Getting good in almost all games is based on understanding and mastering the fundamentals to the extent that you can make consistently correct (or at least a high degree of 'correctness') decisions based on them. This is true for all esports titles, and probably all games in general.
Mastering the fundamentals will make you 'good' to a level that very few people ever reach. It's not until you reach a level where everyone around you has a mastery of the fundamentals, that the meta comes into play.
source: coached and managed professional esports players, in multiple games, who have competed in the world championship of their respective titles.
I disagree slightly. The metagame is relevant whenever you're facing opponents of similar skill. If you're way better than your opponent, you can use highly sub-optimal, non-meta strategies and win through sheer experience and skill. For instance, I could kill 50% of Starcraft opponents lower than me by building only one unit and even announcing which unit I'll mass up.
However, if you're making a similar number of errors as your opponent, then the meta does come into play. Regardless of the raw error rate, where pros make few and amateurs make many, if this rate is similar to your opponent, then it still matters if your opponent has a strategic/meta counter to your strategy.
This is a good point. I played semi-high level StarCraft for a while (high masters, low grandmasters), and strategic decisions based on the metagame certainly won and lost me many games. That said, the GP has a point, too. I probably would've been better served working on my mechanics and fundamentals if I wanted to advance to the next level.
> If you played against grandmasters your fundamentals were likely extremely good relative to most players
Relative to most players, no doubt. To be fair though, even someone in diamond is "extremely good relative to most players".
I was a mid+ NA grandmaster zerg, and took games off players like EG demuslim. And even at the level I was at, fundamentals were the most important thing. And even at the level I was at, I could see the fundamental errors that I or my opponents would make.
Certainly though, when facing off a player of a similar skill, knowing the meta can be really helpful. Even more important is knowing that specific player's playstyle.
When you practice with a certain partner consistently, you start doing things that you would never do against an unknown player, to exploit quirks of their playstyle. The best players had incredible game sense and thus were really good at doing this. (My favorite player for a long time was Stephano, who absolutely excelled at this)
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I'm not sure I had an actual point I was making :P
I was a masters NA Zerg, not quite at your level but we probably could have met in the ladder at some point.
I totally agree, I just think it's not great advice to say "if you want to get good go after the meta". Some gaming communities over emphasize the meta and IMO StarCraft is one of them. Meta is just one aspect of ways to get an edge and as you progress in your skill you need to take advantage of every edge you can get.
Many StarCraft streamers will do challenges where they only go for a certain, non dominate strategy to see how high they can rise, the one that stuck with me the most was destiny going mass queen. I saw so many people asking "what can counter mass queen" because they saw him winning over and over again. The answer wasn't how should you change your strat to deal with someone going mass queen, they aren't that good, the answer was to be better at macro than that player.
I started in Gold and ended up in GM, so depending on timing, we might have come across each other. I played under the name "sanddbox".
I used to be a huge Destiny fanboy. In fact, my measure of when I'd "made it" was when I could beat Destiny on ladder. (He beat me many times as well, of course).
Side note: Kind of sad that when I checked up him a couple months ago, he mostly just seems to do weird political debate style stuff these days
> I just think it's not great advice to say "if you want to get good go after the meta".
Right, I totally agree here. If it wasn't clear, I think the vast majority of players should just ignore the meta and focus on fundamentals.
That being said, often specific meta strategies (say, the 2 base sentry/immortal all-in that was so ridiculously powerful back in the day) give players a really hard time, and so IMO the best way to do it is to use learning how to beat the strategy as an example of learning fundamentals. For example, beating that all-in required effective scouting, map control, micro, and stopping drone production at the perfect time.
I agree, but applying this isn't always easy: When discussing meta and strategy, it's usually discussed in the context of high level esport play. But the optimal strategy often drastically changes with skill level. For example in a shooter when everyone has bad aim and bad teamwork/communication you need a different strategy then in high level esport in the same game where everyone is great at aiming and lives in the same flat as his teammates.
The optimal strategy for winning the game you're in is the most-winning strategy that your skill level allows you to execute. The optimal strategy for the game itself requires you to develop your skills to allow you to execute it.
One of the problems when you discuss strategy and meta is that most people blur the lines between the two.
If you plan something based on opposition research (like at the pro esports level as an example), you are approaching that game with a specific strategy in mind. Your chosen strategy should keep the meta in mind but the strategy and the meta are distinct.
The meta comes from knowing the various strategies that are effective against other teams/players who utilize the same general pool of strategies. Each strategy in the pool comes about because it works with reasonable reliability against the other strategies in the pool. That's why unexpected plays, 'cheese,' or 'hard-counters' come into play at the strategic level (often saved for specific opponents or situations). The meta is more about knowing what situations you're likely to encounter. You know the meta, then you optimize your strategic approach for your unique situation (such as the skill-set of the various players on your team, specific tendencies of the opponent you're preparing for, or even choosing not to optimize to win your next game to keep a strategy hidden (among other reasons).
Ultimately, the strategic evolutions of iterated games is a ridiculously deep and nuanced topic, making it difficult to really get into the meat and potatoes in forums. Maybe I should make a blog post or something, but I don't know how interesting it would be.
> Ultimately, the strategic evolutions of iterated games is a ridiculously deep and nuanced topic, making it difficult to really get into the meat and potatoes in forums. Maybe I should make a blog post or something, but I don't know how interesting it would be.
I'm interested, and if you do end up doing so, I would love to give you feedback on it before publishing it, if you want.
I played SC2 at a "semi-professional level" (read: good enough to take games/series off of pros, but not good enough to make a living).
I find a lot of truth in what you said, and agree that the nuance in strategic evolution of iterated games is super fascinating.
I was a young teenager when I played SC2 "seriously", and now that I'm in my early 20's, it really struck me how much more of an advanced mind for strategy I have now. Back in the day, I was a very mechanical player, but also had some really innovative play at times, particular with respect to a "macro aggressive" style (aggressive, but not just going for all-ins).
For a short while I received some coaching from my team's coach, and it was incredible how even just an hour of casual coaching drastically improved my understanding of concepts like map control. And mind you, my coach as an actual player was like plat-diamond level (by a pro's standards, total garbage basically), and I always found it fascinating how the best players don't make the best coaches and vice versa.
I'll think about the topic a bit and see if I can come up with something! If you'd like to give me some feedback we can connect via twitter (@Proziam) and if I can come up with something I'll send it to you for a first pass.
[0] Pulse Esports (The organization I founded in 2011/2012) had some great sc2 players, mostly because I was playing starcraft at the time. Running a young org took a lot of time, so I decayed in skill pretty dramatically (down to the diamond/master level).
All this talk about the meta game on war games makes me remember the Ender's Game book, which was heavily based on how Ender was able to adapt quicker than his opponents to new rules and war scenarios.
I kind of remember reading that the book was even recommended in the military.
Understanding the metagame implicitly happens from experience and skills. Even if you played simply, you still used your metagame based on your skill and experience with that unit.
In chess I can often win with dubious gambits against players of relatively equal skill, but this would not be true in higher levels of play. In this case going 'off-meta' has distinct advantages between opponents of equal but mediocre skill.
TFA definitely agrees with this opinion, but also asserts that learning about the meta teaches you what fundamentals are most useful to know.
> Note what I’m not saying, however. I’m not saying that I should actively pursue the meta — this is ineffective, because I am not good enough to play. I cannot execute even if I know where the puck is going. But studying the state of the metagame as it is right now often tells me what I must learn in order to get to that point.
Agreed. Since a bunch of people seem to be responding to you about competitive games/experiences, my friend left me with the following pointer when he gave me a lengthy rundown on 2D fighters (cleaned up a bit for HN posting): "Tech and meta aren't things to chase after because they're things that come with learning fundamentals. You practice fundamentals until you die". It was like that when I was playing Quake, when I was playing Team Fortress 2, CounterStrike, etc., and it was like that when I was playing Starcraft.
What does your friend mean by fundamentals? In 2D fighting games, learning the character's move set is easy compared to learning when and how to use them effectively. People seem to focus on learning combos but a good player can do a lot of damage just by establishing and breaking patterns: throwing when they expect you to attack, attacking low when they expect a high attack, not switching patterns when they expect you to try something else...
The metagame of 2D fighting games is actually a series of very fast rock paper scissors games. It's all about beating the opponent's counter to what they think you'll do.
Your second sentence is mostly it, although it really generalized and lessened what it means to learn your fundamentals; learning your character's options are and what the basic flow of combat will be based on those options. Fundamentals gives you the tools and skillset to play the rock-paper-scissors metagame you've described (Team Fortress 2 also behaved like that). Things that would fall under fundamentals for something like Street Fighter would be:
- learning basic ranges on the stage (SF4/5's "grid" stage highlights this really well)
- learning the range of your character's moves (i.e., Chun Li's standing heavy punch/fierce has considerable reach, more than 1 square on the grid stage)
- using your jab/short to "check" aggression
- using your anti-air moves to catch your opponent's jump-in attacks
- rudimentary okizeme (after you knock the opponent to the ground, you can catch them with either damage or block pressure)
- what general actions beat other general actions (blocks beat moves, grabs beat blocks, jumps beat grabs)
The list goes on to some extent before it starts mingling with more refined actions. While it's rarely a 1:1 translation, things like the above have plenty of carry-over between 2D fighters, and the concepts themselves apply to 3D fighters like Tekken. I'd also go so far as to include knowing what bad habits are as part of fundamentals, like mashing fast buttons while still blocking or after getting up from being knocked down.
It's been buried in the comments but someone posted a link to Richard Garfield's MTG paper about "metagame" and I like his definition of metagame: "It is how a game interfaces with life". The game of rock-paper-scissors doesn't exist in a vacuum: even at a low or casual level, understanding the fundamentals allows a player to make educated guesses about how an opponent will behave during that game of rock-paper-scissors. It's not concrete, obviously, but noting what fundies the opponent has and which ones they're not good at or are completely missing can change how a player approaches the fight over the course of the game.
In my experience, there's a sort of hierarchy of skills relevant to the game or competition. There are basic skills (like being fast and accurate with aiming, or predicting the opponent's movement), and then there are skills that are dependent on basic skills (leading targets), skills that are only possible once basic skills become automatic (map awareness), or skills that are situational.
The "fundamentals" are usually the 80% mark on this graph: it's the generally agreed upon set of skills that are relevant in 80% of situations, so if you have your fundamentals down better than your opponent, you will win in 80% of those situations. The meta might win you the other 20%, but that's capped at 20%.
1) Literacy. Can you move and shoot in the FPS? Know how pieces move in chess? Basics of the how to play. You must master these and make them reflexive to move forward.
2) Fundamentals. The emergent gameplay that arises from those basic rules. But importantly these are all contained within the game. I usually break these up into Tactics and Strategy. Tactics are the moment-to-moment events. Strategy are longer-term goals that help guide you towards victory, and understanding how overlapping or even conflicting strategies can work in synergy and in trade-offs.
For example, in chess tactics are things like recognizing forks and skewers. Strategy involves "controlling the center" or "develop your pieces to good squares."
In MOBAs, last hitting, skill combos, space control are the tactics. Strategy can involve knowing when to push, when to group to gank vs split push, or farm vs gank decisions.
Interestingly some game types have more tactics/strategy components. Twitch FPS games tend to be almost all tactics with a bit of strategy (gun X better in situation Y). Starcraft rewards strategy more heavily (do better macro!).
These are, as you mention, skills that will apply to the vast majority of games because they are baked into the rules of the game.
3) The Meta. Once you are near the Fundamentals skill cap, you can use information outside of the game to get an edge against similar opponents. I'm about to play player X, and they usually like to do Y, so I should prepare a counter strategy Z. A lot of players seem to really like character A because of these advantages, perhaps I should learn A and how to counter the most common tactics using my character's skillset.
Note knowing the Meta also helps prune what information (Fundamentals) you need to learn and maintain. If no one plays character Foo, then you (probably) don't need to understand their kit as intimately. But then someone could use it as an off-meta pick to surprise you! So you should be at least familiar enough to refute it just in case.
> When skill level differs even a little bit, metagame becomes non-deciding factor.
Which lets top tier players troll high level players by going jokingly off-meta. In L4D and L4D2, we would do what's called rushing against top ESL teams as a way of embarrassing people who played in those leagues.
The trick is a ladder is often rating your fundamentals + meta abilities. Where meta is a boost on top of your fundamentals.
So, yeah, if you know around the Gold ranking the meta seems to bias towards folks playing Terran using a Reaper at time X, then the meta knowledge gives a quick and easy boost since you're prepared.
But that's a temporary boost. In Plat or Diamond the meta is often different due to the increase in skill floor from improved fundamentals. This is why folks often say just MACRO BETTER instead of chasing optimizing meta strats. Better long-term reward.
Is meta opponent modeling? Then it would make sense that it becomes non-deciding when skill level differs - chess engines don't bother with it at all and just aim to destroy the opponent through sheer strength of play.
Playing the meta definitely requires opponent modeling, but I don't think it's exclusively opponent modeling. In the example of Splendor, I think meta is best explained as the interaction between emergent strategies. An AI may not need to think of it as a meta as is the case in chess, but an AI may still be playing strategies that match elements of the metagame.
I think European style board games are great examples. Euro board games are often designed in a way where there are 3-6 different "currencies" in the game that are vaguely interchangeable in terms of progress towards the victory conditions, but these currencies have situational tradeoffs. It's usually a safe bet to play a T-shaped strategy where you focus on a few currencies but dabble in the rest enough to influence the game conditions to favor you. Scoring mechanisms often explicitly reward being T-shaped and gameplay mechanics often explicitly favor T-shaped strategies, so regardless of whether the AI is explicitly trying to play a meta strategy, it's probably going to look like a meta strategy because the meta is T-shaped.
