To get good, go after the metagame
commoncog.com
commoncog.com
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.
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.
I'm not familiar enough with Overwatch specifically, but it sounds like there isn't enough income and prize pools to go around. The top team may earn a decent wage and splashy amounts, but there isn't enough at the 2nd or top 10 rung to support a thriving ecosystem longer-term.
I'm more familiar with the LoL/DotA scene where there's enough smaller tournaments and the prize pool+sponsorships are enough to cover a wide range of top talent. Yeah, there's a lot of hype about winning the #1 Internationals, but that's only for one team out of hundreds that play. Or compare to how LoL is set up with their leagues where the top X teams get to play consistently and take in a steady income. Plus their broadcasting system to bring in more income to support the scene.
Similarly, you can look at stream numbers to get a feel for other income available to the players.
In general, without a healthy "middle-class" and "upper middle-class" of players to bring excitement and income, you lack the buzz and support to build top-tier competition longer term. And those don't exist unless there are ways for them to keep playing and monetize their skills.
Fortunately, if you're grinding up the FPS ladders, most FPS games tend to have more transferable skills letting you move from game to game more easily than some genres. Ninja is pretty famous for being the best at Fortnite, but he was a pro PUBG player and pro Halo 3 player before that. So it's not uncommon to see FPS pro players shift between the more in vogue FPS game of the time. (Caveat that not all FPS games reward the same skills and all that, CS is not TF2 is not CoD is not Fortnite is not Overwatch)
I would argue that these complaints aren't understanding the 'meta' of capital investment in the current climate.
When I first started coaching LoL I came in to coach a team where the coaches I replaced suffered from some pretty serious delusions that come from the same place. They had very strong beliefs about playing 'the meta' and the value of certain flex picks at the time. When I took over and took the team back to fundamentals and reduced champion pools by half - winrates skyrocketed. It's really easy to want to copy what you see works for other people, but it's not always the best course of action.
I would say players around the border of silver and gold would benefit by paying attention to the meta.
And then there's players like BoxBox, who isn't exactly a one-trick, but clearly mains Riven. [1]He's at ladder rank 334 at the moment.
And as a final example, there's the monster himself, Apdo. [2]Apdo is a famous player in China who has on multiple occasions been rank 1 (or boosted people to rank 1...) using mostly Twisted Fate. He's more than talented enough to play any champion well, but is most known for TF. Similar to BoxBox and Riven, but on a whole different plane of skill.
All this is to say that there's no real need to change champions to continue climbing until you're at least above diamond, or if you want to play with a group where a synergistic team composition would be meaningful (like amateur tournaments).
[0]https://www.twitch.tv/cowsep
[1]https://na.op.gg/summoner/userName=boxbox
There is no faking it in chess. You either grasp the game or you get soundly defeated over and over. That is also true of esports titles, which is why I fell in love with them.
In FPS, aiming moving and ducking are like learning how to move the pieces in chess. And sure, those are the basics to even play.
But when people talk about "fundamentals" they are talking about the emergent things that come from those skills and are usually unique to the game. In chess, this is stuff like don't hang your pieces, tactics like spotting skewers or forks, understanding endgames, and later general strategic goals like controlling the center or develop your pieces to "good" squares.
In FPS games, this often deals with understanding the flow of a map (choke points vs open areas, cover and sniper locations), proper navigation (efficient pathing!), role synergy, and how a match develops (at about 30 seconds I should expect an opponent, if they went straight path A, to show up around this corner).
MOBA games moving and attacking and using a skill are the language. Fundamentals involve map awareness, ganking, vision control, wave management, etc.
Fighting games move, jump, attack, block is the language. Understanding zone control, the Rock-Paper-Scissors of strike/block/grapple, how to manage your health and special meters, character movesets/matchups are the fundamentals. Picking character X against player Y is the meta.
Once you have all of that squared away, you can start doing "meta." That is figuring out optimal picks vs particularly optimal setups, researching your opponent to build a specific toolkit against them, etc.
To give an example from a game I love dearly: Halo. The number one fundamental isn't aim, or knowing sick trick nades, or masterful timing of power weapons. It's positioning. Positioning controls where your opponents respawn, it controls where your team respawns, and it is the single most impactful part of "map control." Good aim means nothing if you stand in the wrong places at the wrong times. Power weapons are useless if you get yourself back-smacked by opponents getting split-spawned that you weren't aware of.
