely, there's also the striving for all 20 hearts and all 4 bottles. Placed in the game for being done, I guess, but not really a ruleset or requirement that it be done.

But in almost every game I play, I make it a point to try getting somewhere I'm not supposed to be. Sometimes it turns out to be a secret area, sometimes unreachable, and sometimes an abyss or just an empty, small spot. But still...I dunno if that counts though.

Edge magazine - at least I think it was Edge magazine - did an excellent feature on the various ins and outs of speedrunning, which has already been mentioned in this thread. Speedrunning of any kind often uses exploits/bugs/that sort of thing to get through the levels as quickly as possible, often missing out large, supposedly mandatory chunks of the game.

Which brings me onto something else which hasn't been mentioned yet; good ol' rocket jumps. (Actually, I was brought up on concjumps, because I'm a TFC nut, but the principle is the same.) I don't know how far this crosses into modding, because you're only adding levels, but there are plenty of extra maps for those sorts of games which are designed with nothing in mind but getting from one side to the other using rocket/conc/grenjumps. I guess it is modding, really, but still, it *can* be considered outside the rules of the game when you use it in a regular match.

TFC....Good times :-*

There's a few other Halo 2 game types that rely on voluntary rule obeyance.  Zombies, Tremors, Braveheart...those are the ones I've seen.

When me and my friends played Worms we used to have voluntary truces where we'd just go about digging homes for ourselves in the terrain and only actually fighting when we were absolutely bored.

Rocketjumping, like Jeepjumping (you know, planting grenades under the jeep in Halo and watching it fly) crosses the line into what I'm talking about when it's formalized as a contest- who can get the jeep/corpse furthest/fastest/to a specific location.

Lackey, could you elaborate on the rules to Zombies, Tremors and Braveheart?

Lets see, in Zombies everyone starts with a shotgun and a plasma sword.  The zombie is the one player on green team (everyone else switches to red) and is the only player allowed to use the sword.  Everyone else must use the shotgun.  If the zombie player kills another they are honour-bound to switch to green team and to start using the sword as well.  The game ends when either every player is a zombie or if one or more human players survive until the end of the round.

Tremors is...well I'm a little unclear on the rules of this one.  One team all drives banshees around (you have to play this on a certain map: Blood Gulch) while the other team is allowed only to use grenades and has to survive by jumping from rock to rock.

Braveheart is played usually with a very large number of players (also on Blood Gulch).  Every player is on one of two teams and starts at their respective base.  At the beginning of the match everyone is required to fire off all of their grenades at the enemy base (this volley looks quite impressive) before charging to the middle for close combat.  No shooting or grenades are allowed here, just the melee attack.  Additionally there are no re-spawns during the match so the stakes are quite high.

Anyway you can see how these require people to voluntarily follow the rules.  You can break them at any time, but people will stop playing with you.

I think there are some kinds of "emergent gameplay" that are so obviously good/bad, we don't think about them.

Real world morality is one example.  In games which don't give any reward or disincentive for killing civilians, if I accidentally kill an innocent person, especially one with a name that you can talk to, I'll still reload my last save, even if I've actually made a lot of progress. I bet I'm not the only one.

The other one is not cheating. Let me put it this way: when I'm playing Deus Ex, there's a certain combination of key presses that will make me draw a shotgun and load it with sabot rounds. There's also another set of key presses that will make me impervious to damage. But while any number of people will use the first set of key presses, most people will choose to play without using the second. Why? Both are allowed by the game program itself. But the second one breaks the fourth wall and makes the game less fun.

Some stuff me and my friends used to do:

"Take The Building" on FPS games. Play on teams, set the other team to have a bunch of smart bots, and then hole up in a building on the map and see how long you can survive.

Finishing off your opponent in a fighting game with the weakest/goofiest move possible.

Boxing matches in Halo. (use the Plasma Pistol only, its melee attack is a punch)

"Darksiding" in Worms is a good example. For those of you who don't know, Darksiding is basically the technique of digging tunnels deep into the level and then hiding like a sissy little coward while everone else fights it out. Surprisingly, it works. There are other "sides" (playing styles) too, like Lightside, Greyside, Brightside, etc.

Worms also had a bunch of made-up gametypes people played, like Shopper, Forts, Race, etc. Also, since there was nothing in the game stopping people from breaking the self-imposed rules of these gametypes, a sort of marital law emerged. People who cheated were called "cows" and were killed on sight by everyone else.  :D

*facepalm*

I forgot Hero Race! Back when Warcraft II came out with the editor, me and my brothers made a map where the hero characters in the game were all assembled as passive in the centre of the map, so if one of your guys touched them they became part of your army. The objective was still Warcraft 'Kill everyone else' style, but there was also a race to see who could get the centre fastest (surrounded by boulders that need to be blown up, trees that need to be chopped... or blown up. Moats to be traversed etc) and procure the heroes. But if it took them too long the heroes might have nothing to return to, or the other teams could focus on defense and build up fortifications enough to take on the heroes. It was fun, but I think I recall the heroes being a little -too- powerful for that.