By my definition it's meta to do opponent modeling since you are using information outside of the game mechanics.
And you're right, for games with high efficiency and public knowledge you can often just grind through optimal play.
However, for games with hidden information, you can play theoretical optimally, but you can also gain an additional edge if you can properly model your opponent. I'm thinking like in Poker. There's mathematically correct play, but because you play against folks who don't play mathematically correct you could get an extra edge by properly modeling the faults of your opponent you can exploit!
I think it depends on the game too. In Dota 2 (and probably LoL) the balance between heros can change significantly per patch, and a lot of winning is having good hero picks compared to the other team. If you don't keep up with the meta, then your win rate will go down, and this is true for amateurs and the pros.
I would argue the meta matters a lot less than you may think even in MOBAs.
At most levels, just being very very good at a few characters, even if they're off-meta picks, will do better than someone who picks on-meta and doesn't have a good fundamental skill with the champion.
Now, most players keep a pool of champions they have solid (or at least better) fundamentals so that as the meta shifts they can fall back to others. Additionally there are cross-champ skills like strategic considerations that can carry you.
It's also weird because in MOBAs the updates literally change the balance of the game, so by some definitions this actually changes the fundamentals which causes the meta to have to react. So really most players are chasing relearning the fundamentals (oh geez Zeus is nerfed into uselessness!).
Depends on the patch... sometimes a hero is so broken that your win rate will swing from 40 to 60 depending on which team gets <insert buffed hero>. It’s still best to focus on your fundamentals, but the game can be way easier or harder depending on what happens in the draft.
One pretty weird fundamental is to get good at coaxing your teammates to make a reasonable team comp without causing anybody stress
> It's not until you reach a level where everyone around you has a mastery of the fundamentals, that the meta comes into play.
At any given MMR bracket, everyone around you has a similar mastery of the fundamentals so the meta is relevant.
However, put someone with the fundamentals of a 6k+ MMR player into a 3 or even 4k match and they'll demolish everyone else even with a disadvantage relative to the metagame.
> It's not until you reach a level where everyone around you has a mastery of the fundamentals, that the meta comes into play.
and you said
> At any given MMR bracket, everyone around you has a similar mastery of the fundamentals so the meta is relevant.
which refutes the original comment.
> However, put someone with the fundamentals of a 6k+ MMR player into a 3 or even 4k match and they'll demolish everyone else even with a disadvantage relative to the metagame.
I don't think anyone disagrees with this; I think the issue I (and the person you're responding to) have is the idea that you should ignore understanding the meta until you're 6k MMR as you say.
Both are important and you should develop both at the same time if you want to improve.
Perhaps the best use of the meta, as noted in the article, is to help guide you to understanding what are the fundamentals to learn, and they help filter down what fundamentals you need to learn.
Zeus is never picked? Great! Don't need to learn that kit. Or perhaps digging into why Zeus isn't picked can help inform why another character is more useful especially in conjunction with others in a team.
The assumption I work with is that mmr is a function of both fundamentals and meta. Fundamentals act as the floor, and meta as the ceiling. Team interactions make this all the more interesting - some examples:
A player with no understanding of the meta but good fundamentals can easily be directed by their team and have the same output as a high(mmr, meta) player. However, direction will not always be available and this will result in some losses.
A team full of players with high meta knowledge but low fundamentals will lose the fundamental game too hard and lose most matches. Also experience the "too many chefs in the kitchen" effect.
A team full of players with high fundamentals but poor meta knowledge will perform reasonably well, but be outshined by a more balanced team.
The team that won the largest DOTA championship 2 years in a row was clearly one that on balance had medium fundamentals (at a pro level), and outstanding meta.
Not to mention when organizations have to write new rules to prevent someone exploiting unintended consequences of the existing ruleset. It's fairly common not only in sports but source of many regulations and laws in any sector.
It's more complicated than that. Largely, it just seems that way because most people never bother to understand the rules past a cursory Google whereas big companies have teams of very experienced regulatory professionals from the agencies themselves who are all about it and therefore know every way to tweak inputs so that they trigger certain regulations rather than others. I was working on a regulatory compliance product for a bit and the first thing I did was pull every applicable regulation, standard, and rule governing the space and read them. This took about a month and made me much more knowledgeable than the vast majority of people in the field who didn't even try. Being an expert is about taking the time to sit down and read the RFCs, basically. We don't have many experts because no one wants to do it.
This is so true. I got a law degree as a hobby while working as a software developer. The actual substantive knowledge I got from that hasn't been very useful so far (apart from the occasional online flex...), but the skills I learned to do what you describe have been a real USP for me. Now law school didn't explicitly teach me those skills; there was never a course where someone taught 'how to go deep on any subject'. It was more learned through osmosis, and maybe some aspect of seeing the meta as well. Seeing a few times how rules are never what they seem at first, and that you need to understand the full landscape to really understand, apply and abuse them is the underlying experience/skill. (come to think of it, maybe this is exactly the meta but just looking at it from another side... hmm...)
As a lawyer I had the reverse experience, programming taught me to go deep. Plenty of mediocre lawyers don’t chase depth of understanding to the nth degree, but trying to understand, debug, and work in a new codebase taught me detective work at a new level that absolutely cannot be replaced with bs or the program won’t work.
If you don't have money, you can spend a lot of time becoming proficient in the field, and maybe find a loophole or two, and assure yourself you are in compliance.
If you have money, you can afford the compliance experts to find you every loophole.
If you have even more money, you can get new holes written into regulation, tailored specifically for you.
It's a complicated situation. In our case, the regulations were complicated because:
1. There was no one place that held all the data one was expected to know. Regs were strewn over legislative artifacts, departmental implementatikn documents, best practice documents, and international standards. Also, more than one class of regulations potentially covered efforts in the space. There was also no one site listing the locations of everything.
2. The regulations had evolved from an earlier time where an existing regulatory framework was adopted to try to fit new classes of things, and the mapping didn't work perfectly.
3. The regulations were written in a very high level manner to allow freedom of implementation and to make sure that the regulations didn't constrain tech development. Unfortunately, that meant that there were no suggested implementations which made it difficult for new entrants to the space (especially startups who can't afford to hire consultants) to understand how to actually comply simply.
4. There was ambiguity about what systems fit into which regulatory class as systems were advancing quickly and were changing state over time (ie updates) so traditional regulatory class lines were blurring.
That is where we stepped in. We were making a product that was ambiguously regulated and so we pulled the regs to understand them. Once we figured out how time consuming this was, we tried to make a software system to provide suggested basic implementations to be compliant and which helped companies properly bin their products into regulatory classes. Ultimately the entire regulatory system was changed rendering our product irrelevant, but I hope this shows why the system was as complicated as it was and helps demonstrate that the complexity was not a function of large players going for regulatory barriers to entry but rather a result of natural evolution and technical advancement over time which rendered existing regulations poorly suited for the current environment.
I don't disagree, but I think that view is complimentary to regulation being created and discussed and implemented. People see organizations doing bad stuff, create constraints, which a lot of times the organizations welcome since raises the barrier for competitors to entry.
I've noticed this to be true for table tennis and other sports too. When I play against a less experienced player, it's quite frustrating to notice that most of the points I score are clear mistakes on their part, rather than any kind of skilled moves on my part.
Charles Ellis wrote a book(1) about that. He asserts that any professional sports competition is a winner's game - you win by successfully executing difficult plays and being better than your competition. But amateur sports is usually a loser's game - you win by not making as many mistakes as your competition. The book is about finance but the observation is universal.
I've noticed this with chess too. As a kid, I briefly developed an obsession with chess. The book I read through argued that if I simply followed a few basic rules religiously, I'd instantly be a 'better' player than many who maybe played a lot more, but didn't know about these rules.
And sure enough, when my obsession quickly waned, and without having played much chess at all, I found myself consistently winning from novices who had a lot more experience than I did. In hindsight, I suspect what happened is that they played a better game but were more likely to make catastrophic mistakes.
Of course, I suspect any player with any training probably applies these basic rules already, and would easily defeat me.
This kind of remind me of the argument of deliberate practice presented in the book "Talent Is Overrated". The biggest improvements can just be made by deliberately learning and practicing the things that good players take for granted.
There are zillions of them, but it's normally some combination of:
1) Initially develop your pieces in the center rather than threaten or capture the opponent's pieces (this avoids most traps where opponents pull you out of position).
2) Castle by move 8-10
3) Don't leave your king where it can be checked
4) Don't hang pieces
Executing these, however, is the problem. Number 4, in particular, is just something that requires a lot of practice. Most games below 2000 rating seem to be lost because somebody hangs a piece.
I think the idea is that if you aren't operating at "pro league" level in anything, you should focus mostly on getting the basics right and not making mistakes. But if you are operating at that level, this is table stakes and you need to do more, or your competition will overrun you.
I suspect most people/organizations operating at the highest level understand or have internalized this, but many in the other category have not, to their demise. I've certainly seen organizations get themselves in trouble by trying to execute on something trickier than they were ready for. And others fail at something through an accumulation of clearly (at least, in retrospect) avoidable mistakes.
The corollary being that you are very likely to be in the latter category, like it or not, and it's best to realize it.
I haven't read the book though so could easily be misinterpreting.
Until you get to the level of college and NFL, being successful as a quarterback is largely about being physically gifted. At those lofty levels though sometimes a QB who looked unstoppable at a lower level looks lost at sea. That because everyone on the field is a supremely gifted athlete, the game becomes far more intellectual, and these guys find themselves unable to handle the complexity of the defensive schemes and offensive systems.
> "I think the idea is that if you aren't operating at "pro league" level in anything, you should focus mostly on getting the basics right and not making mistakes."
still, that's just a matter of definition and perspective. even at a pro level, if you don't win, you made at least one mistake relative to your opponent. so to win, make fewer mistakes, right?
i don't play video games anymore (and never played more than recreationally), but i've played pro-am basketball, and from my observation, being a pro doesn't mean you don't make mistakes. it usually means that, besides having highly honed skills, you have more tricks in the bag to recover from your mistakes (and conversely, to induce mistakes in opponents).
so the contention is that everyone can benefit from a strategy of reducing mistakes (aka active practice), pro or not, and the prior anecdote isn't really super-useful.
I don't think that is correct according the to thesis (and again, haven't read it so may be misrepresenting).
They are saying that at that (pro) level, not making mistakes is not enough, you have to make things happen too. Obviously making too many mistakes will cost you, but they are suggesting that playing "perfectly safe" can still easily lead to a loss. I don't think anyone was suggesting that pros don't make mistakes (hell, there are entire stats dedicated to this), but rather than merely focusing on minimizing them will not win you a championship.
The idea is that conversely at lower levels of performance, this isn't the case, and it really is mostly about lowering mistake rates. More tellingly, it suggests that the opportunity cost of focusing on anything else is likely too high.
To tie it back to the actual post, this suggests if you are spending a bunch of time and effort "metagaming" but you haven't already mastered the game, you are probably going to have poorer returns than just getting better at the game. This at least sounds plausible to me.
There's also an argument that a some areas just don't really HAVE a pro league, so focusing on not making mistakes is plenty... This can be the case if a) everyone is a beginner, because the field is new, and/or the fundamentals aren't cleanly understood, or b) no one really cares enough to become a pro (perhaps because it's an area that isn't rewarded by available incentive structures).
In my experience not everyone is mindful of their mistakes. If you write them off to 'bad luck' or circumstance, you miss the opportunity to understand the root cause of the outcome (the mistake if you will).
As an action plan, I would write that: Engage in the activity and dive deeply into all of the mistakes you make and develop the skill or tactic to avoid that mistake in the future. At the point where you don't make mistakes any more, then you start look at the meta and responding to what your opponent is setting up to do, rather than what they are doing right now.
that's a good point--players should practice acively, rather than passively (like shooting lots of baskets but never working on improving your shooting form).
but i'd still contend you never get to a point where you don't make mistakes and then turn to the meta-game. folks tend to start thinking about, and honing, the meta-game at different levels of experience.
For most sports, if you're defensive you'll beat offensive minded people until you reach a very high level of amateur play. People will constantly make low percentage plays because they're fun and they will misplay while executing them.
They will "fall on their own swords".
For most games with a net, focus on keeping the ball in play. For team sports, play defense and just keep it simple.
Basically, "never interrupt your adversary while they are making a mistake".
I think this is true in professional ball sports in sort of the inverse. Once you reach the highest level, then the focus is once again on defense. Defense wins championships.
It's easy to score 1 or 2 touchdowns on accident, even against the best defense in the league. No one scores 50 points on accident, especially against solid opponents.
This has direct implications in head-to-head games.
In fighting games, this observation leads to the following advice for someone playing against an opponent with weaker fundamentals: "play it safe until you give them enough rope to hang themselves."
Instead of going in as aggressively as normally would be required against a skilled opponent, just sit there and defend, and give your opponent free reign to try to crack your defense. The more they try, the more chances they give themselves to slip up and make a big mistake, which you then take full advantage of.
If their execution is worse than your defense, this is seen as a less risky strategy than going in on the offensive and hoping you don't make a mistake yourself.