Fundamentals are (somewhat) unique to a game, and they typically reveal themselves either once you've intuitively started applying them, or through thoughtful analysis.
1. At the beginning of the game the forces stand in equilibrium.
2. Correct play on both sides maintains this equilibrium and leads to a drawn game.
3. Therefore a player can win only as a consequence of an error made by the opponent. (There is no such thing as a winning move.)
4. As long as the equilibrium is maintained, an attack, however skilful, cannot succeed against correct defence. Such a defence will eventually necessitate the withdrawal and regrouping of the attacking pieces and the attacker will then inevitably suffer disadvantage.
5. Therefore a player should not attack until he already has an advantage, caused by the opponent's error, that justifies the decision to attack.
6. At the beginning of the game a player should not at once seek to attack. Instead, a player should seek to disturb the equilibrium in his favour by inducing the opponent to make an error - a preliminary before attacking.
7. When a sufficient advantage has been obtained, a player must attack or the advantage will be dissipated."
Note that this is still not actually proven! But it is generally accepted.
If the players are less skilled than this, i.e. they aren't going to play the best move every time, then any analysis you want to make about whether the starting position is a theoretical draw becomes moot because they aren't going to play the theoretical best moves anyway.
But if you assume the game is a theoretical draw from the starting position, then any game you lose is ultimately down to you playing at least one suboptimal move (otherwise you would have been able to force a draw), and any game you win is ultimately down to your opponent playing at least one suboptimal move (otherwise he would have been able to force a draw).
As it happens, I've just got home from playing a chess match in the local league. I lost, which means I made at least one suboptimal move, although I'm quite confident I made many!
Cognition and agency in the real world is often hierarchical in nature. You learn a task by breaking it down into simpler tasks, and if necessary breaking down the simpler tasks into yet simpler. This is due to nothing more than algorithmic efficiency (when at all possible -- it usually is IRL), divide and conquer.
The fundamentals are the basic tasks which higher level tasks rely on. Sometimes (quite common really) the nature of this (inverted) tree is such that the higher level tasks have a sort of soft max-min relationship: your overall skill will only be about as good as your weakest subskill. An example that comes to mind is manual driving. You could be the most brilliant, strategic, high-reflex rally race car drive in the world, if you miss most of your stick shifts you will likely be a mediocre driver, if even competitive. Shifting properly and quickly makes a significant difference. So much that it's almost completely futile to practice those higher skills unless you've nailed down the basics.
When you're just having 'fun', learning something intuitively, without the sharp focus on improving, it's easy to neglect those fundamentals. They are likely areas where you have some natural relative difficulty, which can lead to shying away from them (in larger contexts sometimes this is even wise -- you want to use what you're good at afterall!) -- it could be because they're uncomfortable, painful, repetitive, boring, too difficult (break it down!) and so on. Compensating for weaknesses exists I believe, but in high levels of competition it's something extremely subtle; again risking generalizations almost every high skill individual will have fundamentals mastered.
Most of my activity is academic, and I have some anecdotes in this regard. I feel like I've really evolved when (a) I've focused on learning the basics of my field really well (going down to the math foundations and axioms) (b) focused on improving weaknesses. It wasn't intuitive to me that this attention to fundamentals could yield so much.
edit: It should be noted (as others noted) that identifying what are the fundamentals can be something difficult itself. Common tools here are reviewing your games/production/etc, or asking others (teachers, peers, etc).
For example: Relative value of the pieces, Control of the center, Pawn structure, Tactics, Initiative, Tempo, Opposition, Keep the position balanced, Develop multiple ideas/areas (strategy), Control open lines (files/ranks/diagonals) and crossings
If you do that in silver league, you're going to stomp 99% of your opponents even if your scouting and strategizing and unit compositions are all awful. You could do nothing but make a single unit type and still win.
Of course, if you do this at least somewhat well you'll rapidly "level up" in the ranking system to the point where you'll need to actually start scouting and reacting.
I actually had games where I was too focused on this where I hadn't made a single aggressive move, the opponent pushed and saw my massive army and just quit.
