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To get good, go after the metagame

• shinryuu 7y ago
  First time I ever understood what "the meta" refers to. Though I've definitely participated in the metagame without realizing it before.
  • richk449 7y 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. https://dotesports.com/general/news/what-is-the-meta-meaning-24834 https://dotesports.com/general/news/what-is-the-meta-meaning...
    • wkey 7y ago
      So what is your definition? :)
      • richk449 7y ago
        I can think of two definitions: 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.
        • vnorilo 7y ago
          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).
          • richk449 7y ago
            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.
        • NoodleIncident 7y ago
          This article is about the metagame, which is derived from this meaning. It just gets confusingly shortened back to meta in some contexts
    • ffgddd_gfghvc 7y ago
      Yeah meta in games is used very loosely — the M4 in CoD is meta, meaning the best available. I got the feeling reading this that the author is more familiar with the video game usage and worked backwards to give it some more substance.
      • jpxw 7y ago
        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.”)
        • plinkplonk 7y ago
          thank you for this! I was reading the article with the latter meaning in mind, and got quite confused. Should read the comments on HN first!
        • 0xffff2 7y ago
          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.
        • laughingbovine 7y ago
          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.
          • chubbyrabbit 7y ago
            I think the author lack the context of META being the acronym for "most effective tactics available", as most of the gaming world is using it.
    • marcus_holmes 7y ago
      I had the same - the "choice of strategies" in Splendor is just that - strategy. The "meta game" would be the level above that.
      • shadowsun7 7y ago
        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.
        • marcus_holmes 7y ago
          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". Made me think, though. Thanks :)
      • gowld 7y ago
        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.
        • 7y ago
    • na85 7y ago
      >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. All of that is both strategy and meta.
      • shadowsun7 7y ago
        OP here. Exactly this.
      • richk449 7y ago
        Eh, it’s all semantics. What you are calling meta has been called strategy for thousands of years. No big deal - words change. I’ll get used to it.
        • nimblegorilla 7y ago
          Meta is an aspect of strategy, but the terms aren't interchangeable.
        • fenomas 7y ago
          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.
    • gowld 7y ago
      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.
      • bena 7y ago
        Meta is weird. 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.
        • laughingbovine 7y ago
          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.
    • Schwolop 7y ago
      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.
• Proziam 7y ago
  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.
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • wpasc 7y ago
    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!
    • Proziam 7y ago
      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.
• alasdair_ 7y ago
  “The metagame” in MTG was popularized by the game’s creator, Richard Garfield after playing a lot of Cosmic Encounter and other games. He wrote a great paper on it here: https://edt210gamestechsociety.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/2000-garfield-metagame.pdf https://edt210gamestechsociety.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/2...
  • tdy_err 7y ago
    TL;DR: Magic became competitive and players influenced Magic by demanding competitive rules.
• asood123 7y ago
  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.
  • majos 7y ago
    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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushing_hands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushing_hands
    • dillonmckay 7y ago
      Yes, it is a martial art, and there are some interesting moves. Also, if you enjoy that sort of thing and action movies, I recommend: Tai Chi Master https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0108281 https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0108281 Man of Tai Chi https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2016940/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2016940/ There are also random youtube videos of various ‘push hands’ techniques.
      • rasz 7y ago
        Its TMA, as effective as ballroom dancing. Do not try to delude yourself into thinking it has any defense qualities.
    • rasz 7y ago
      its pure bullshido https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-KX99T5r3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-KX99T5r3A
      • reddickulous 7y ago
        I agree and it's interesting that he also went on to become a black belt in jiu jitsu which is mostly not bullshido.
• plinkplonk 7y ago
  Does the author actually define "metagame" anywhere? He seems to use the term throughout the article to mean multiple subtly different things.
  • nonanonymous 7y ago
    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.
    • Tyr42 7y ago
      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.
      • plinkplonk 7y ago
        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).
  • viburnum 7y ago
    Yeah, this article is a woolly mess.
• euix 7y ago
  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.
  • joncrane 7y ago
    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?
    • athenot 7y ago
      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.
      • bluGill 7y ago
        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...
    • DevKoala 7y ago
• Aardwolf 7y ago
  > 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
  • bena 7y ago
    I think that's true of every sport with a weight class. You want to be the heaviest guy in your classification. I don't think that's metagaming so much as just simple min-maxing.
    • UnFleshedOne 7y ago
      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.
      • kyuudou 7y ago
        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".
• mangoman 7y ago
  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)
  • xixixao 7y ago
    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.
    • digibo 7y ago
      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.
• deleted 7y ago
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• zeveb 7y ago
  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.
• KaoruAoiShiho 7y ago
  This article is really the same thing as Elon Musk's "think from first principles", except Musk's formulation is much better imo.
  • libertine 7y ago
    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).
    • KaoruAoiShiho 7y ago
      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.
• runawaybottle 7y ago
  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.
