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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
> 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.
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".
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)
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).
> 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
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.
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.
[+] [-] Proziam|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] WhompingWindows|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] timerol|6 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] rc-1140|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] novok|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inerte|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mercer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kingkongjaffa|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wpasc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggambetta|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] beaker52|6 years ago|reply
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".
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/244992/mind
It's great for giving people a taste of the thrill of meta.
[+] [-] shadowsun7|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpxw|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gentleman11|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tikhonj|6 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] namelosw|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] gowld|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] scott_s|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] _hardwaregeek|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] euix|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joncrane|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] downerending|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zackmorris|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bukson|6 years ago|reply
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)
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://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 :)
[+] [-] hvasilev|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seniorsassycat|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gorpomon|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] alasdair_|6 years ago|reply
He wrote a great paper on it here: https://edt210gamestechsociety.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/2...
[+] [-] asood123|6 years ago|reply
Thesis that learning one thing deeply helps learn other (unrelated) things makes total sense to me.
[+] [-] _pastel|6 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] mangoman|6 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] WhompingWindows|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] sergioro|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colonCapitalDee|6 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] Aardwolf|6 years ago|reply
It also has the metagame of carefully crafting your weight to optimally fit in your preferred weight class
[+] [-] zeveb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pretendscholar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gbasin|6 years ago|reply
I think this can be done systematically...
[+] [-] tylerjwilk00|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUxt--mMjwA
[+] [-] runawaybottle|6 years ago|reply
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.