We had my ex-wife's brother living with us for a while and he wanted to play StarCraft. I was like, "Sure, we can play 2v2 against the computer until you're comfortable". He was like "Nah, I've played Age of Empires, I know how RTS works, let's play 1v1." I tried to tell him, "StarCraft is fast". He insisted. So we played.
I built workers, sent a scout across the map, found his base. He was hoarding mineral until he could afford a barracks. I was pumping out workers. I built a secondary base in his expansion area, a barracks and a factory and staged a bunch of siege tanks along his opening, then drop-shipped several marines, firebats, and medics behind his mineral line.
He had just started building his second barracks. He sent his troops to try and handle the situation, then I pushed my siege tanks in from the other side and ruined his barracks.
There is overlap, in that the simplest single-move tactics (forks and skewers) are almost the same as catching immediately hung pieces.
I applied chess-logic (focusing on gradients of control) and demolished my opponent, who refused to believe it was only my first game, and refused to play again.
> 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.
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.
You are coming with the assumption that "fun" is some objective standard that is on a scale with "playing to win" on the other end.
For some people, playing to win and finding the metagame is the fun.
And there is nothing wrong with that. And too often I find that people who complain about people who are just "playing to win" are really just trying to complain about losing without seeming sore. The pattern is easy to spot, anything that causes them to lose is somehow "playing wrong" or not "fun". There's apparently some intangible, undefinable, nebulous quality being lost. But in reality, the only thing actually being lost is your chance to win.
> There's apparently some intangible, undefinable, nebulous quality being lost.
Yes, it's called "fun". It's using the game as a platform for creativity and expression, not merely optimization for a fixed arbitrary set of rules.
Saying that this doesn't count is you saying "you're having fun wrong".
It's also why professional sports evolve rules to stop camping strategies like scoring 1 pt and then sitting on the ball/puck unitl the clock runs out.
And I never said fun didn't count. I said people find fun in different ways and trying to police how other people have fun is a bad look. So please, if you want to argue against me. Do it against what I actually said and not just what you wish I said.
Can you clarify this? Is this because most people don't care about mastering the fundamentals in the first place? I can't tell whether I'm missing something and the idea is more complex, or that's what you're saying.
1. People think they already have the fundamentals 'down'
2. Actually mastering the fundamentals can be boring and make a game feel like work (which, if you don't truly enjoy pushing the limits in a game, it is.)
A totally random example from League of Legends. 99% of players go into game after game and literally never review their previous games. They will spam games but literally never go into a custom game to practice last hitting. Or, they'll play a different champion every game, instead of putting in the repetition required to fully comprehend all the matchups they will find themselves in.
In short, very few players think of their most time spent practicing fundamentals as a valuable investment. Related, most players never even learn what the fundamentals are because revealing them takes a lot of effort.
For example, Starcraft is a game largely driven by economy or 'macro' rather than ultra-fast reflexes. However, the importance of macro is basically hidden from novice players. Their in-game experience is 'the other player always has more stuff than I do!' which they often attribute to build-order or other game decisions. It actually takes a while before a player really gets in tune with the idea that they need to be deploying resources ASAP and balancing the resources they acquire with the unit composition they are going to have in the next [insert window of time].
We used an iPad to record swings of our little leaguers and it made a huge difference for them.
It helps because it’s easier to see what is happening vs hearing it. One example that we would see is kids dropping the back shoulder when they swing. Once they see it, they correct.
However, the key isn't necessarily video recordings. It's deliberately practicing individual things you are bad at in isolation until you are good at them.
We need to record LoL and StarCraft games because it's tough to pause and redo something in the middle of a match. Similarly recording baseball swings or people dancing or swimming is useful for reviewing the complete action.
But when you practice piano, you can pause and redo a measure or line until you get it right, then slowly reincorporate it as part of the whole piece.
The WORST thing you can do is keep playing and think "I'll fix that later." Because inevitably you'll play a piece again, probably do the same mistake, and now you're actually practicing the mistake and ingraining it into your memory.
A video recording and reviewing it of a whole piece can help you go back and isolate your mistakes though. But it's just a tool for the goal of identifying and fixing mistakes.
My wife had trouble with a certain move in dog agility until she saw herself do it on video and it was clear what was wrong.