Also applies to chess in the same way. Weaker opponents tend to accidentally "hang" their pieces a lot (i.e. move their pieces directly under attack of your pieces) just by poor observation, so it can be a good strategy to just stall, keep to your side of the board, and wait until your opponent slips up and makes a crucial mistake. Once they've made enough mistakes and you have enough of a material advantage, moving in for the win becomes completely trivial.
For me, in most multiplayer games (Overwatch and such), I became far better (and more useful to the team) when I focused more on staying alive ("not making mistakes") rather than trying to execute fancy plays.
That depends. I think it means that at a certain level, in order to improve, you must play tougher opponents.
The game of Go makes this abundantly clear. You can actually damage your own skills by playing too many inexperienced or weaker opponents. But playing someone just a bit stronger than you can improve you both.
I don't know if this works the same in e-sports, but it is striking in Go, or to a lesser extent, Chess.
In the original context (finance/investing) his point is that virtually nobody actually manages to consistently beat the market average (net of fees). So it's a "loser's game" and most people would do better avoiding mistakes like paying high fees than trying to beat the market.
I used to play chess in college with a master (now grandmaster) player. He would always let me take back moves when I did something stupid (sometimes even a couple). As he put it it was no fun to win on someones goof, what was fun was winning when they were playing the best possible game they could.
Whenever I play poker with friends this is my experience too. I don't do anything really fancy at all, I basically just follow very simple guidelines anyone can look up on the Internet. I just wait for good cards, permit worse cards the further down I am in the betting chain, raise or fold instead of calling most of the time, and I bet agressively when I have really good cards to get the most value. I win because my opponents have no idea of what they’re doing, and even if you would point out an obvious misplay they wouldn’t even agree.
Most people who play casually have some romantic ideas about poker from spy movies, where it's about bluffing. Bluffing only works if people actually believe you have good cards, people won't believe you have good cards if you play with mediocre or bad cards every hand.
I am by no means good enough to beat a person who is good at the game that could profile my playing style, do the mental math faster than me and who can tell the difference between whether or not I have analysis paralysis or bluffing.
In chess, when titled players play lower ranked players, they profess not to play for a win (i.e. take chances), but just play solid moves and wait for their opponents to blunder the game away.
For someone who's awful at pool like me, I suspect that optimal play is to avoid ever hitting any ball in to increase the likelihood that your opponent will scratch on the 8-ball.
This rung true for competetive Halo. The novice was focused on aiming good and getting accurate with the bread and butter weapon (magnum or battle rifle depending on which halo you played)
The top players were great at the standard weapon, and a the power weapons, and the meta became:
- instead of individual kils - teamwork to double team a single opponent
- map positioning to control where the enemy would respawn when killed,
- timing when the power weapons on the map would regenerate.
key skills became teamwork, coordination and communication when everyone is a good aim.
If you wouldn't mind posting a paragraph what coaching an esports team is like and how you feel about the current state of esports, I'd love to hear about it from an insider!
I'm not sure if this is exactly what you were hoping for but I'm happy to answer questions!
On coaching:
Coaching is probably the best and worst job in esports, depending on the day. It's also a role that is completely misunderstood by the management of most organizations, to the extent that coaches have had their decision-making hamstrung by management. This is getting better as time goes on, and I expect that it will eventually get to a similar place as traditional sports. With all of that out there, coaching is just straight-up fun. It's awesome to be able to see people improve over time and to pull together all your resources to try new things and push to a higher level. Between playing, coaching, and managing, I feel coaching is the most rewarding.
On esports:
I'm honestly torn about the state of esports at the moment. On the one hand, I'm very bullish on its future and happy to see that it's come as far as it has (it wasn't anything like this back when I first fell in love with it in the early MLG days - about 2004?). On the other hand, I feel like a majority of the money coming in is straight up dumb. The Overwatch League is probably the best example. The moment it was announced, I pulled the plug on the game entirely because it was clear there was no way to make it work the way it was 'supposed to.'
However, if people continue to come into the space and invest in solid fundamentals (quality talent, management, and support) rather than fads (cough team Ember...), then the esports industry is going to thrive. In my opinion, it will become the 'new sports' but without the baggage of so much legacy. Esports has the potential to evolve and push the envelope in so many areas that the way we absorb 'sports' entertainment is going to change dramatically over the next decades.
(EDIT: To expand on the overwatch question)
The math behind the Overwatch Scene doesn't make much sense. If you compare the amount of capital drawn in vs the amount of money the average team can make, it's an extremely high-risk / low reward ecosystem to be involved in. That said, there aren't many organizations that actually turn a profit right now, and the valuation of everything is dubious at best. Almost every Overwatch player I know at this point is looking forward to Project A and praying, but only time will tell how that plays out.
Can you expand a bit on why you pulled the plug because of there being “no way to make it work like it’s ‘supposed to’”? I’m actively working hard to improve at Overwatch to try and break into the tiered competitive scene, so any reservations about its future are of great interest to me and figuring out whether or not it’s a ship to move from at some point or not.
As with most eSports, the key metric is how much inflow there is and how much outflow.
I'm not familiar enough with Overwatch specifically, but it sounds like there isn't enough income and prize pools to go around. The top team may earn a decent wage and splashy amounts, but there isn't enough at the 2nd or top 10 rung to support a thriving ecosystem longer-term.
I'm more familiar with the LoL/DotA scene where there's enough smaller tournaments and the prize pool+sponsorships are enough to cover a wide range of top talent. Yeah, there's a lot of hype about winning the #1 Internationals, but that's only for one team out of hundreds that play. Or compare to how LoL is set up with their leagues where the top X teams get to play consistently and take in a steady income. Plus their broadcasting system to bring in more income to support the scene.
Similarly, you can look at stream numbers to get a feel for other income available to the players.
In general, without a healthy "middle-class" and "upper middle-class" of players to bring excitement and income, you lack the buzz and support to build top-tier competition longer term. And those don't exist unless there are ways for them to keep playing and monetize their skills.
Fortunately, if you're grinding up the FPS ladders, most FPS games tend to have more transferable skills letting you move from game to game more easily than some genres. Ninja is pretty famous for being the best at Fortnite, but he was a pro PUBG player and pro Halo 3 player before that. So it's not uncommon to see FPS pro players shift between the more in vogue FPS game of the time. (Caveat that not all FPS games reward the same skills and all that, CS is not TF2 is not CoD is not Fortnite is not Overwatch)
I am no means an expert but my take was that many people from grass-roots esports backgrounds balk at the numbers set by ATVI for OWL team licensing (20mil for a team iirc?) and associated player salaries (reaching upwards of 200K in some instances). Certainly in it's current state, team merch/tickets sales are nowhere close to recuperating these expenses from an investment standpoint.
I would argue that these complaints aren't understanding the 'meta' of capital investment in the current climate.
> Mastering the fundamentals will make you 'good' to a level that very few people ever reach.
Can you clarify this? Is this because most people don't care about mastering the fundamentals in the first place? I can't tell whether I'm missing something and the idea is more complex, or that's what you're saying.
1. People think they already have the fundamentals 'down'
2. Actually mastering the fundamentals can be boring and make a game feel like work (which, if you don't truly enjoy pushing the limits in a game, it is.)
A totally random example from League of Legends. 99% of players go into game after game and literally never review their previous games. They will spam games but literally never go into a custom game to practice last hitting. Or, they'll play a different champion every game, instead of putting in the repetition required to fully comprehend all the matchups they will find themselves in.
In short, very few players think of their most time spent practicing fundamentals as a valuable investment. Related, most players never even learn what the fundamentals are because revealing them takes a lot of effort.
For example, Starcraft is a game largely driven by economy or 'macro' rather than ultra-fast reflexes. However, the importance of macro is basically hidden from novice players. Their in-game experience is 'the other player always has more stuff than I do!' which they often attribute to build-order or other game decisions. It actually takes a while before a player really gets in tune with the idea that they need to be deploying resources ASAP and balancing the resources they acquire with the unit composition they are going to have in the next [insert window of time].
> 2. Actually mastering the fundamentals can be boring and make a game feel like work (which, if you don't truly enjoy pushing the limits in a game, it is.)
3. Mastering the fundamentals can just be hard. E.g. movement and aim in most first-person shooters. Mastering these fundamentals can be hard to the point of even professional players having significant gaps, e.g. players that are known to have excellent movement but lackluster aim, or vice versa.
Things like aim/movement fall into the grey area between mechanics and fundamentals.
Raw aim = mechanics.
Crosshair placement = fundamentals.
Basic Movement = mechanics.
Pathing = fundamentals.
You're absolutely right about things just being hard though. The gaps between even professional players can be huge in one area and nonexistent in another. Once you take that and apply it at the team level, it's easy to understand why a player could shine among a certain group, and do terribly with another, even if both groups were of very similar 'skill.'
learning so much from you guys lol not even a gamer :) now i think i am going to try to invest into a camera to record my piano practices. i wonder if that would help me get better...
However, the key isn't necessarily video recordings. It's deliberately practicing individual things you are bad at in isolation until you are good at them.
We need to record LoL and StarCraft games because it's tough to pause and redo something in the middle of a match. Similarly recording baseball swings or people dancing or swimming is useful for reviewing the complete action.
But when you practice piano, you can pause and redo a measure or line until you get it right, then slowly reincorporate it as part of the whole piece.
The WORST thing you can do is keep playing and think "I'll fix that later." Because inevitably you'll play a piece again, probably do the same mistake, and now you're actually practicing the mistake and ingraining it into your memory.
A video recording and reviewing it of a whole piece can help you go back and isolate your mistakes though. But it's just a tool for the goal of identifying and fixing mistakes.
We used an iPad to record swings of our little leaguers and it made a huge difference for them.
It helps because it’s easier to see what is happening vs hearing it. One example that we would see is kids dropping the back shoulder when they swing. Once they see it, they correct.
Similar advice in music. Record your practice sessions. Listen. Wince. Pick out targeted things to fix. Drill. Record again. Comfort yourself that at least that targeted thing is less painful. Repeat.
And it can be so tempting to delete them immediately because the videos are embarrassing. But you'll be so happy to have them in a few years to look back on how you've improved!
I also think fighting games are a good example. Most beginners gravitate towards the special moves and supers. But basic moves and understanding positioning can elevate your game much more.
How much of this is data-driven? I mean, every shot can (in theory) be digitally logged and analyzed. Is there anyone doing a Moneyball-style player performance data analysis service? I hate to use the term, but an "AI coach"?
Data is getting to be a bigger component, but that was driven primarily by esports betting (another area I've had some experience in, coincidentally). Data, in general, is under-utilized by almost everyone and the few 'real' data folks I've met have the habit of missing the forest for the trees (there's not exactly a tremendous wealth of coaching experience in esports, so the number of folks who could do the coaching and implement/build new tools for that purpose is near-zero).
It's pretty hard to go straight from DATA -> ACTIONABLE COACHING DECISIONS
It's much easier to go from COACHES INTUITION + SUPPORTING DATA -> COACHING DECISION
I'm not aware of any other coach (but there probably is some) that has the technical skills to build the kind of tools that would be required. Bear in mind, most games don't actually give you all the data you'd want to look at. That said, there were a few folks who made a killing in esports betting for a while.
Most people consistently make mistakes. They're not really playing to win, and going over all their footage to ensure they have their fundamentals down. It's actually really hard to perfect your fundamentals.
It doesn't have to be _everyone_ - I've played many an online FPS where I really appreciated that _one_ player for the meta battle going on between us whilst the rest of the game unfolded around us.
I really play games for those moments where you communicate with a player/players _on the other team_ through the meta. And then you dance around the strategies trying to set/catch each other offguard.
And you _know_ when you're playing against someone that gets it. And you can tell certain players apart, or classify their level of meta-ability by they way they're playing.
Sometimes in chess, you're embroiled in a really intense battle in one area of the board, but the game is developing on some other level and is primed for a swift turn, and knowing your opponent is aware of that same notion is really beautiful.
A great, quick and easy card/boardgame for revealing this kind of meta (but it's kinda one dimensional when you "get it") is "The Mind".
The thing is in common esport titles this will only ever really happen at relatively high levels (top ~0.1%) of play. Or at least, that's where it would actually matter. Below that, games are usually just decided by who is better at fundamentals. It doesn't matter how great your smoke setup is in CS:GO if I can just wait or flash my way through and insta headshot everyone because I'm just better at movement/aim. And the same is even more true when you compare pre-set strategies with rigid holding positions to people who instinctively know when they have to get counter-frags when a teammate dies and how push in a way that doesn't allow these set strategies. (The same is true to almost the same degree in LoL/DotA/SCII).
This is 100% true. Unfortunately, it inhibits player growth tremendously. Players who are too focused on the meta lose sight of fundamentals. This can manifest itself in weird ways, like LoL players picking up the flavor of the month picks instead of playing what they're strongest on when they can.
When I first started coaching LoL I came in to coach a team where the coaches I replaced suffered from some pretty serious delusions that come from the same place. They had very strong beliefs about playing 'the meta' and the value of certain flex picks at the time. When I took over and took the team back to fundamentals and reduced champion pools by half - winrates skyrocketed. It's really easy to want to copy what you see works for other people, but it's not always the best course of action.
So chasing the latest LoL champion of the month is bad. That makes sense. But at what level does it pay off to take advantage of the meta changing, and change your main from time to time to adjust?
I would say players around the border of silver and gold would benefit by paying attention to the meta.
There are plenty of 'one-trick' players who can make it to extremely high elo even if they aren't particularly competitive. [0]There's a schoolteacher in Korea(?) who streams in a cow costume and plays only Master Yi, on the Korean server. He's Diamond.
