Metaplay: Play Practices, Communication, and Interaction in Pokémon from 1998-2020

This paper introduces metaplay as a theoretical framework for analyzing contemporary digital game play, arguing that play extends well beyond the act of playing to encompass a broader network of practices, media, and social relations. Its central thesis is that metaplay is communicative and built from three reciprocal components: metagaming, which concerns deliberate, optimized strategies; paratexts, which include both industry-made and user-generated auxiliary media; and capital, drawn from Bourdieu and Consalvo, which describes the knowledge, skill, and authority players accumulate and deploy. The author positions this framework as a more precise alternative to vaguer existing definitions of the metagame.

The empirical basis is a qualitative doctoral study of adult players of the main-series Pokémon games in a predominantly suburban and rural region of Canada, anonymized as "the District." The study spans the franchise's history from 1998 to 2020 and focuses on how play practices have shifted from local, face-to-face contexts to globally networked ones. Participants describe how locally developed rules and folklore were supplanted by community-devised standards, and how hacking and online information-sharing rapidly dispelled playground myths about the games.

Key findings emphasize that players who produce guides, streams, and technical analyses accrue capital and authority, which in turn shapes competitive builds and tournament practice. The research also identifies digital divides: rural players with unreliable Internet and younger players constrained by parental limits are less able to access features that increasingly depend on online connectivity. The author argues that these dynamics, though observed in Pokémon, likely generalize to other digital game cultures and offer a route to connecting game play with broader patterns of everyday communication technology use.