3. Mastering the fundamentals can just be hard. E.g. movement and aim in most first-person shooters. Mastering these fundamentals can be hard to the point of even professional players having significant gaps, e.g. players that are known to have excellent movement but lackluster aim, or vice versa.
Raw aim = mechanics.
Crosshair placement = fundamentals.
Basic Movement = mechanics.
Pathing = fundamentals.
You're absolutely right about things just being hard though. The gaps between even professional players can be huge in one area and nonexistent in another. Once you take that and apply it at the team level, it's easy to understand why a player could shine among a certain group, and do terribly with another, even if both groups were of very similar 'skill.'
It's pretty hard to go straight from DATA -> ACTIONABLE COACHING DECISIONS
It's much easier to go from COACHES INTUITION + SUPPORTING DATA -> COACHING DECISION
I'm not aware of any other coach (but there probably is some) that has the technical skills to build the kind of tools that would be required. Bear in mind, most games don't actually give you all the data you'd want to look at. That said, there were a few folks who made a killing in esports betting for a while.
I only box casually for fitness but I like that the teacher tries to teach good habits.
A direct experience report on the same topic from a particular game.
The "fundamentals" are usually the 80% mark on this graph: it's the generally agreed upon set of skills that are relevant in 80% of situations, so if you have your fundamentals down better than your opponent, you will win in 80% of those situations. The meta might win you the other 20%, but that's capped at 20%.
1) Literacy. Can you move and shoot in the FPS? Know how pieces move in chess? Basics of the how to play. You must master these and make them reflexive to move forward.
2) Fundamentals. The emergent gameplay that arises from those basic rules. But importantly these are all contained within the game. I usually break these up into Tactics and Strategy. Tactics are the moment-to-moment events. Strategy are longer-term goals that help guide you towards victory, and understanding how overlapping or even conflicting strategies can work in synergy and in trade-offs.
For example, in chess tactics are things like recognizing forks and skewers. Strategy involves "controlling the center" or "develop your pieces to good squares."
In MOBAs, last hitting, skill combos, space control are the tactics. Strategy can involve knowing when to push, when to group to gank vs split push, or farm vs gank decisions.
Interestingly some game types have more tactics/strategy components. Twitch FPS games tend to be almost all tactics with a bit of strategy (gun X better in situation Y). Starcraft rewards strategy more heavily (do better macro!).
These are, as you mention, skills that will apply to the vast majority of games because they are baked into the rules of the game.
3) The Meta. Once you are near the Fundamentals skill cap, you can use information outside of the game to get an edge against similar opponents. I'm about to play player X, and they usually like to do Y, so I should prepare a counter strategy Z. A lot of players seem to really like character A because of these advantages, perhaps I should learn A and how to counter the most common tactics using my character's skillset.
Note knowing the Meta also helps prune what information (Fundamentals) you need to learn and maintain. If no one plays character Foo, then you (probably) don't need to understand their kit as intimately. But then someone could use it as an off-meta pick to surprise you! So you should be at least familiar enough to refute it just in case.
When skill level differs even a little bit, metagame becomes non-deciding factor.
And you're right, for games with high efficiency and public knowledge you can often just grind through optimal play.
However, for games with hidden information, you can play theoretical optimally, but you can also gain an additional edge if you can properly model your opponent. I'm thinking like in Poker. There's mathematically correct play, but because you play against folks who don't play mathematically correct you could get an extra edge by properly modeling the faults of your opponent you can exploit!
I think European style board games are great examples. Euro board games are often designed in a way where there are 3-6 different "currencies" in the game that are vaguely interchangeable in terms of progress towards the victory conditions, but these currencies have situational tradeoffs. It's usually a safe bet to play a T-shaped strategy where you focus on a few currencies but dabble in the rest enough to influence the game conditions to favor you. Scoring mechanisms often explicitly reward being T-shaped and gameplay mechanics often explicitly favor T-shaped strategies, so regardless of whether the AI is explicitly trying to play a meta strategy, it's probably going to look like a meta strategy because the meta is T-shaped.
So, yeah, if you know around the Gold ranking the meta seems to bias towards folks playing Terran using a Reaper at time X, then the meta knowledge gives a quick and easy boost since you're prepared.