And then there's players like BoxBox, who isn't exactly a one-trick, but clearly mains Riven. [1]He's at ladder rank 334 at the moment.
And as a final example, there's the monster himself, Apdo. [2]Apdo is a famous player in China who has on multiple occasions been rank 1 (or boosted people to rank 1...) using mostly Twisted Fate. He's more than talented enough to play any champion well, but is most known for TF. Similar to BoxBox and Riven, but on a whole different plane of skill.
All this is to say that there's no real need to change champions to continue climbing until you're at least above diamond, or if you want to play with a group where a synergistic team composition would be meaningful (like amateur tournaments).
I played a lot of chess as a kid. That's actually where I 'discovered' the real value of fundamentals. Quick wins in chess are universally the result of an opponent making a horrific mistake. Of course, that means the opposite is also true!
There is no faking it in chess. You either grasp the game or you get soundly defeated over and over. That is also true of esports titles, which is why I fell in love with them.
My biggest improvement in chess came after comprehending The Theory of Steinitz [1]:
1. At the beginning of the game the forces stand in equilibrium.
2. Correct play on both sides maintains this equilibrium and leads to a drawn game.
3. Therefore a player can win only as a consequence of an error made by the opponent. (There is no such thing as a winning move.)
4. As long as the equilibrium is maintained, an attack, however skilful, cannot succeed against correct defence. Such a defence will eventually necessitate the withdrawal and regrouping of the attacking pieces and the attacker will then inevitably suffer disadvantage.
5. Therefore a player should not attack until he already has an advantage, caused by the opponent's error, that justifies the decision to attack.
6. At the beginning of the game a player should not at once seek to attack. Instead, a player should seek to disturb the equilibrium in his favour by inducing the opponent to make an error - a preliminary before attacking.
7. When a sufficient advantage has been obtained, a player must attack or the advantage will be dissipated."
It assumes both players are as highly skilled as it is possible to be (e.g. they can see right to the bottom of the decision tree in every variation).
If the players are less skilled than this, i.e. they aren't going to play the best move every time, then any analysis you want to make about whether the starting position is a theoretical draw becomes moot because they aren't going to play the theoretical best moves anyway.
But if you assume the game is a theoretical draw from the starting position, then any game you lose is ultimately down to you playing at least one suboptimal move (otherwise you would have been able to force a draw), and any game you win is ultimately down to your opponent playing at least one suboptimal move (otherwise he would have been able to force a draw).
As it happens, I've just got home from playing a chess match in the local league. I lost, which means I made at least one suboptimal move, although I'm quite confident I made many!
Fundamentals can be hard to define concretely because they can even underly the principles of how people talk about playing the game. Take, for example, the age-old advice in chess "control the center." To an absolute novice, this is interpreted as 'have your pieces in the center.' To more experienced players control can be more fluid. In some cases, it's as much about protecting a position as it is about occupying it.
To give an example from a game I love dearly: Halo. The number one fundamental isn't aim, or knowing sick trick nades, or masterful timing of power weapons. It's positioning. Positioning controls where your opponents respawn, it controls where your team respawns, and it is the single most impactful part of "map control." Good aim means nothing if you stand in the wrong places at the wrong times. Power weapons are useless if you get yourself back-smacked by opponents getting split-spawned that you weren't aware of.
Fundamentals are (somewhat) unique to a game, and they typically reveal themselves either once you've intuitively started applying them, or through thoughtful analysis.
Fundamentals -- let's go back to the fundamentals of fundamentals (cognition)!
Cognition and agency in the real world is often hierarchical in nature. You learn a task by breaking it down into simpler tasks, and if necessary breaking down the simpler tasks into yet simpler. This is due to nothing more than algorithmic efficiency (when at all possible -- it usually is IRL), divide and conquer.
The fundamentals are the basic tasks which higher level tasks rely on. Sometimes (quite common really) the nature of this (inverted) tree is such that the higher level tasks have a sort of soft max-min relationship: your overall skill will only be about as good as your weakest subskill. An example that comes to mind is manual driving. You could be the most brilliant, strategic, high-reflex rally race car drive in the world, if you miss most of your stick shifts you will likely be a mediocre driver, if even competitive. Shifting properly and quickly makes a significant difference. So much that it's almost completely futile to practice those higher skills unless you've nailed down the basics.
When you're just having 'fun', learning something intuitively, without the sharp focus on improving, it's easy to neglect those fundamentals. They are likely areas where you have some natural relative difficulty, which can lead to shying away from them (in larger contexts sometimes this is even wise -- you want to use what you're good at afterall!) -- it could be because they're uncomfortable, painful, repetitive, boring, too difficult (break it down!) and so on. Compensating for weaknesses exists I believe, but in high levels of competition it's something extremely subtle; again risking generalizations almost every high skill individual will have fundamentals mastered.
Most of my activity is academic, and I have some anecdotes in this regard. I feel like I've really evolved when (a) I've focused on learning the basics of my field really well (going down to the math foundations and axioms) (b) focused on improving weaknesses. It wasn't intuitive to me that this attention to fundamentals could yield so much.
edit: It should be noted (as others noted) that identifying what are the fundamentals can be something difficult itself. Common tools here are reviewing your games/production/etc, or asking others (teachers, peers, etc).
In Chess, you can learn techniques used by players a few hundred points above your rating, but still make game-losing blunders (hanging a piece totally undefended, not knowing how to finish a winning endgame) that are easy to spot (if you are careful). Patiently eliminating blunders will do much more for your rating than learning myriad openings variations and complex combination moves.
In FPS, aiming moving and ducking are like learning how to move the pieces in chess. And sure, those are the basics to even play.
But when people talk about "fundamentals" they are talking about the emergent things that come from those skills and are usually unique to the game. In chess, this is stuff like don't hang your pieces, tactics like spotting skewers or forks, understanding endgames, and later general strategic goals like controlling the center or develop your pieces to "good" squares.
In FPS games, this often deals with understanding the flow of a map (choke points vs open areas, cover and sniper locations), proper navigation (efficient pathing!), role synergy, and how a match develops (at about 30 seconds I should expect an opponent, if they went straight path A, to show up around this corner).
MOBA games moving and attacking and using a skill are the language. Fundamentals involve map awareness, ganking, vision control, wave management, etc.
Fighting games move, jump, attack, block is the language. Understanding zone control, the Rock-Paper-Scissors of strike/block/grapple, how to manage your health and special meters, character movesets/matchups are the fundamentals. Picking character X against player Y is the meta.
Once you have all of that squared away, you can start doing "meta." That is figuring out optimal picks vs particularly optimal setups, researching your opponent to build a specific toolkit against them, etc.
The fundamentals are about positional elements and strategic principles.
For example: Relative value of the pieces, Control of the center, Pawn structure, Tactics, Initiative, Tempo, Opposition, Keep the position balanced, Develop multiple ideas/areas (strategy), Control open lines (files/ranks/diagonals) and crossings
In Starcraft, the one that gets hammered on the most for lower-level/newer players is "constantly make workers and spend all your money". The most basic rule of thumb is to not stop making workers until you hit 70 or so.
If you do that in silver league, you're going to stomp 99% of your opponents even if your scouting and strategizing and unit compositions are all awful. You could do nothing but make a single unit type and still win.
Of course, if you do this at least somewhat well you'll rapidly "level up" in the ranking system to the point where you'll need to actually start scouting and reacting.
And it's actually really hard (from personal experience) to keep this up and have your money all spent and controlling your units all at the same time. So simply practicing this one simple rule makes you better at many aspects of the game because you're forced to scramble and keep up.
I actually had games where I was too focused on this where I hadn't made a single aggressive move, the opponent pushed and saw my massive army and just quit.
Yeah, I was never amazing, but I played a decent amount of Brood War back in the day. So I had build orders, I knew of the importance of making workers and staying broke and expanding early.
We had my ex-wife's brother living with us for a while and he wanted to play StarCraft. I was like, "Sure, we can play 2v2 against the computer until you're comfortable". He was like "Nah, I've played Age of Empires, I know how RTS works, let's play 1v1." I tried to tell him, "StarCraft is fast". He insisted. So we played.
I built workers, sent a scout across the map, found his base. He was hoarding mineral until he could afford a barracks. I was pumping out workers. I built a secondary base in his expansion area, a barracks and a factory and staged a bunch of siege tanks along his opening, then drop-shipped several marines, firebats, and medics behind his mineral line.
He had just started building his second barracks. He sent his troops to try and handle the situation, then I pushed my siege tanks in from the other side and ruined his barracks.
I tried to find the original comment on HN, it was very informative, but some chess master (grandmaster?) commented on here that until you are highly rated (say 2200), the only thing you should focus on to improve at chess is to improve your ability to notice tactics in games. He went into more detail but I can't find the post :(
Not quite. First you need to eliminate your own hung piece blunders and look for opponents'. But that gets you to 1000-1500 then you need to notice tactics.
There is overlap, in that the simplest single-move tactics (forks and skewers) are almost the same as catching immediately hung pieces.
My first (and only!) game of GO was ruined by my deep understanding of Chess.
I applied chess-logic (focusing on gradients of control) and demolished my opponent, who refused to believe it was only my first game, and refused to play again.
Not a coach or a pro, but I was very briefly coached by somebody who coached pro teams. I eventually made top 0.1% mmr at a certain esport too (in the more casual “play with friends” mode - why play a multiplayer game in solo queue?).
I can confirm that it’s all about the fundamentals.
You have to realize that, no matter how good your fundamentals and “mechanics” are, they are actually not good and that if you improve them you will just climb and climb.
It’s a bit tricky to figure out what these fundamentals are when you start out - not everything is equal.
This probably says something interesting about have design—but I'm not sure what exactly!
One thought is that there are some games where the metagame becomes important at earlier skill levels. Magic the Gathering comes to mind: fundamental skills are certainly important, but understanding the format—even in formats where you don't need a pre-built deck—is important even at a middling skill level, well short of any competitive level. I feel this pretty keenly because that's the level I play at online!
The truth is, (and this applies to games like MTG, Hearthstone, Poker, etc.) piloting the deck you have correctly matters more than people really like admitting. If you copy a 'known-good' strategy, you can crush with it at every level except the very top of the game. This applies even if your known good strategy is off-meta.
The main issue at the middle level is that people don't push to the next level of thinking, despite often thinking that they do. The reality is that most people have the thoughts but not consistently. Or, they have the thought, but don't apply it (well) to their decision making.
(I'm going to butcher this concept for this example)
Level one - You play your cards. You look at what you've got; you do stuff that has a big effect based on what you have in your hand. Your opponent's counter-play options aren't considered.
Level two - You now consider that your opponent might counter the cards you play in some fashion, and you adjust accordingly. This is the level most people are at. ('If I play BIG CARD and he just kills it with EASY COUNTER that would be bad...let's hold off on it until there's a lower chance of that happening...')
Level three - You now consider that your opponent is making the same kind of decisions you are. The game becomes more about information. You know that when X card is played, it indicates certain other possibilities. And, you are aware that your opponent might be making the same considerations about you, so you consider the plays you make in the context of how they might be perceived. (A lot of this becomes near-autopilot because of the sheer volume of games put in - often thousands -> tens of thousands).
This is the short version of the concept, but it applies to all games that have incomplete information, MOBAs, Card Games, RTS, and so forth.
This is illustrated with the deck Affinity. It sweeps beginner players consistently even if the pilot keeps making mistakes but once you meet tougher opposition all of the options the deck presents become overwhelming and you know that you need to maximize the value of every play to beat a good opponent, especially if they have boarded in counters for your deck.
Getting specific on the skill works very well on simple FPS games, just like bots are easily beat all of the top players. Basically this is true for the games that rules are extremely simple, there's no place left to play the metagame.
While a lot of games with sufficiently complicated mechanisms where people cannot process accurately, meta could come into play. For example, people spend quite some time making the computer beat human in the chess game, when human only have some not accurate meta experience.
Also, meta is probably the most useful skill for learning new games. A decent RPG player would infer the plot and mechanism in new RPG games, whereas a strategy game player could quickly find out what's the trade-off between all the viable options much quicker than others. A player with all genres experiences can adapt any games real quick.
I would be really interested in reading a long blog post about your experience. I'm sure it would reveal many details that most people (including me) wouldn't easily guess.
IMO, if you get to the point where the metagame matters, unless you are getting paid to play professionally, or you love metagames for their own sake, you should stop or drop down to a lower level league.
Replacing every game by its metagame, as some "board game geeks" tend to do, destroys the diversiry and value of inventing different games in the first place.
"Scrabble is an area control game with a complicated resource tree" may be fun for some, but informal not-technically-enforceable rules like "only play words you have ever used or seen before in a sentence" keeps it fun and interesting and meaningful for people who play games for valuable reasons (like learning, or skill development, or humor) other than just the W and L. If you are afraid to make an elegant or humorous play because it harms your chances in the metagame or to win overall, you are shortchanging yourself and your play partners.
Your advice is bordering on "you're having fun wrong".
You are coming with the assumption that "fun" is some objective standard that is on a scale with "playing to win" on the other end.
For some people, playing to win and finding the metagame is the fun.
And there is nothing wrong with that. And too often I find that people who complain about people who are just "playing to win" are really just trying to complain about losing without seeming sore. The pattern is easy to spot, anything that causes them to lose is somehow "playing wrong" or not "fun". There's apparently some intangible, undefinable, nebulous quality being lost. But in reality, the only thing actually being lost is your chance to win.