• gorpomon 7y ago
  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.
  • roel_v 7y ago
    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.
  • gowld 7y ago
    Is intentionally using meta when you are bad at it a good meta?
• gbasin 7y ago
  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/ https://garybasin.com/thinking-toys/ I think this can be done systematically...
  • juliend2 7y ago
    The "skill tree" image seem like a good mental model[1] for learning. [1] https://fs.blog/mental-models/ https://fs.blog/mental-models/
• dillonmckay 7y ago
  So any Tetris 99 training suggestions?
• F_J_H 7y ago
  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: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17079369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17079369 Basic idea - you can be too clever for your own good, and as a result, fail miserably at the meta game, which less clever people don't do.
  • draw_down 7y ago
    I think this is a much better treatment of the idea. I had forgotten about this, thanks.
• pretendscholar 7y ago
  When did meta come to mean strategy? It can't really be 'meta' if its about one specific game or implementation.
  • zerocrates 7y ago
    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.
  • screye 7y ago
    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.
    • echelon 7y ago
      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. Metagame is truly emergent phenomena.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• jason46 7y ago
  Git gud, is the correct term.
• colonCapitalDee 7y ago
  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-report-stage-3 https://overwatchleague.com/en-us/news/23053244/the-meta-rep... (WARNING: autoplay video).
  • jimduk 7y ago
    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.
• cjmb 7y ago
  Good article and a nice read :) 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...
• aliswe 7y ago
  Is management perhaps the "meta" of software development?
  • bradlys 7y ago
    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)
  • Schwolop 7y ago
    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.
• seniorsassycat 7y ago
  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.
  • chrchang523 7y ago
    http://gamedesignadvance.com/?p=2346 http://gamedesignadvance.com/?p=2346
• scott_s 7y ago
  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.
  • 83457 7y ago
    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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0Jj7r3CLwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0Jj7r3CLwQ
  • _hardwaregeek 7y ago
    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.
• tylerjwilk00 7y ago
  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]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUxt--mMjwA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUxt--mMjwA
• WhompingWindows 7y ago
  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. https://youtu.be/yF6GczAXpJI?t=3185 https://youtu.be/yF6GczAXpJI?t=3185
• jonas21 7y ago
  So, is learning to identify and excel at metagames is the meta-metagame?
• mc3 7y ago
  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). 3. Owner: Udemy does well. Same applies to the app stores!
• z3t4 7y ago
  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...
• _pastel 7y ago
  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?
  • 317070 7y ago
    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.
    • 7y ago
• Paddywack 7y ago
  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 Would this be a correct understanding?
  • smogcutter 7y ago
    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.
• mobjack 7y ago
  The current meta strategy for getting a software engineering job is practicing leetcode.
• m3kw9 7y ago
  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.
• ph0rque 7y ago
  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.
• hi5eyes 7y ago
  metagame with opponents within similar elo is the most important
• sergioro 7y ago
  A somehow related quote from Paul Halmos (https://youtu.be/LwMcz1Yh8tc?t=1506 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."
• artur_makly 7y ago
  And for tennis.. I highly recommend the 'inner game' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QEKR9TVQXk&t=13595s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QEKR9TVQXk&t=13595s you can apply this zen mastery to basically any physical game and always 'win'
• hvasilev 7y ago
  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.
  • dblank9 7y ago
    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.
  • imtringued 7y ago
    Because most old tools absolutely suck. People aren't chasing the new stuff. They are escaping from the old stuff.
• 205guy 7y ago
  I see what you did there: "for content marketing [...] now we do longer, more comprehensive guides, and we cross-launch those to Product Hunt and Hacker News"
• minusSeven 7y ago
  I wonder if this applies to a game of Chess or Go? What would be meta for that?
• bukson 7y ago
  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 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. It is also very interesting that you can sometimes find Equilibrium by researching "counters" or using best response dynamic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_response) 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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miu3ldl-nY4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miu3ldl-nY4 https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/bitstream/handle/1773/22797/Jaffe_washington_0250E_11528.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/bitstream/h... I don't want to nitpick the word meta, just maybe someone will find more info if he or she knew how to google it properly. ps I created account specially to write this comment :)
• zrkrlc 7y ago
  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.
• ipython 7y ago
  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. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
  • falcor84 7y ago
    But then the question becomes on which level of OODA loop you should spend your focus, right?
• mark_l_watson 7y ago
  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. Good article.
• navane 7y ago
  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.
• K0SM0S 7y ago
  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.
• Balanceinfinity 7y ago
  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
• nr1throwaway 7y ago
  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.
• takinola 7y ago
  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?")
• netvarun 7y ago
  [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 :) Hi shadowsun7!
• IndexPointer 7y ago
  I'm not sure I understand what he means by meta game. Is it adapting to rule changes? Or simply focusing on abusing the rules instead of just being good at the fundamentals of the game?