But that's a temporary boost. In Plat or Diamond the meta is often different due to the increase in skill floor from improved fundamentals. This is why folks often say just MACRO BETTER instead of chasing optimizing meta strats. Better long-term reward.
Which lets top tier players troll high level players by going jokingly off-meta. In L4D and L4D2, we would do what's called rushing against top ESL teams as a way of embarrassing people who played in those leagues.
The metagame of 2D fighting games is actually a series of very fast rock paper scissors games. It's all about beating the opponent's counter to what they think you'll do.
Your second sentence is mostly it, although it really generalized and lessened what it means to learn your fundamentals; learning your character's options are and what the basic flow of combat will be based on those options. Fundamentals gives you the tools and skillset to play the rock-paper-scissors metagame you've described (Team Fortress 2 also behaved like that). Things that would fall under fundamentals for something like Street Fighter would be:
- learning basic ranges on the stage (SF4/5's "grid" stage highlights this really well)
- learning the range of your character's moves (i.e., Chun Li's standing heavy punch/fierce has considerable reach, more than 1 square on the grid stage)
- using your jab/short to "check" aggression
- using your anti-air moves to catch your opponent's jump-in attacks
- rudimentary okizeme (after you knock the opponent to the ground, you can catch them with either damage or block pressure)
- what general actions beat other general actions (blocks beat moves, grabs beat blocks, jumps beat grabs)
The list goes on to some extent before it starts mingling with more refined actions. While it's rarely a 1:1 translation, things like the above have plenty of carry-over between 2D fighters, and the concepts themselves apply to 3D fighters like Tekken. I'd also go so far as to include knowing what bad habits are as part of fundamentals, like mashing fast buttons while still blocking or after getting up from being knocked down.
It's been buried in the comments but someone posted a link to Richard Garfield's MTG paper about "metagame" and I like his definition of metagame: "It is how a game interfaces with life". The game of rock-paper-scissors doesn't exist in a vacuum: even at a low or casual level, understanding the fundamentals allows a player to make educated guesses about how an opponent will behave during that game of rock-paper-scissors. It's not concrete, obviously, but noting what fundies the opponent has and which ones they're not good at or are completely missing can change how a player approaches the fight over the course of the game.
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.
Regulation is more of a pay to win game.
If you have money, you can afford the compliance experts to find you every loophole.
If you have even more money, you can get new holes written into regulation, tailored specifically for you.
1. There was no one place that held all the data one was expected to know. Regs were strewn over legislative artifacts, departmental implementatikn documents, best practice documents, and international standards. Also, more than one class of regulations potentially covered efforts in the space. There was also no one site listing the locations of everything.
2. The regulations had evolved from an earlier time where an existing regulatory framework was adopted to try to fit new classes of things, and the mapping didn't work perfectly.
3. The regulations were written in a very high level manner to allow freedom of implementation and to make sure that the regulations didn't constrain tech development. Unfortunately, that meant that there were no suggested implementations which made it difficult for new entrants to the space (especially startups who can't afford to hire consultants) to understand how to actually comply simply.
4. There was ambiguity about what systems fit into which regulatory class as systems were advancing quickly and were changing state over time (ie updates) so traditional regulatory class lines were blurring.
That is where we stepped in. We were making a product that was ambiguously regulated and so we pulled the regs to understand them. Once we figured out how time consuming this was, we tried to make a software system to provide suggested basic implementations to be compliant and which helped companies properly bin their products into regulatory classes. Ultimately the entire regulatory system was changed rendering our product irrelevant, but I hope this shows why the system was as complicated as it was and helps demonstrate that the complexity was not a function of large players going for regulatory barriers to entry but rather a result of natural evolution and technical advancement over time which rendered existing regulations poorly suited for the current environment.
1. https://www.amazon.com/Winning-Losers-Game-6th-Strategies/dp...
all it seems to be saying is that to become better, make fewer mistakes, with an implied exhortion to practice. is there more to it than that?
I suspect most people/organizations operating at the highest level understand or have internalized this, but many in the other category have not, to their demise. I've certainly seen organizations get themselves in trouble by trying to execute on something trickier than they were ready for. And others fail at something through an accumulation of clearly (at least, in retrospect) avoidable mistakes.