> There's apparently some intangible, undefinable, nebulous quality being lost.
Yes, it's called "fun". It's using the game as a platform for creativity and expression, not merely optimization for a fixed arbitrary set of rules.
Saying that this doesn't count is you saying "you're having fun wrong".
It's also why professional sports evolve rules to stop camping strategies like scoring 1 pt and then sitting on the ball/puck unitl the clock runs out.
There was derision in the phrase "intangible, undefinable, nebulous quality". Because it doesn't really exist. Fun exists in many forms.
And I never said fun didn't count. I said people find fun in different ways and trying to police how other people have fun is a bad look. So please, if you want to argue against me. Do it against what I actually said and not just what you wish I said.
A saying I have related to this is "Rules make sports." The skills and strategies that matter in a sport develop around the rules. Change the rules and you change the sport.
The judo example the author presented is actually one of my go-to examples as well. Not only did disallowing grabbing the legs take out an entire suite of offensive options, it took out defensive options in judo. In judo, the main way to win is to throw your opponent such that they land on their back. Before, a judo player could grab their opponents legs as a way to counter a throw. Now grabbing the legs is a penalty. But allowing yourself to be thrown is going to at least result in your opponent getting a point, and has potential for you to lose the match. So the solution is, in some situations, judo players will just intentionally face-plant onto the mat to avoid the throw. It looks silly, no one would do it in a self-defense situation, but rules make sports.
Note that just about all combat and grappling sports have this quirk: because they have rules, and are not just a free-form fight, you're going to encounter situations where the optimal thing to do in the sport would be terrible to do in a real fight.
Fencing exhibits this phenomenon nicely. Fencing does not come even close to mimicking a real sword fight. One reason for this is right of way, basically the idea that the person who attacks first gets precedence and the onus is on their opponent to defend against the attack before attacking themselves. However what is defined as an "attack" in fencing is very different from what a layperson would assume. Really, it's defined as forward movement without a clear intention to take the blade. Which means that tactics such as advancing with ones arm held back are rewarded.
A lot of people, upon hearing this, respond with something along the lines of "fencing is stupid! We should make our own sword fighting system that encourages real fighting!". HEMA is a nice example of this. Putting aside the questionable logic of a martial art based around swords, what inevitably happens is that as the system develops, people want to compete, to see who is the better fighter. Since they clearly can't judge fights by, well, murder, they need to come up with a rules and points system. Once this system develops, someone starts to realize "hmm, if I do x action, I can win fairly easily". Thus a meta develops. Once a meta develops, everybody starts using the meta to win and the fighting becomes less mimicking killing people with a sword and more competing in a sport.
Some argue that the way to prevent this is to not have competitions or rules. But...then you have a bunch of people waving around swords with no clue as to whether it's actually effective.
Side note, fencing has had a few of these major meta developments in its history too. Johan Harmenberg famously pushed epee's meta to be a lot more athletic and dynamic.
Many martial-like sports have a fundamental problem caused by this. In essence, there's a sequence:
1. are certain techniques that are likely to cause injury even with proper protective gear, that sucks in a sport;
2. so we make rules to prohibit using such techniques;
3. so the meta changes so that realistic tactics (which obviously need to protect against the dangerous technique) become suboptimal, and the new meta is 'unnatural' as it leaves the fighters vulnerable to something that's prohibited but would be used in any real situation.
The 2004 Olympics Judo representative for USA at 99kg, Rhadi Ferguson, retired from Judo competition after leg grabs were made illegal because that was such a big part of his game.
Another great example is the difference between Rugby Union and Rugby League. While there are lots of rule differences, a key one for me: in Rugby League, defenders must go back 10m after a tackle, while in Rugby Union they do not. This leads Union to be a very close affair with play rarely moving without consistent strong effort, while any fast player in League will get at least 5 of those meters back after every tackle. Very different games strategically, while from an outsiders perspective they are just the same.
There is also the ultimate version of the metagame i.e. your personal human condition. Blindly pursuing your career or chasing money without understanding the finite duration of your own physical existence, the scale of the universe, where you want to be in terms of life goals and family.
This is the meta I'm struggling to learn at the moment. I constantly gripe that people making similar salaries in my organization don't produce nearly as much as I do...but they seem happy and I'm constantly stressed out. Which begs the question...who's winning?
Not you. But this isn't a competition for salary. If you think your work and skills aren't valued correctly, you should look for another job. It is not that important that others have high salary that they (maybe) don't deserve, what is important is that you get the salary you think you deserve (important from your point of vue). Of course, whatever you get in the end also depend on what the business is willing to pay to have you.
If you feel stressed, you may be giving too much of yourself. If you are giving more then you like to, to compensate for your teammate, you might need to find teammates that are up to your level, that carr as much as you, an a business that care as much as you too.
The answer probably lies somewhere halfway between you and them. What you are doing is probably good in terms of staying sharp with your skills. But some detachment can help: I am assuming (correct me if I'm wrong) that you care very much about what's going on at work and that causes stress.
But I think it's possible to continue to care while not letting the organization's sluggishness affect you in a personal way. You care because you believe it's the right thing to do and/or because it furthers your skills. Good. The others are missing out; even if their pay is the same now, in 5-10 years you will be better positionned than them for whatever opportunities come. At the same time—and this is where that balance comes in—if you're slaving away with no enjoyment of life, it all seems pointless.
You are missing an important meta. Those who don't produce as much might produce something that is more valuable than you and thus be more valuable than you despite not producing as much quantity.
I've seen a lot of people fall into that trap and then get bitter when the "less productive" person was promoted.
Of course sometimes the meta is licking your bosses boots not something that makes the company money...
What do you mean by “don’t produce nearly as much as I do”?
Are you measuring feature completion or business impact? If your managers are happy with your coworkers that “produce less”, then chances are their efforts have the same business impact as yours.
I deliver more results, get assigned more important and complex work, and work more hours.
It's a project with a fixed span, and the barrier to entry is very high (government clearance and certain skills) so many people who gain entry exploit the situation because they know we're short on people and won't fire anybody unless they have a negative impact on the business. So the bar is high to get in, but the bar is very low to not be kicked out (have some positive impact). So we'll keep people that only do 1-2 tasks per week because it's better than 0, but don't reward the folks who can do 10 tasks per week.
Have you had this conversation with your manager? If the difference is truly objective, you can argue for them. The "meta" you are missing here is salary negotiation.
I think the question is wrong so no answer is going to make sense. Parts of life are indeed a competition, like work, but in those limited domains it’s easy to tell who’s winning - it’s who’s making the most money. Happiness doesn’t even factor in there. If you include your whole life, happiness matters big time, but then it’s not a game or a competition anymore.
One of the benefits of long experience is often being able to see forward quite a distance. If you can see that the project you're working on will fail with high probability, you can avoid a lot of useless work/angst. And perhaps even enjoy the wreck.
I'm struggling with this as well. Most of the qualities I had as a teenager like passion, drive, tenacity - in general a will to master difficult subject matter like science and technology for the betterment of humanity - let me down in the end. Here I am in my 40s, tired, broke, constantly reevaluating if I even want to do this anymore, and I keep reaching the same conclusion. I just don't know.
I'm deeply concerned that the world is rapidly rushing in a direction that I no longer believe in. While I'm sitting here tapping away at a keyboard, species are going extinct, wealth inequality is reaching a point of no return, people are being marginalized to the point of slavery.. there are so many indicators that we are headed towards disaster that I almost can't bear it anymore.
Im really trying not to be negative so I want to paint a portrait of how I thought the world would be today. When the Berlin wall fell in 1989, my friends and I (who were about 12 at the time) were already keenly aware of how messed up the world was. We grew up with AIDS and the war on drugs, gas guzzling cars, the military industrial complex out of control, deforestation and desertification, all the same problems as today. So we had hoped that maybe after the wall fell that the world would finally begin to deescalate the arms race. Maybe we'd starting getting solar panels on our roofs, maybe they'd cure AIDS and legalize drugs. During adolescence, we hoped that things would start going right for us for a change. And the 90s were epic, the internet came out, music got good, counterculture seemed to be rising with the WTO protests and similar movements.
But then the dot bomb and 9/11 happened and the rest is history. We've regressed into a neofascist authoritarian culture driven by fear and mistrust. The few glimmers of hope like CRISPR and legalized weed and cheap solar panels and lithium iron phosphate batteries are great and everything, but from my perspective this has all been too long coming. Now we have insurmountable threats like all reefs dying by 2050 due to ocean acidification and temperature rise, which will lead to half a billion people from pacific island nations being displaced into southeast Asia when their supply of fish runs out and potentially world war III. And everywhere we look, the news along those lines is pretty grim.
Ok back on track to positivity: what could/should have happened is that when Clinton was elected, had he been more progressive and less moderate, we could have deescalated the arms race. We could have chosen diplomacy and financial assistance to eastern Europe and prevented the wholesale slaughter that happened as the USSR was diced up and claimed by strongmen. We could have used the money to pay off the national debt completely under the next president, maybe Al Gore, who would not have allowed Who Killed the Electric Car to happen. The tightening of the purse strings might not have happened, so the dot bomb could have been avoided. The housing bubble never would have happened. Instead we could be building sustainably by now with hempcrete and be using switchgrass and algae for biofuels. Instead of this race to the bottom marginalization of tech workers for the service economy, we could have had coops and democracy in the workplace like in Germany. We could have an automated industrial manufacturing base in the US bigger than China that would provide a UBI for everyone. We could have stopped cutting NASA off at the knees and perhaps had a SpaceX level of reusability in the public sector.
I guess writing this is a catharsis since nobody will read it. I'm trying to live and work the way I would have in 2000 had I known what I know now. But it's hard when the world has digressed so far from what it could have been that people don't really understand where I'm coming from anymore. We're so distracted with living under the realities of this local maximum that we can't see beyond it to what could be. So I guess at this point I will try to write more about what's possible because I don't really know what else to do.
I'm not sure if you're aware or not, but going down that rabbit hole is the least positive thing you could have done (ok, I exaggerate but the point stands).
There's a saying in Arabic "if only" is the devil's work - it sometimes appears to be a positive or constructive thing but in reality, you're just digging yourself deeper into a depressing world view.
Don't focus on what could have been done differently: a) you can't do anything about it now, b) things rarely work out the way you'd think they would, so who knows how things could have gone wrong in that scenario.
Focus on the here and now. You seem to care tremendously about sustainability and the environment. Find a company working in battery tech or renewable energy (it doesn't have to be revolutionary, evolutionary improvements matter just as much, if not more so; e.g. improved Li-ion (LiFePO₄ or otherwise) today can save more species than NiFe or whatever batteries tomorrow) and apply. There are not just dozens of such opportunities, there are thousands - but you'll need to go out of your way to find them. Maybe you'll have to move (and move your family with you?) and maybe that's good for you.
My favorite quote from the Anarchist's Manifesto: "To Fix Anything, start Everywhere. To Fix Everything, start Anywhere."
It looks grim, and we're going to have to use the few things we've gotten right as a species to fix everything else we've allowed to go wrong.
Places like YC, Twitter, YouTube, etc. have been focusing on insignificant things like clicks and conversions and "content" for years. The public sector has been allowed to fester and become corrupted by people who understand they make more money through controlling the system than they do by actually running it as intended. Meanwhile, BOTH systems are run by a precariously small class of VC's and wanna-be VC's who have become further and further insulated from their consequences.
The article is very good, but i dislike the word "meta" for this whole notion as it is simple a Nash Equilibrium (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium) for some game. Changes of rules makes other equilibria, some equilibria are probabilistic (that makes the game balanced I think) some are just pure strategies (choose this hero if available). I think naming "meta" as "Nash Equilibrium" would popularize game theory more and add some good tools for balancing games.
If someone is interested in this topic becuase of esports commitment or just by curiosity there are some nice youtube videos and papers about using
game theory in games:
Software development is a really funny example of this. The meta changes constantly and as a result "the technology is changing all the time". The thing is that the underlying principles and rules have barely changed in the last few decades.
This is why I've never understood people that are enthusiastic about new programming languages and frameworks (among other things). It is just exploring the potential of a different meta. It doesn't necessarily make you a better programmer and probably your time is spent better elsewhere.
I personally believe this is also the reason why in the last few decades we are seeing less and less 'good' new programmers. Turns out it is quite counter intuitive for a new player to understand why they should spent their time on underlying principles and not on constantly chasing the shinny.
It seems to me that ever-changing tech is the meta of software development.
When done right, new tools and frameworks make us more productive and enable us to do more in less time. Because time to market is a crucial component of startup success, picking the right tools can give you that edge.
As for the underlying principles of software development, that's the "fundamentals" that everybody is talking about in this thread. OF COURSE you need to master them. But once you do, the meta really is chasing new tech. The problem is that folks with no knowledge of fundamentals are constantly chasing the new thing - i.e. attempting to play the meta prematurely.
Donkeyspace is my favorite idea derived from metagames, but I can't find any good descriptions online.
As any given meta becomes dominant, other playstyles become viable that would not be viable in a game against players unaware of the meta, or in a different meta. A counter-meta. Sometimes there's counter-counter-meta and then you're really in Donkeyspace.
I am the worst (maybe best) person to play board games with because 5 minutes after learning the rules I loudly proclaim what I perceive the meta to be, and unashamedly telegraph my moves in regards to it. I lose almost all of the time, but it makes the night much more memorable and I enjoy the mental exercise of trying to quickly grok a meta. Sometimes for fun I loudly proclaim "I'm going to Moneyball this!", and then often we end up discussing baseball or movies for a fair bit too.
