I don’t want to rehash all the details of the war so far.  There’s a good, non-biased article on the fight here. One of the arguments that came up immediately following the battle of D-GTMI was that –A- and Ushra’khan were guilty of “metagaming.”

The prefix “Meta” stems from the Greek μετά which means “after”, “beyond”, “with”, “adjacent”, “self”.   It’s used in “…English to indicate a concept which is an abstraction from another concept, used to complete or add to the latter.”  (From Wikipedia )

Web programmers are familiar with meta tags in the head of webpages.  The information in these tags is known as “metadata” which describes the content, author, etc. of the data in the body which is displayed by the browser.  Metadata is “Data about Data.”  In a more abstract concept “meta” can be used to describe something that is related to a larger concept, but not in a concrete way.  I really enjoy wikipedia’s example of “meta-answer”: “A meta-answer is not a real answer but a reply, such as: ‘this is not a good question’, ‘I suggest you ask your professor’”

What then, is “Metagaming?”

According to our research above, metagaming would be “gaming about gaming” or “game beyond game.”  I think the former works best for the situation at hand here.  Metagaming in roleplaying games seems to be all about using knowledge that your character wouldn’t necessarily have access to in order to gain an advantage.  This could apply to something as benign as understanding the mathematical relationship between agility and critical hit percentages in World of Warcraft.

In the D-GMTI situation CVA’s accusation of metagaming refers to the enemy gaining access to their voice communications which resulted in access to a password to their player-owned station (POS) allowing –a- and U’K to ram ships (“bumping”) out of the force field and into a vulnerable position.

There are a couple points of view on the matter:

1. Because voice communication is offered within Eve it is considered “in game” and thus not “metagaming.” If CVA had been using Eve Voice instead of Ventrilo/Team Speak it would have been as simple as getting a spy into their fleet and joining the communications network.  This is not much different than what presumably happened.
2. Similar to argument 1, but rooted in the idea that voice communication is an integral part of any group activity within Eve is thus “in game” even when not provided by the code of the game itself. (Despite their being an identical function in the code of the game)
3. Because there is no way for your character to “hack” the voice channel themselves without the use of a second character/account allied with the target alliance (a spy) the act of infiltrating communications is beyond game.  (I suppose you could social engineer yourself an invite to the fleet, but that would probably be pretty short-lived.)
4. Spying on voice communications ruins the “purity” of the engagement and and defeats the goals of the battle/game which are presumably to win through skill at contest.  (we could get into a great discussion of “playing to win” here if you want…)

What do you think?