The corollary being that you are very likely to be in the latter category, like it or not, and it's best to realize it.
I haven't read the book though so could easily be misinterpreting.
still, that's just a matter of definition and perspective. even at a pro level, if you don't win, you made at least one mistake relative to your opponent. so to win, make fewer mistakes, right?
i don't play video games anymore (and never played more than recreationally), but i've played pro-am basketball, and from my observation, being a pro doesn't mean you don't make mistakes. it usually means that, besides having highly honed skills, you have more tricks in the bag to recover from your mistakes (and conversely, to induce mistakes in opponents).
so the contention is that everyone can benefit from a strategy of reducing mistakes (aka active practice), pro or not, and the prior anecdote isn't really super-useful.
--devli's advocate
I don't think that is correct according the to thesis (and again, haven't read it so may be misrepresenting).
They are saying that at that (pro) level, not making mistakes is not enough, you have to make things happen too. Obviously making too many mistakes will cost you, but they are suggesting that playing "perfectly safe" can still easily lead to a loss. I don't think anyone was suggesting that pros don't make mistakes (hell, there are entire stats dedicated to this), but rather than merely focusing on minimizing them will not win you a championship.
The idea is that conversely at lower levels of performance, this isn't the case, and it really is mostly about lowering mistake rates. More tellingly, it suggests that the opportunity cost of focusing on anything else is likely too high.
To tie it back to the actual post, this suggests if you are spending a bunch of time and effort "metagaming" but you haven't already mastered the game, you are probably going to have poorer returns than just getting better at the game. This at least sounds plausible to me.
As an action plan, I would write that: Engage in the activity and dive deeply into all of the mistakes you make and develop the skill or tactic to avoid that mistake in the future. At the point where you don't make mistakes any more, then you start look at the meta and responding to what your opponent is setting up to do, rather than what they are doing right now.
but i'd still contend you never get to a point where you don't make mistakes and then turn to the meta-game. folks tend to start thinking about, and honing, the meta-game at different levels of experience.
For me, in most multiplayer games (Overwatch and such), I became far better (and more useful to the team) when I focused more on staying alive ("not making mistakes") rather than trying to execute fancy plays.
They will "fall on their own swords".
For most games with a net, focus on keeping the ball in play. For team sports, play defense and just keep it simple.
Basically, "never interrupt your adversary while they are making a mistake".
Teams lose games all the time while holding the other team to a very low score, but almost no one ever loses if they put up 50 points.
But then again, I played offense...
The game of Go makes this abundantly clear. You can actually damage your own skills by playing too many inexperienced or weaker opponents. But playing someone just a bit stronger than you can improve you both.
I don't know if this works the same in e-sports, but it is striking in Go, or to a lesser extent, Chess.
In fighting games, this observation leads to the following advice for someone playing against an opponent with weaker fundamentals: "play it safe until you give them enough rope to hang themselves."
Instead of going in as aggressively as normally would be required against a skilled opponent, just sit there and defend, and give your opponent free reign to try to crack your defense. The more they try, the more chances they give themselves to slip up and make a big mistake, which you then take full advantage of.
If their execution is worse than your defense, this is seen as a less risky strategy than going in on the offensive and hoping you don't make a mistake yourself.
Also applies to chess in the same way. Weaker opponents tend to accidentally "hang" their pieces a lot (i.e. move their pieces directly under attack of your pieces) just by poor observation, so it can be a good strategy to just stall, keep to your side of the board, and wait until your opponent slips up and makes a crucial mistake. Once they've made enough mistakes and you have enough of a material advantage, moving in for the win becomes completely trivial.
And sure enough, when my obsession quickly waned, and without having played much chess at all, I found myself consistently winning from novices who had a lot more experience than I did. In hindsight, I suspect what happened is that they played a better game but were more likely to make catastrophic mistakes.
Of course, I suspect any player with any training probably applies these basic rules already, and would easily defeat me.
1) Initially develop your pieces in the center rather than threaten or capture the opponent's pieces (this avoids most traps where opponents pull you out of position).
2) Castle by move 8-10
3) Don't leave your king where it can be checked
4) Don't hang pieces
Executing these, however, is the problem. Number 4, in particular, is just something that requires a lot of practice. Most games below 2000 rating seem to be lost because somebody hangs a piece.