I guess the whole tower defense gametypes and DOTA (or whatever the acronym is) from WC3 count, but then again, tower defense is only available since the map's ruleset is designed for that type of game.

Now Super Mario Bros for the NES, that was a game where I'd try to limit myself as much as possible.  No mushrooms? check.  no stars? check.  Move through the entire game while jumping backwards? check.
Honestly, at times I wonder if the emergent gameplay is usually more fun than the intended gameplay.

That's right, and it sort of precludes most kinds of RTS custom gametypes- if you're adding the rules using an in-game editor of some kind, it's not what I'm looking at specifically.

It is actually. You create your own rules within a much more finite rule set. I guess it can labeled as expressing your "freedom". You create your own world. There is a better explanation (im sure) for it though.

I think part of what makes it fun is that it's your own creation. If someone gives you a bunch of gametypes, that's fun, but there's something so much more fun about them -not- existing and you creating them yourself. I mean how much fun must the Warthog Jumping guys have had when they first found out about it? Rocket Tag in Crackdown was fun too, but only because of the spontaneous thing of it.

That's an interesting angle I think. Basically when me and my brother started playing, at any point one of us would yell "ROCKET TAG!" into the microphone and shooting a rocket in the direction of the other person. If the force of the shockwave ragdoll'd your character, you were then tagged and had to do the same. It generally carried on until we got a kill or we just grew tired of it. But they also introduced this in an update as an actual gametype, which is fine... but it ruined how much fun it was to just break into like that. There's a difference between choosing what to play and deciding at any given moment how to play it. Or, something or other...

It's interesting that when one of these alternate uses for gaming becomes popular enough, it sometimes becomes formalized... adapted so that the altered gameplay is the focus, rather than just agreed "folk rules".

The Defrag mod for quake 3, for example, takes quake 3's awesome, involved, high-skill-ceiling movement (strafe jumping, rocket jumping, plasma climbing etc.) and refocusses levels and game rules around navigation and speed, rather than killing others.

...

One folk game we tried at a lan party once was "Beat the Bullies" in quake 3. Everyone got on the red team (bullies), except 1 guy, designated "the victim" was on the other team. We took turns being "the victim", and everyone who was a bully was only allowed to use the gauntlet, and not allowed to pick up any weapons. It was fantastic on Q3DM0. It turned the game into some kinda serious sam clone, but where every enemy was as intelligent as the player... so people would hide in cover, waiting for team mates to join so that they could bum rush the victim. Or one person would run from cover as a distraction so that the rest could flank the victim without him noticing. So, this was a case where all players had to work with an agreed rule set to get the most out of the folk game. As with Defrag, there have been countless mods which fixed this rule set, but normally they'd augment the "victim" rather than restrict the "bullies".

While playing UT2k4 at my last office in evenings, I was *almost* the best player there (two notable exceptions), but because I don't like UT quite as much as Quake 3, I couldn't take it seriously, and ran around using the impact hammer exclusively. I ended up winning quite a lot of matches by running from the good players and killing the bad ones - people weren't used to enemy charging straight at them with some dash-double-jumps. They just weren't used to my "human rocket" tactics, so I did surprisingly well. My point here is that you don't NEED universal acceptance of folk-rules to alter the game in your own little way.

I managed an 11 knife kill streak in BattleField 2, just trying to get the knife combat achievements.

And in Soldier of Fortune 2, the knifes were actually the only weapons which had a consistent path - everything else had random aim offset, so straight 1 on 1 firefights could be a bit of a crap shoot. So me, I always ran from anyone who saw me, and hid in difficult to reach spots, waiting until I could get the drop unsuspecting victims. So yeah. When I get bored in FPS games, I try playing hand-to-hand/gimmick weapons exclusively. It's easier than you think, once you adopt the mindset, and realize that other people aren't thinking the same way as you, and having that kind of lateral view of the game can be very disruptive to players who are fixed in their strategy. Very Jeet Kun Do in that respect. It's like looking at any game with fresh eyes.

That Quake 3 twist sounds sweet. I'm lanning tonight. I might suggest that!

Another "twist" I remember came from playing Need for Speed 3 on PS1. We all just stopped driving and "assumed" roles in the map. ie, the house on the road by intersection was mine. We "rode" to town, "bought" stuff. It sounds all Sims-like.