Here are a few games and what their meta is not:
The Climbers - Don't try and get as high as quickly as possible.
Munchkin - Don't try and become a mercenary for hire defending anyone who needs it.
In law school, I had a 'how to negotiate' workshop once. We were given a fictitious deal to negotiate (with some external circumstances hidden from us), were paired up with a random person and then had 15 minutes to execute in the hallway. The second I got my numbers, I started building some sort of game theory model around the circumstances in my head, filling in some numbers and scenarios, all while stalling the girl opposite to me so that I had more time to work on my 'optimal strategy'. So then in the last 3 minutes or so, I 'executed' on my theory and we both got our negotiated numbers. The girl looked rather bored and played a bit dumb, giving out the feeling of 'I'll let you have this one, what do I care.'
Well the result is easy to predict - after the hidden circumstances and our respective numbers were revealed, it turned out she had basically steamrolled me and any smugness I might have had about my rational approach and winning strategy was crushed. I stopped doing any formal analysis of real world decision making after that.
One of my favorite books of all times: The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin. He was the chess prodigy written about in Searching for Bobby Fisher. He quit chess shortly after and became a world champion in Tai Chi. The book is about learning two very different skills and how they are the same.
Thesis that learning one thing deeply helps learn other (unrelated) things makes total sense to me.
If anyone reacts as I did and wonders how it's possible to compete in Tai Chi, the competitive sport [1] is not the slow-movements-in-the-park activity I had in mind.
Very true - even blue belts in BJJ are savage killers compared to similarly-ranked adherents in other arts, TMA or not, much less the average drunk bully in a bar.
Yet a lot of the same life lessons are passed on through the right, uh, professor.
TMA aren't just sports, they call themselves martial arts. Emphasis on martial, relating to war. You would expect something calling itself a martial art be useful in a fight, but MMA is much more effective in self defense than TMA because they focus on actual combat in the ring instead of showy but unproven katas.
TBF, MMA has rules that don't apply to bar fights, and knowing how to use a firearm fits closer a martial art that would let you survive on a modern battlefield. Or practicing squad tactics on an airsoft field. Perhaps TMA weapons training would qualify as a martial art in the days before firearms when armies fought with sword and spear, but it shouldn't continue calling itself anything to do with martial in this day and age. Historical dance or reenactment maybe, along the lines of renaissance fair and civil war battle reenactors.
Playing a game immediately after learning the rules is my favorite challenge - especially when the other players are all new too.
At this stage, tactics are mostly about keeping all the rules in your head and thinking hard before each move. But strategy is really interesting. Everyone is guessing blindly, and you can often win by guessing slightly less blindly.
I have two meta-strategies:
(1) Game phases
While learning the rules, whenever possible, mentally categorize game mechanics as opening-related or endgame-related. For example, a lot of board games have some engine-building in the opening and some point maximization in the end.
During the game, constantly estimate the distance to the end of the game. On the first playthrough, most people transition to endgame too late.
(2) Mechanics comparison
Whenever a game has different types of mechanics or resources, search for reference points that compare them. For example, in Dominion, you must choose between buying treasure and action cards. So on the first playthrough, you should deduce that 1 silver is similar to an action with (+2 treasure, +1 action).
The article talks about the metagame transition in Splendor, when players realize that a strategy with minimal engine-building is viable. I deduced that on the first playthrough by trying very hard to estimate the value of a 2-cost card vs taking resources.
Of course, you need to continuously re-evaluate as you understand the game better. By I have a very high winrate on first playthroughs relative to my general ability.
Does anyone else have meta-strategies for this situation?
However, I break things down a little differently.
1) How to win. What gets counted to win, usually VPs. If you understand that, and how to efficiently accrue them, then you're a few steps ahead. Then, how to end the game. Can you control how it ends?
You use this in engine vs endgame, but I prefer breaking it out because not all games have two phases. Some simply generate VPs as you go (no compounding engine mechanic), and what you really care about is turn efficiency.
2) My other rule is compare to similar mechanics from other games.
I have heavily studied other games, so spotting how a draft system works or engine-building and turn efficiency is easily recognizable and I can calculate sorta optimal moves. Similarly this gives you an easy framework to figure out how the specifics of this game compare to each other.
3) Table dynamics. Almost always you can get a huge edge just by knowing what you need to do NOW vs latter. This is mostly about efficiency. If you know player X is going to take Red next turn, then you can decide if denying them is worth it, or that means you're safe to take/ignore Blue. So sussing out what other players are doing, especially if they're cooperating, is especially helpful.
To accomplish this, I actually try to turn the table dynamics to friendly and talkative. Usually in the guise of it's a friendly game and look at my sharing my insight/knowledge. So others freely share what they're thinking. Means discovering strategies in the game happens faster, but I also glean important tips from others.
Interestingly I played splendor for the first time against some experienced players a couple of weeks ago, and after they explained the rules and how the best strategy is to slowly build up resources, I googled ‘how do you win at splendor’ and everyone said to try and grab the most expensive cards first.
So I did that, then they said it was beginners luck after I won. Then I won two more times, and they said ‘wow you just must be good at games’, and I said no, I’m good at googling.
In my experience, this is a misfeature of closed board gaming groups. They come up with a local metagame, and nobody new comes in to disrupt it. New players are low-skill, so they learn the local strategy and stop there.
You can become a tremendously consistent winner at all sorts of board games simply by knowing that most local metagames are exploitable, and constantly looking for the exploit. Are players burning their resources too fast, or holding them for too long? Are they undervaluing a resource in one phase and overvaluing it in another? Are they failing to recognize potential resource engines, or building engines to obtain things that can be obtained faster without one? Are they not recognizing or exploiting resource scarcity? Are they failing to recognize situations where they can apply pressure or force actions by threatening to end the game?
This strategy is only viable if nobody is blocking you from the tier 2 and especially tier 3 cards either by reserving what you're obviously going for, or shorting the supply of a colour you clearly need - But it works great otherwise.
Splendor has clever subtle player interaction here which I think is a real strong part of its design.
I've played a lot of four-player Splendor, and went two years and three tournaments without losing a game. One of the lessons from that is this: Even if three players are all jockeying for the expensive cards, it is still a losing strategy for the fourth to try to build an engine.
Good players playing against other good players will often grab one or two cheapies in the midgame to deal with resource scarcity. But you simply cannot win by buying cheap cards, building an engine, and picking up nobles. It's just that much slower.
The metagame in Splendor is more subtle, as you say. It's about clever play interaction and depends heavily on the early-game tableau. Does the tableau strongly favor a single color? Then your choice is to jockey for position on that color, or avoid the resource scarcity and go for weaker and/or less-coordinated cards. Does it have a lot of strong cards? Then it's about finding one or two you can get without someone else tying up your resources. Does it have a lot of weak cards? Then it's about finding ways to gain an upper hand for when the stronger cards come out.
Are players holding a lot of chips? Then you need to avoid getting stuck with a poor "hand" of chips - either a full hand that can't buy anything useful, or an empty hand when the chip supply is weak. Are they hoarding the wilds? That's much like the above, but with even more pitfalls.
Unfortunately, there's a skill ceiling to Splendor, and it's fairly low. Once you approach it, improvement is asymptotic, and the luck element of the game spikes tremendously. These days, I don't really like playing without the expansion. But in good news, the expansion refreshes the game wonderfully.
Yes. I am like you, I love playing first games. My playbook is usually:
1) create chaos. Everybody plays the same game where they pick a boring strategy, which makes the best calculator at the table win. Instead of trying to maximize my points, I try to increase the chaos around the table, increasing the complexity for everyone and pushing them to make mistakes.
2) in games where this is possible, I will try to sprint to trigger the end condition. As you say, people underestimate how soon the end comes.
3) be unexpected. A bad but unexpected move can be better than the good move in the first game. Try to identify which moves would have an excessive impact on the complexity and which makes everyone go back to the drawing board on their calculations.
In general, chaos and havoc around the board have helped me usually.
This is why I like dominion so much; you can play with random sets of cards, and watching the meta develop over ~an hour as you play the game is really fascinating. Sometimes someone will see a combo which is really powerful, and other times we get caught up in something useless before realizing.
Interesting. I'm familiar with the meta as it relates to gaming (I follow SC2 pretty closely, though I basically never play anymore). I am curious to explore what the meta is as it relates to building web apps, or building software systems.
I guess in web apps, the meta has evolved away from stateful and towards stateless applications, rigid to ephemeral infrastructure, and away from big kitchen sink frameworks towards smaller tools built for specific purposes (here I'm thinking like netlify, react-cli / vue-cli, serverless and aws lambda compatible frameworks and languages). In database land, I think there's a bit of reversal towards a happy medium between Relational and No SQL with the whole NewSQL trend (though I think most people just end up using whatever they're comfortable with).
I think the concept of 'covered ground' is especially fascinating when it comes to thinking about the meta of building web apps. Do you really appreciate the trade offs between MySQL and MongoDB, if you haven't ran into the scaling issues between the two? I don't think "running a bad migration" is covering enough ground to appreciate the differences. Is struggling to wrangle a bug in an Angular 1 directive enough 'covered ground' to understand the meta in building frontend applications?
And I wonder if the meta is moving towards low code and no code frameworks. Dark Lang looks pretty cool, though I've never really used it. Retool proved really valuable for internal dashboards for managing customer support at my last company.
You could explore the meta at a more fine grained level than just 'web apps', or zoom out to software in general and try to understand the meta (just like you could analyze why certain units in SC2 are just broken, or understand why the economies of the different races mean different opportunities for timing attacks for each race)
Metagame is the 'game outside the game' ie in rock paper scissors the game is trivial the metagame involves guessing what the opponent will pick.
Meta-software-engineering would be things outside of your software stack that affect the overall process. People, sleep patterns, office layouts, commute time, corporate culture etc.
There's the classic "startup engineer" metagame: hop from startup to startup to build up an options portfolio. Stay until the 1-year cliff, exercise whatever options you get, and move on to the next one so you've hedged your bet over as many promising companies as possible.
I think you're correct about the meta of software engineering. People, Remote Work, Culture hacks are metagaming attributes of building a company or startup.
I was thinking more specifically about building web apps (or software systems). I think there's something there as well
The meta in software engineering in general is people. Once you have sufficient technical expertise, you realize that the largest gains come from working efficiently with others.
I wouldn't say that working efficiently with people directly counts as "meta". Productive cooperation with others sounds like a straightforward skill to improve, with no new rules being introduced.
Maybe new company/team organizational approaches or methodologies (Waterfall, Kanban, etc.) can count as playing the meta and give you an edge over the competition.
The process of building things is embedded in various contexts. As is the process of being paid to build things. And those contexts are themselves embedded in other contexts. There are first-, second-, third-, nth-order "smart" moves in a given situation given the specific contexts in play.
In terms of creating web apps or other software, there are organizational, hiring, funding, exit, marketing, and many other meta-games going on — and they're all in constant flux.
The metagame is PARAMOUNT in Starcraft Brood War, which has had no patches in nearly 20 years. The only thing that's changed is the map pool and the players' skill/knowledge (finding some bugs, mapping out defense to rushes, etc.). Thus, players have years and thousands of hour to grind "standard" or "optimal" strategies, and someone who is less creative but more mechanically gifted can advance just by copying cookie-cutter strategies but executing them 5% better.
However, the Brood War leagues know this tendency, so they often add crazy maps to the mix. This season, ASL added Inner Coven, which is a really bizarre island-ish map, and has created a totally new meta. Check out this TvT, it's one of the weirdest games I've seen in years, all due to a map prodding the meta game.
A somehow related quote from Paul Halmos (https://youtu.be/LwMcz1Yh8tc?t=1506): "I would choose depth over breath of knowledge every time. I think if you know something very well and keep try to know it better, then you will expand to other subjects, and the deeper down you go the broader the near by becomes."
I see a lot of debate over what "meta" means, and I'd like to throw my own hat in the ring.
I would argue that a playing a game at the base level (i.e. playing without meta) consists of (a) finding different strategies to use, (b) figuring when is appropriate to use each strategy, and (c) executing strategies optimally. When the game is first being played, most strategies haven't been discovered. At this stage strategic play consists of (without loss of generality) player A using a strategy they think is effective, player B devising and using a strategy that will be effective against the strategy used by player A, Player A adapting in response, and so on. This is strategic play, but it isn't a meta-game. The meta-game arrises when players A and B are both experienced enough at the game that they can debate which strategy is the objective best. The meta then becomes the agreed upon dominant strategy (or set of strategies). In the base game (i.e before the meta develops) strategies exist mostly independent of each other, while the meta-game consists of fitting strategies into a framework.
The meta can change because of external or internal forces. An external force is a change to the base game, which is common to e-sports, and less common in actual sports. In e-sports, most games will tweak how the game is played (change the cooldown of abilities, change the size of a characters health pool, etc) every month or so. This will change which strategies are best, and therefore change the meta.
Internal changes arise from the changing skill level of players. As players get better at the game, hard to execute strategies will become more viable, while easy to execute strategies will remain at about the same level of viability.
This article shows a great example of what the pro Overwatch meta (the game I'm most familiar with) looks like and how it evolves, and it's (mostly) accessible to non-Overwatch players: https://overwatchleague.com/en-us/news/23053244/the-meta-rep... (WARNING: autoplay video).