Most people who play casually have some romantic ideas about poker from spy movies, where it's about bluffing. Bluffing only works if people actually believe you have good cards, people won't believe you have good cards if you play with mediocre or bad cards every hand.
I am by no means good enough to beat a person who is good at the game that could profile my playing style, do the mental math faster than me and who can tell the difference between whether or not I have analysis paralysis or bluffing.
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.
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.
One of the problems when you discuss strategy and meta is that most people blur the lines between the two.
If you plan something based on opposition research (like at the pro esports level as an example), you are approaching that game with a specific strategy in mind. Your chosen strategy should keep the meta in mind but the strategy and the meta are distinct.
The meta comes from knowing the various strategies that are effective against other teams/players who utilize the same general pool of strategies. Each strategy in the pool comes about because it works with reasonable reliability against the other strategies in the pool. That's why unexpected plays, 'cheese,' or 'hard-counters' come into play at the strategic level (often saved for specific opponents or situations). The meta is more about knowing what situations you're likely to encounter. You know the meta, then you optimize your strategic approach for your unique situation (such as the skill-set of the various players on your team, specific tendencies of the opponent you're preparing for, or even choosing not to optimize to win your next game to keep a strategy hidden (among other reasons).
Ultimately, the strategic evolutions of iterated games is a ridiculously deep and nuanced topic, making it difficult to really get into the meat and potatoes in forums. Maybe I should make a blog post or something, but I don't know how interesting it would be.
I'm interested, and if you do end up doing so, I would love to give you feedback on it before publishing it, if you want.
I played SC2 at a "semi-professional level" (read: good enough to take games/series off of pros, but not good enough to make a living).
I find a lot of truth in what you said, and agree that the nuance in strategic evolution of iterated games is super fascinating.
I was a young teenager when I played SC2 "seriously", and now that I'm in my early 20's, it really struck me how much more of an advanced mind for strategy I have now. Back in the day, I was a very mechanical player, but also had some really innovative play at times, particular with respect to a "macro aggressive" style (aggressive, but not just going for all-ins).
For a short while I received some coaching from my team's coach, and it was incredible how even just an hour of casual coaching drastically improved my understanding of concepts like map control. And mind you, my coach as an actual player was like plat-diamond level (by a pro's standards, total garbage basically), and I always found it fascinating how the best players don't make the best coaches and vice versa.
[0] Pulse Esports (The organization I founded in 2011/2012) had some great sc2 players, mostly because I was playing starcraft at the time. Running a young org took a lot of time, so I decayed in skill pretty dramatically (down to the diamond/master level).
Relative to most players, no doubt. To be fair though, even someone in diamond is "extremely good relative to most players".
I was a mid+ NA grandmaster zerg, and took games off players like EG demuslim. And even at the level I was at, fundamentals were the most important thing. And even at the level I was at, I could see the fundamental errors that I or my opponents would make.
Certainly though, when facing off a player of a similar skill, knowing the meta can be really helpful. Even more important is knowing that specific player's playstyle.
When you practice with a certain partner consistently, you start doing things that you would never do against an unknown player, to exploit quirks of their playstyle. The best players had incredible game sense and thus were really good at doing this. (My favorite player for a long time was Stephano, who absolutely excelled at this)
--
I'm not sure I had an actual point I was making :P
I totally agree, I just think it's not great advice to say "if you want to get good go after the meta". Some gaming communities over emphasize the meta and IMO StarCraft is one of them. Meta is just one aspect of ways to get an edge and as you progress in your skill you need to take advantage of every edge you can get.
Many StarCraft streamers will do challenges where they only go for a certain, non dominate strategy to see how high they can rise, the one that stuck with me the most was destiny going mass queen. I saw so many people asking "what can counter mass queen" because they saw him winning over and over again. The answer wasn't how should you change your strat to deal with someone going mass queen, they aren't that good, the answer was to be better at macro than that player.
Right, I totally agree here. If it wasn't clear, I think the vast majority of players should just ignore the meta and focus on fundamentals.