Woah, insanely old post ressurection! But I think it's for a good reason.

So many months later, the article is complete and published in Loading... Journal, a peer-reviewed journal put out by the Canadian Game Studies Association. If you're so inclined, you can open a free account and read it here:

http://journals.sfu.ca/loading/index.php/loading/issue/current (http://journals.sfu.ca/loading/index.php/loading/issue/current)

Thanks again for your input, TIGSource. Very much appreciated!

Another emergent gametype for Super Metroid (SNES) was low percentage runs, where players would try to beat the game with as few items as possible. This was made possible due to the bomb jumping allowing players to 'break' the level flow.

It was so popular that in Metroid Zero Mission (GBA) the team specifically designed the entire game level structure to allow for and encourage this. There was even a different ending if you beat the game with below 10% of the items.

i played no town games in diablo I, sometimes zoomed in and with lowest brightness if i was feeling really hardcore.

in einhander, squares awesome horizontal shooter one of the ships had a particularly agile 'hand' that was normally used to grab dislodged weapons but could also be used to  absorb enemy bullets. my friends and i developed the monk, or ahimsa style of gameplay in where we would try and progress as far through the game as possible without killing any enemies (bosses excluded). the ahimsa style works with a lot of different games.

I used to play Gunz when I was younger, one of those MMORPGFPS things that float around. The point is that most people had evolved this style where by using a sword you could basically break the laws of physics, flying around and stuff, and since it was so popular the makers never took it out. However, I avoided doing any of that stuff to see if I could get by the "right" way and for a while I enjoyed myself, especially since it was so unusual. I don't know if that counts.

Of course, I also used to try to break any and all games I owned just to see if I could, so I guess that counts. Other people do too, just look at Ullillia's youtube videos to see examples of that. In cases where the game is terrible, it most certainly is more enjoyable than just playing it.

I hang out on the Hitman forums (http://www.hitmanforum.com/forum/index.php?) and, given the nature of the game, they have quite the selection of self-imposed rules. Everything from speed runs, silent assassinations, accidents only (as of Blood Money), stuff like that. Players will often write custom missions (in which one must complete the mission by following the directions the author wrote instead of the standard).

Once, while playing Contracts, I tried to kill everyone in the level and drag their bodies into the big pool in the thermal Bath House hotel stage. I got about thirty bodies floating in the pool, only to realize one of the bar tenders was inaccessible because there was no way behind his bar. Oh, my disappointment.

I like to go Car Surfing in the GTA games.  Hop onto a car (the back of a pickup works best) and fire your gun until the driver goes into road-rage mode and see how long you can stay on.

I also like seeing how high I can get on onto buildings using the bicycle in GTA:SA just by bunny hopping.  Turns out you can get pretty damn high.

Then there's the King of the Hill challenge: do the weapons cheat to max out all your weapons then start killing everything in sight and see how long you can survive.  Once you start killing you can't re-spawn your weapons.  In GTA3 or LCS I generally do this from the steps of the stadium, in San Andreas I'll usually pick a spot on top of one of the buildings along the waterfront in San Fierro.  You can't leave the hill until all your ammo is gone, which gives you an opportunity for the next game...

Start on foot and max out your wanted level.  Once the army is after you, start running.  The goal is to collect enough bribe markers to get your wanted level back down to zero.  No vehicles allowed, you must stay on foot.  I've only been able to do this a couple of times.

Dang, I was reading this from the start without realizing it was an old thread!

Oh well, I'm going to mention another example anyway.  I've seen spontaneous, user-enforced melee-only happen on TF2 servers, usually when the server switches to 2fort and everyone's bored to tears of that map.  (I still kinda like it, but I can't argue with the comedy value of a random TF2 melee brawl!)

And I think you were right to avoid the term "metagaming".  I wouldn't even call this metagaming, really.  Metagaming is stuff that's outside of the game, while what you've described is players simply changing the rules of the game despite being unable to change the programmed rules.  (Like kids in a playground coming up with their own variant of a playground game, except that in this case the playground comes with built-in rules that they have to work around.)

Oh, it is an old thread.

I didn't even notice  >:(

I guess I just admitted that I didn't read the whole thread too :P.  Oops.

I think the thread resurrected its self quite nicely

I remembered that the Warning Forever developer had a word for playing with self-made rules, and as it turns out it is yarikomi, so I guess that's useful?

And yeah, I also didn't notice how old this was. :)

Dudes- seriously no worries about the new suggestions. The paper is finished and published, but more examples are always awesome to hear. I'll have to look into this concept of yarikomi.