A build on this, is as a soft-core participant in a game, often it is more enjoyable to participate in a game where the meta is not known, and everyone is in the 'finding different strategies' mode - bit like early days starcraft. Now the Internet exists, everyone jumps to semi-optimal strategies by copying, not putting in their own thinking time. While I admire high level play, at mid/low level it is more fun if the meta is not nailed down, also philosophically I think life is more 'hidden' than people think, and the idea there is a best-move/ common optimising strategy without thinking yourself is detrimental. I personally would like games which are more random, or where optimising is harder and less discoverable and not shareable.
Totally agree! Overwatch is often criticized for the pro meta "infecting" regular play, because low/mid level players will find themselves pressured by their teammates to play heroes that are meta at the pro level, even though pro strategies are only meta when they're being executed at the highest level of play.
> Judo — the sport that I am most familiar with — has a metagame that is shaped by rule changes from the International Judo Federation. A few years after I stopped competing, the IJF banned leg grabs, outlawing a whole class of throws that were part of classical Judo canon
It also has the metagame of carefully crafting your weight to optimally fit in your preferred weight class
I wonder why sports with weight categories don't implement floating weight windows? If there is 10kg spread in a given category, place every participant in the center of their own category so they always fight somebody at most 5 kg different from them in either direction and adjust points being earned appropriately (based on weight difference and an impact factor of weight in given sport).
Then points will be normalized and you can compare skill of underfed ballerina and a sumo fighter directly if they compete in the same sport.
This is a constant point of contention. The workaround (at least in BJJ that I know of) generally is to have "open weight" fights in addition to weight-class restricted ones. Everyone's happy usually. Now if they have open sex fights then we can see the underfed ballerina vs. a sumo fighter!
It's not as common in MMA, I think. BJJ is often thought to favor the smaller, weaker player but with the less strict ruleset in MMA, open fights aren't as "fair", I think. Physics, basically. Skill level equal, a larger and more muscular and well-conditioned athlete will usually win.
An enjoyable exception to this is the classic BJJ vs. wrestling contest in the early UFCs between Royce Gracie, a 6'1" 180lb guy vs. a seeming bear of a man with proven wrestling skills in 6'2' 250lb Dan Severn. If you're not a fight geek (if you are, you surely already know about these 2) it may be kind of boring to watch and more interesting to read or watch a well-informed analysis with pictures and clips, sort of like a "Gracie Breakdown".
Interesting point that one has to master the game first, before mastering the metagame. I am reminded that Warren Buffet & Bill Gates are reputed to enjoy the game of bridge, which comprises at least three games: the trick-taking game; the bidding game which is about how many tricks one thinks one can win; and the communication game which runs over the bids themselves. One could argue that outa-of-band communication is a third, cheating, game. One might also consider multi-table play to be a metagame, although it is a fairly simple one.
The "metagame" describes the competitive/race aspect of testing and discovering new strategies from match to matches, adjusting for changes to rules and the strategies you see others employing. I'd say it's this change over time across many individual matches and rulesets that justifies the "meta" part of the term to differentiate with adjustments you might make or try to make within one match.
The term "meta" is often colloquially used to describe a currently dominant strategy... in other words, whatever's winning the metagame. "Meme-game" could be a less flattering but also pretty accurate description of how "the meta" often plays out with a kind of herd mentality.
It doesn't mean strategy. It's basically the strategy of the strategy (or the game of the game, hence the term Meta). It's about finding the new strategy before your opponent. It becomes a game unto itself.
MetaGame is not strategy. The metagame is often the behind-the-scene variables that enable a certain set of strategies to flourish.
For example, in Dota, changes to armor or magic resistance scaling can change the metagame to be magic or physical focused, but the strategies and trends themselves develop in ways that take the meta-game into account.
During one meta game, it is common to see various different strategies flourish. IMO, as it is one level of abstraction higher, it is fair to call it meta-strategy and by extension the meta-game.
To further expound upon this, the vast majority of a game is encoded in the engine or ruleset. Core strategy is in dealing with these these ground truth fundamentals. This is the realm of beginners and casual players.
Small tweaks to the rules or weights (simple numeric multipliers!) can dramatically change how the game is played amongst those who are incredibly skilled at the game's fundamentals.
I love this concept. I've been thinking about ways of "traversing skill trees" and identifying meta-games for some time. Collecting ideas here: https://garybasin.com/thinking-toys/
If you find metagame strategies interesting, you may enjoy Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene [1] and specifically Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS)[2]. Of course ESS takes place over a much longer timeline. Summary of ESS in this video by Veritasium [3].
The meta game is a high level arena for people that hammered through the proven advantageous strategies. Once you beat everyone unwilling to do that, you are now in an arena with people that used your exact same strategy.
A short example of this is a fighting game where the majority of people want to play the characters they enjoy playing. Unfortunately, like life, there is no perfect balance, and picking some specific characters will give you an advantage (even if you hate playing them). So long story short, play the character with the advantage, ride it to the top, everyone at the top got there doing the same shit you did —- and voila, the meta game, how do we all with the same strategy compete against each other.
I may be simplifying but wouldn’t the ultimate “meta” move be to adapt the concepts behind John Boyd’s OODA (observe, orient, decide, act) loop[1] in your thinking? Basically you need to always adapt to changes in the game and get inside your opponents own loop.
If you’re able to run your own OODA process faster than your opponent, you’re already acting before they have even realized the game has changed.
He writes "There seems to be something in getting good at a skill tree that helps in latter life. I’d like to think it is a function of exposure: once you see the competitive meta at the top of one skill tree, you begin looking for it everywhere else."
Two things explain this phenom: 1) you learn how to learn - and if you pay attention you become better at learning, more efficient; 2) you develop the confidence that your time invested will pay off with expertise, so you don't begrudge the investment
Re: playing the meta game, a great article on coyotes being "too clever by half" and missing the meta game to their detriment came up on HN awhile ago:
The definition of meta used in the piece doesn't match my understanding. Take his final example where he says that adjusting tactics in response to your opponent in ultimate frisbee is meta. No, that just strategy.
Same goes for most of the examples he gives.
Looks like I'm getting old, and the word has been redefined from out under me:
In video games, however, the metagame has its own meaning—and depending on which game you play, the context differs. In short, the metagame in video gaming means using characters or items that are the most powerful at the time to try and find the best and quickest means to victory.
>Take his final example where he says that adjusting tactics in response to your opponent in ultimate frisbee is meta. No, that just strategy.
Choice of strategy can be "meta", though. It depends on the context. For example in ultimate frisbee the current meta is to play Vertical offense, and so you see a lot of teams training for how to run it and how to defend against it.
Back in 2004 ish, the dominant teams played Horizontal offense, and we only saw Vert for set plays after a foul or other play stoppage.
The meta has changed because the dominant strategies have changed.
Then you can get even more meta, because perhaps your team is playing "long ball" and you know that if you start calling lots of travels, the other team will reciprocate. And you know that because even a contested travel causes a return to the thrower, it will hurt you more than hurting them.
The article's usage seems to drift around somewhat, but in esports I follow "meta" refers specifically to the consensus about which strategies are good or bad, not to strategies themselves or to anything someone does in a given game.
E.g. saying "foo is meta right now" means most players consider foo to be stronger than the alternatives, and if a player uses a strategy other than foo one might say they were playing off-meta, etc. But the term is wholly distinct from strategy itself.
Meta is the set of viable strategies GIVEN the strategies that your competitors commonly employ.
Here's a concrete example:
Soccer fundamentals: passing, dribbling, etc.
Soccer strategies: formation, player roles, etc.
Soccer meta: viable formations, player roles, etc.
No one is out there playing a 8-2-1 formation because it's not a viable strategy, i.e. it's not part of the current meta. The current meta in soccer is largely 4-4-2 and 4-4-3.
3 in the back is relatively rare, because it's weak to the player roles that we currently see being employed by competitors. It's not part of the meta because it's a weak strategy against the currently common strategies in the meta.
High level strategy: wear down opponent, exploit endurance advantage
Low level strategy: aggressive midgame, long passes, high tempo, rotate attackers
Tactics: 4 4 2 formation, joe and Jean on wings, etc. force opponent mike to run side to side to wear out, then focus on scoring in final third of game.
Fundamentals: passing, communication, give and go, etc.
Meta: realizing that you can make more from your Instagram account than from playing the game.
Disclaimer: I don’t know anything about soccer (football)
Feels like you're starting to argue in bad faith with the only purpose of rejecting the concept of "meta" as it's being presented.
If you'd like, you can think of "meta" as short for "meta-strategy", with the distinction between "meta-strategy" and "strategy" as similar to the distinction to "meta-physics" and "physics". People who claim that "meta-physics" is just "physics" would probably be regarded as "pedants".
Meta is anything where the best action depends on something outside the game. Identifying the best weapon to challenge your opponent's defense is not meta. Identifying the best weapon to counter your opponent's predicted defense is meta.
Choosing to use a weapon at all is not meta.
Choosing to not use a weapon to lure your opponent into trying to grab it while you wait to snipe them, is meta.
Think about rock-paper-scissor. The game is totally random. There is no in-game strategy that can do better. The only way to do better than half chance is to play meta and predict your opponent's strategy.
Say you have a game with various weapons. Each weapon has attack power, attack speed, and weight. If everything is balanced right, there could be no singular optimal weapon.
And let's say that the best considered weapons are all of a certain weight. They do the most damage in the least amount of time available.
Playing the metagame would be recognizing the game everyone is playing is using those weapons as best as possible. And then choosing the knife because it lets you run faster than everyone else. And your strategy becomes knifing people in the back and running away before they can fire back.
Then more people catch on to the knife strategy, because the best players are using it. Now most people are using knives and the game is all about maximizing run speed.
So you start using the pistol. It's a very slight hit to your run speed, but you can still fire back on anyone who knifes you in the back. You start just capping knifers left and right.
More people catch on. Pistols beat knives. As more people become pistol wielders, knifers get worse. The game is all about pistols now.
Until someone realizes that shotguns and rifles are only slightly slower than pistols, but do way more damage. Basically, everything of a certain weight is just good when facing a lot of pistols. So the game comes right back around to the start.
This is different from in-game strategy. In-game strategy would be planning routes and knowing how and when to cover. Meta is out-of-game strategy.
Like, investing in infrastructure, technology, etc is all war meta. It lets you approach the situation in ways your opponent isn't thinking about. You can make their strategies during the war irrelevant.
I think the "meta" in this case would be your entire post. Ie. "use knives when heavy weapons are popular, use pistols when knives are popular, use highest dps weapon when none are popular" is The Meta... assuming lots of people agree that its the best way to win.
Yes. That's why I said it's different from in-game strategy. In what manner did you think I was implying that what I was talking about wasn't talking about an example of the metagame?
The Splendor part was a but confusing. The author's point is that the simple strategy has no meta, because players can't interfere with each other. It's just a race. But the strategy of saving up points opens up a metagame because players can now interfere with each other, so the game becomes about guessing opponent strategies and counterstrategies.
Another analogy is a bicycle race. You could have everyone run separately and compare their best times. But by racing together, you get peloton and team effects where players can attack opponentns and support teammates, but expose weakness that could be exploited, and the success of an act, like passing or drafting, depends on how others react.
In this instance, the metagame is the optimal strategy given your gaming group’s current strategic preferences.
I’ve found that over time, the dominant tactics in Splendor for my group swing between build and buy. People do whatever is necessary to win. Tactics used 50 games ago go away and then get brought back. People hold grudges against others over old games, and act to disrupt each other. All of this can be predicted and folded into game strategy.
I’ll admit, it’s a little difficult to see this type of meta in most gaming groups — my group happened to be my entire office, and we played Splendor every lunch break for probably a year. That’s hundreds of games within a small group of people.
You do see this in Chess, various openings fall in and out of favour over time. I guess you could call this "meta" - tactics change in line with strategy, strategies change in line with the meta game. But as GP says, I've always considered this as just "strategy".
I think a good example that aids definition is "meta-optimisation" (aka "meta-computation).
Optimisation is a process that aims to find the best possible solution to a problem. E.g. let's use Dijkstra's algorithm to find the shortest path between two locations.
Meta-optimisation is finding the best possible process to do optimisation. E.g. let's use A* with a reasonable heuristic instead of Dijkstra's algorithm, because it'll be faster to run and give the same optimal result.
The meta-game here is that time-to-compute PLUS travel the path is the real thing that needs optimising - not just the path length.
I don't think it's that loose actually, at least not the way I see it used. usually the "meta" is about choosing between two or more roughly equipotent strategies/tactics based on what you expect your opponent to do. you predict what your opponent will do by observing current trends in the game. the meta certainly changes after balance updates, but it can also change organically over time as people try different things.
This interpretation seems to unnecessarily constrain strategy. A strategy is not just something you pick at random. A good strategy is chosen with all context in mind - including your opponents choice of tactics and strategy.
that's a fair point; "meta" is probably a subset of what people generally mean by "strategy", especially in military contexts.
in games though, I consider strategy to be something that arises more directly from the game mechanics and perhaps in response to your opponent over the course of a match, while meta comes from understanding the greater community ("meta" because the community exists outside of the game itself).
This is “meta” as in Most Effective Tactic Available, as opposed to the normal use of the word “meta” (“referring to itself or to the conventions of its genre; self-referential.”)
I don't know about this acronym... "meta" from the article is certainly not using it. The acronym definition breaks down because technically something can be meta and not be the most effective tactic available. Eg. when the rules of a game are too complex to solve in a short time, you will see players rally around a "meta" strategy until a more optimal one is discovered and vetted.
