[2022] Eulogy: The Death of the Game Within the Game

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today because Marvel Strike Force has emptied itself of the need for creativity, strategic planning, and risk taking. The path to success is now one firmly established road that is irreversibly inflexible and will not change for the foreseeable future. Let’s be clear about something: the actual game “Marvel Strike Force” is alive and well—it is launching new content, new characters, new mechanics, and so forth. There is no small contingent of players who are still enjoying the game as much as they always have or more. But the game within the game—the game many of us actually enjoyed the most about Marvel Strike Force—that game is dead on the table, never to return.

What is the game within the game you ask? Well my intrepid young reader, allow me to regale you with tales about times long ago—the early days of Marvel Strike Force. In those days, Marvel Strike Force played an unspoken chess match of sorts with the players. It would release new characters that would provide convenient solutions to existing problems, but they were not necessary solutions. The player would then have a choice—accept the easy solution or try to outwit (then) FoxNext by finding creative or unique solutions within his or her existing roster to meet the challenge. Team synergies existed, but not with the overwhelming force of present day. It was very common to see hybrid teams in virtually all game modes. The player tested his wits against the game to find paths to success other than always upgrading the latest and greatest, and (for me, at least) that was the real fun of playing Marvel Strike Force. That was the game within the game: stretching existing rosters as far as they could possibly go and upgrading new characters only when one viewed the new character as contributing something synergistic or exciting to the existing roster. In this context, new character releases were something to celebrate and almost always enthusiastically discussed within the community for their strategic value vis-à-vis a myriad of other characters (i.e., not just within one fixed team of five).

The game within the game, however, started becoming ill in the days of the Black Order. Black Order was so good as a complete team as compared to any other existing teams at the time (hybrid or not) that they became a necessary, rather than convenient, solution for the arena problem. The game within the game became more crippled with the death of Ultimus raids (raids that allowed players to build their own raid teams out of any combination of characters) and the rise of Doom Raids—raids that had specific call outs to multiple traits. With those raids came the obligation to upgrade pre-packed raid teams as they were the only combination of characters possessing the requisite origin trait who get the job done. The players were overloaded with necessary solutions to the raid problem, and (due to the limits of the game economy) that essentially dictated what players would upgrade going forward and primarily use not only in raids, but most (if not all) other game modes as well. The trend towards homogenized rosters was well underway, but there was still a small amount of room for creativity to have a turn at the wheel here and there.

But the game within the game would finally draw its last breath with the advent of the Apocalypse content. Scourges demanded players substantially upgrade specific characters (often times, ones the players otherwise had no interest in upgrading) to unlock the predicate characters to unlocking Apocalypse--four legendary horsemen who must they themselves (and their team) also be the targets of substantial upgrades. Of course, the game economy for most players does not support that many upgrades and so upgrading any characters other than this predetermined list of characters is not an option.

The end result is this: there is no room left for discretionary spending of resources or creative team compositions. All rosters for the foreseeable future will be primarily—if not exclusively—a combination of scourge and horsemen teams. This is because the path to success is now fully preordained and no amount of creativity or strategy will provide a different way. Marvel Strike Force traded in the elements of the game that allowed intellectual rigor to flourish for a long list of prepackaged, necessary solutions. Intellectually, the game has been reduced in complexity to the point that a chimpanzee could play it because there are only two real questions posed by all of its content: (a) do you have the team that Scopely has decided is the only team that you can use to meet the challenges of the particular content you are playing; and (b) if so, have you leveled/geared/upgraded the entire team sufficiently to satisfy entry requirements and beat the content? If the answer to both questions is yes, you win. If the answer to either question is no, you lose. End of analysis.

However, none of this is a criticism of Scopely. I cannot blame it for killing the game within the game because that was the game played mostly by free to play players and light spenders. But the actual game—i.e., Marvel Strike Force—was not made for us. It was made for the people who love beating the content by any means necessary, so much that they will happily pay for the new necessary solutions. They are the ones that finance Scopely’s existence and we are incidental beneficiaries of the Scopely's commercial relationship with them. You really cannot blame Scopely for continuing to sell products according to their business model as long as people continue to buy them. That is, at the end of the day, the name of the game. For players who only play the game to beat new content and unlock new characters by any means necessary, the game is still alive and well and they will quickly defend it because they genuinely enjoy it. After all, the game is primarily designed to serve their interests and earn their continued patronage.

But for those who really played Marvel Strike Force because we were playing the game within the game, we feel what is missing all too well nowadays. Everything is rote. There is no longer a need to evaluate my roster to brainstorm who to upgrade. I no longer mix and match combinations to try and find new solutions. I just work my way through the short-term and long-term checklists Scopely has handed me without really even needing to turn my brain on. And there is no conceivable way to reverse that trend. The game has gone too far to possibly come back and equalize itself. So, for players looking for the game within the game experience, we either need to let that desire go and find enjoyment in the mechanical, straightforward world of following Scopely’s pre-established paths or find a new game. It just is what it is.