But the former is the latter because the most effective tactic available depends on what all of the other player in the game are going to do. The most effective tactic available is only the most effective given that other players are also going to choose the most effective tactic available.
1) a higher level of abstraction. For example, creating a class is programming. Creating a class factory (a class that creates classes) is meta programming.
2) self referential. The movie Adaption is meta, because it is about itself.
I would not call 1 metaprogramming. Meta means something like "outside of". Metaprogramming usually means higher order programming (programs that produce programs, such as source generation, lisp macros or templates).
Okay. It’s outside my area of expertise, so maybe I didn’t pick the best example. The internet seems to imply that there is a lot of debate as to what is meta programming.
Yes there is a general trend that a new "market place" opens up. It could be adwords, or it could be udemy. There is then a race to the top/bottom where the marketplace becomes popular and crowded out. The "crowd" progressively gets a worse deal (except for the winners of the crowd) and the owner makes more money.
For example adwords:
1. Crowd gets worse deal: average bidder pays more for ads, hard to make a profit, might break even if you are lucky. Might be OK in a new niche if lucky.
2. Winners: people with sharp marketing teams who can bid on the right keywords and have an
excellent sales funnel to take advantage. They can outbid the crowd and make a profit.
3. Owner: Google makes a tonne of money from ads of course:
Udemy:
1. Crowd gets worse deal: I saw a 80 hour course for $20 on there. Most are 20-30 hours course for $20. Course maker gets a fraction of that. 100's of similar course means the platform doesn't necessarily give you much traffic.
2. Winners: Some people sells thousands of units of their course on these platforms. Again those with good funnels to get them to buy off the platform probably win (I am guessing).
The meta game is like the bike shed. Everyone has an opinion about it. It is abstracted, full of analogies and therefore easy to talk about. It is the only way the experts can talk to the novices about the topic at hand. Note that the novice can't really talk back because they won't know when the analogies end.
How do you distinguish one meta opinion about the other? By looking at the merits of the person behind the opinion, looking at other data that distinguishes the expert from the novice.
If you then use the meta as a vehicle to find out which fundamentals are important, you better skip the meta all together and see what fundamentals the expert has.
Poker is a great example where players can be playing very different "meta" levels. You can play the math ("given my cards, what is the probability I have the best hand on the table?"), play your cash ("are the other players willing to lose the equivalent of a month's income if they are wrong?") or play the other players ("I will let you win a couple low stakes games in order to build your confidence and then clean you out once you start to bet bigger?")
The author's usage of "meta" doesn't match up with how I've seen it used elsewhere. He refers to the "metagame" when really he's just talking about the game itself.
He defines it when talking about Magic, where there's the two games. The match "game", once you sit down with your decks and draw 7. And the metagame, where you choose which decks to bring, what sideboard to pick, etc.
If there's a really popular rush deck, do you drop some cards which shut down blue control and put in some anti rush cards?
That will help when you match against the rush deck, but if everyone does it, then when you reach the finals you might be against the control deck.
That's the metagame, at least how it's used in those circles.
yes, the author seems to use "metagame" to mean a combination of pre-game strategizing (including creation opponent specific strategy) and post game review (+ absorbing lessons learned into the pre game strategizing for the next game).
Would I be correct in the following examples of Meta-game:
US Politics:
- Stacking the supreme court Vs the court case strategy itself
- Gerrymandering Vs Winning votes on merit
- How you play the Caucus nominations Vs policy
Business (internal to large companies):
- Gaming how funding flows vs Getting funding on merits
Business (external market)
- Finding the grey area in policy (e.g. Uber/ Airbnb)
- Lobbying
Meta gaming isn’t the same thing as cheating (or exploiting a rules grey area). It’s not gaming the system vs playing it honestly.
As far as I understand, the metagame is understanding how the rules reward certain strategies and over others, and how those strategies interact with each other. The reason the idea has so much currency in video games is that rules are constantly evolving as the game is updated and patched.
So like for gerrymandering, the metagame aspect is understanding that under the current rules, gerrymandering is a winning strategy. Actually executing that strategy and gerrymandering a district is the playing the game-game part, not the meta-game.
This is a really great article, and something I've been slowly realizing over the last few months.
I only wish he would explore the concept of playing your own meta in order to reach goals that are important to you (and maybe no-one else): hacking the system, so to speak. FIRE (financial independence/retire early) is an increasingly popular meta that does this.
I think the author is basically describing the "meta" as what is mathematically sort of a conformal space to the game space — loosely the idea that a conformal description of the game space lets you operate transformations on said space; and understand why it has the shape it has).
I've personally always focused on the meta indeed; I'm the kinda guy who goes for the map first in dungeons, because I'm more about coordinates than superstition (I'll take a matrix over an oracle, thank you very much). That works when, in the meta, finding the map is an expected player move by the developers (it even becomes part of the storytelling of exploration; think Zelda or Bioshock).
But in the real world, the developer's program is kinda like (maths \wedge physics)^chaos , so the meta is very much NOT clear-cut — there's no jury of life to rule that "this year, we'll outlaw dick moves in office politics", or that retribution for many comes next in the form of a #metoo. The players are anti-Shakespearian, they're chronically fuzzy and chaotic and non-trivial.
There are thus, from our "game space" standpoint (unable to grasp the higher-dimensionality of our conformal space), an infinity of possible meta-games, possible descriptions of what's conformal to us. There are religious descriptions and beliefs about that, there are theoretical social-science accounts, there are witnesses in the thousands or millions even who gave their truth in some book or other long form, there's what your neighbor says, what your best friend says, etc. You, the player, get to make your own meaning.
So we kinda perform "loops", from our game space and back, passing by the meta: we try to grasp at it, understand the "higher" or "deeper" mechanisms. How can I get this...?, Why is it that...?, "What is this...?" By trial and error, we manage to get our bearings, have a "feel of" or "sense for" this field / domain / situation / locality we're in. We kinda "know the ways" to think outside this box, after enough time contemplating it.
A truly "superior intelligence" (like we're superior to ants) would probably solve our "meta" like it's basic dominos — but again it's not magic, nor categorial, but really just more of the same: computing power and specialized features devoted to analyzing patterns up to some order.
So in the investing game the actual game is buying and selling and the Meta game is to do good diligence. I would say for most things the meta game is obvious. For programming, meta game is learn the API and different patterns as the language evolve.
You can apply the same analysis to the study of how "entire societies / nations generate Wealth" and get an interesting picture of the international econo-political metagame throughout history...
How much would people pay for an expertise development app? Been coding one as a side project for some time now and I'm thinking I have to put it in front of actual users as soon as possible.
[off-topic] Kinda late to the party, but always a pleasant surprise to see an article written by a former schoolmate you've lost touched with trending on HN :)
It's interesting that in the early days of Google Adsense it did cost 100x less to advertise, and publishers got 100x more. I'm not that good at math, but does that mean Google takes a 99.99% cut!? Or more likely they rigged the market in the beginning in order to gain publishers and advertisers, eg. they subsidized advertisers and over-compensated publishers. Making the market explode with advertisers and people looking to monetize web content...
For me, the good part of the article started in the section “The Meta in Real Life.”
I think President Obama played a meta game using technology to win election. President Trump played a meta game using skills developed as a TV host to win election.
I think, in a way, that Peter Thiel’s thesis in the book “Zero to One” is also about playing a meta game to develop monopoly type businesses.
I have always loved using Lisp languages and in a sense continually extending a language to “meet the problem to be solved” is another form of meta game. Rise above the fray, look at things from high altitude, be a good generalist, and win.
There are many games and many meta-games in this field. Here are two.
For SWEs, one base game is to earn the most money. The play-space appears to be one's current company, so working hard on company-beneficial projects and doing well should lead to promotions and pay-rises.
A meta-game for SWEs is realising that there are many companies that might hire you, so working on projects that benefit your current company may not be the best strategy. Instead, some SWEs attempt to work on projects that make their CV look more attractive to other companies.
A base game for Managers is trying to get the most output out of the team of SWEs available, by shuffling work around, training people, putting experienced and inexperience people on the same project to spread knowledge, etc. There's a lot of strategy and tactics in this; trading-off short term losses for long term gains, and the like.
A meta-game for Managers is being aware that some of those SWEs may be playing their own meta-game. Do you help that SWE to go up and out to replace them with a different SWE, perhaps with a more useful skillset? Do you cynically restrict them from working on CV-positive projects in an attempt (likely to fail and definitely unethical!) to keep them around? Do you find ways to pay or reward them more pre-emptively so that they're less interested in their meta-game?
Sometimes these meta-games are "too clever by half" and you may well be better off ignoring them and focussing on the base game itself. The important point is to be aware that such meta-games exist, and that even when people appear to be playing the same game, they may in fact be playing to lose in order to win a meta-game instead.
The meta of software development is vague. Software development and the job aspects can be completely independent - and tightly coupled.
So, really, the meta of software development as it pertains to your job would likely be more about the meta of your organization. You could try to scale up those ideas to a whole career and across all organizations but it's gonna be hard. What works in one place won't work in another - but if you know how to recognize the meta within each organization, you can find a meta that you think you'll do well in, and then try to work at places that follow that meta. But - honestly - I've found that hard as many organizations aren't very upfront with how they actually operate.
We've all likely found that being really good at software development doesn't end up getting you a reward at your place of employment. You can be exceptionally good at something - the best - but still lose frequently. True of games as it is with life. It could be because the place you're working at is very team oriented - your team does well, you all get rewarded. It could be purely that your manager dictates it and won't recognize you. It could be that you're in an organization that doesn't value software engineers at all. It could be that you're good at the software development but haven't engaged on the more social aspects and that's what's key to getting rewards. I've had talks where the reason I wasn't getting rewarded is because I seemed too carefree about things - they wanted someone who seemed stressed out and really concerned all the time. Is that really related to software development in itself? I don't think so. There's a fuckton of reasons that aren't related to software development in itself that dictate why you won't progress. And I think that varies a lot between organizations/teams.
Therefore, I'd say there is no big meta for a career in software development. I'd say there is a meta for work in different organizations. (As I don't see a lot of these things as specific to software development but specific to just general work culture)
I was #1 in a highly competitive game (with a lot of players). I was a top player (top 10, easily) in another game (highly competitive, but lower player count)
I was #1 in another field for a short period of time (related to computers, but not games) and then I was top in a third field (nothing to do with computers).
The third field has nothing to do with the first two.
The approach is the same. There is no magic, and I don't even believe in "talent".
You have to work, work hard and work concentrated and fix your weakest points. Everybody does the same and once you get sufficient mastery, you can see it for yourself. It's like lifting a veil. No magic, no geniuses, no special talents, only brute hard work with a lot of mistakes. If you are lucky, nobody will know you made them. If you are highly intelligent, you'll learn from the mistakes of others, so on average you'll stop making mistakes faster. That's the best you can hope for.
I'll talk a little bit about esports, since I am most familiar with that. Being #1 is not easy at all. I would compare it to regular sports and say it's very close, in terms of competitiveness.
Most people involved are objectively dumb, though, so I can't compare it to chess or something like math olympiad or math/physics PhD at a stacked university. So it's very similar to sports, where people are also generally dumb. So high intelligence is not a prerequisite for this thing.
I've also met dumb people in chess and math, so it's not a guarantee. But they can't be dumb and top in chess/math/physics in the same time. That I haven't met yet.
The approach to become #1 is the same for everyone in every field.
Fix the areas you are weak at, re-evaluate where you are weak, keep working at it, don't repeat mistakes, try to learn from other people's mistakes. Work focused, don't waste time, be honest. I see people putting thousands of hours into games, for example, and still end up being newbies. That's time wasted, that's not productive at all.
tldr once you become truly good, among the top, in any field, you will know the "secret" in how to become good/top in any other field. There are no special fields or even special people. People that are truly good in certain fields can become good in any other field, given enough time and assuming it makes sense for them (1.60m playing basketball will never be among the elite, that's just due to the nature of the game).
If someone is #1 (or top 10 or whatever) in any field, I want to hear your thoughts anonymously, since apparently you cant say this out loud.
In my opinion the byproduct of first principles thinking is precisely the opposite of meta : you wouldn't get a meta, but several metas for the same game, since you built your conceptualization from the fundamentals which are established truths.
Metas seem to be built around constrains, limitations, exploits, or other forms of disruption that are introduced in the game in a cyclical fashion (new rules, new laws, new markets, new medium, new tools, etc).
Totally disagree. First principle thinking is a clearer formulation of what the author wanted to achieve with the meta concept. For example in the marketing example where the meta dictates movement from adsense to xyz platforms you can also get there by first principles, which is finding the most cost effective way to reach the audience.
When you're thinking from first principles you are not disregarding the current conditions, including constraints, you are just not allowing yourself to be a lazy and are constantly reevaluating the situation from base. Many people love to talk meta but they end up with a hazy understanding of fundamentals and end up behind the curve, very detrimental. First principle thinking just avoids these issues.
BTW. Games are not perfectly analogous to IRL. Games can sometimes be (imo poorly) designed to function completely based on a fluctuating rps system that forces a meta, where if everyone goes rock you'll have the highest percentages going paper. IRL doesn't really work that way. Pikemen beats cavalry, cavalry beats swordsmen and swordsmen beats pikemen, but guns beat all 3 and it's completely OP.
Mastering the fundamentals will make you 'good' to a level that very few people ever reach. It's not until you reach a level where everyone around you has a mastery of the fundamentals, that the meta comes into play.
source: coached and managed professional esports players, in multiple games, who have competed in the world championship of their respective titles.