That being said, often specific meta strategies (say, the 2 base sentry/immortal all-in that was so ridiculously powerful back in the day) give players a really hard time, and so IMO the best way to do it is to use learning how to beat the strategy as an example of learning fundamentals. For example, beating that all-in required effective scouting, map control, micro, and stopping drone production at the perfect time.
I used to be a huge Destiny fanboy. In fact, my measure of when I'd "made it" was when I could beat Destiny on ladder. (He beat me many times as well, of course).
Side note: Kind of sad that when I checked up him a couple months ago, he mostly just seems to do weird political debate style stuff these days
I kind of remember reading that the book was even recommended in the military.
> It's not until you reach a level where everyone around you has a mastery of the fundamentals, that the meta comes into play.
At any given MMR bracket, everyone around you has a similar mastery of the fundamentals so the meta is relevant.
However, put someone with the fundamentals of a 6k+ MMR player into a 3 or even 4k match and they'll demolish everyone else even with a disadvantage relative to the metagame.
The original comment said
> It's not until you reach a level where everyone around you has a mastery of the fundamentals, that the meta comes into play.
and you said
> At any given MMR bracket, everyone around you has a similar mastery of the fundamentals so the meta is relevant.
which refutes the original comment.
> However, put someone with the fundamentals of a 6k+ MMR player into a 3 or even 4k match and they'll demolish everyone else even with a disadvantage relative to the metagame.
I don't think anyone disagrees with this; I think the issue I (and the person you're responding to) have is the idea that you should ignore understanding the meta until you're 6k MMR as you say.
Both are important and you should develop both at the same time if you want to improve.
Zeus is never picked? Great! Don't need to learn that kit. Or perhaps digging into why Zeus isn't picked can help inform why another character is more useful especially in conjunction with others in a team.
A player with no understanding of the meta but good fundamentals can easily be directed by their team and have the same output as a high(mmr, meta) player. However, direction will not always be available and this will result in some losses.
A team full of players with high meta knowledge but low fundamentals will lose the fundamental game too hard and lose most matches. Also experience the "too many chefs in the kitchen" effect.
A team full of players with high fundamentals but poor meta knowledge will perform reasonably well, but be outshined by a more balanced team.
The team that won the largest DOTA championship 2 years in a row was clearly one that on balance had medium fundamentals (at a pro level), and outstanding meta.
At most levels, just being very very good at a few characters, even if they're off-meta picks, will do better than someone who picks on-meta and doesn't have a good fundamental skill with the champion.
Now, most players keep a pool of champions they have solid (or at least better) fundamentals so that as the meta shifts they can fall back to others. Additionally there are cross-champ skills like strategic considerations that can carry you.
It's also weird because in MOBAs the updates literally change the balance of the game, so by some definitions this actually changes the fundamentals which causes the meta to have to react. So really most players are chasing relearning the fundamentals (oh geez Zeus is nerfed into uselessness!).
One pretty weird fundamental is to get good at coaxing your teammates to make a reasonable team comp without causing anybody stress
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.
One thought is that there are some games where the metagame becomes important at earlier skill levels. Magic the Gathering comes to mind: fundamental skills are certainly important, but understanding the format—even in formats where you don't need a pre-built deck—is important even at a middling skill level, well short of any competitive level. I feel this pretty keenly because that's the level I play at online!
The main issue at the middle level is that people don't push to the next level of thinking, despite often thinking that they do. The reality is that most people have the thoughts but not consistently. Or, they have the thought, but don't apply it (well) to their decision making.
(I'm going to butcher this concept for this example)
Level one - You play your cards. You look at what you've got; you do stuff that has a big effect based on what you have in your hand. Your opponent's counter-play options aren't considered.
Level two - You now consider that your opponent might counter the cards you play in some fashion, and you adjust accordingly. This is the level most people are at. ('If I play BIG CARD and he just kills it with EASY COUNTER that would be bad...let's hold off on it until there's a lower chance of that happening...')
Level three - You now consider that your opponent is making the same kind of decisions you are. The game becomes more about information. You know that when X card is played, it indicates certain other possibilities. And, you are aware that your opponent might be making the same considerations about you, so you consider the plays you make in the context of how they might be perceived. (A lot of this becomes near-autopilot because of the sheer volume of games put in - often thousands -> tens of thousands).
This is the short version of the concept, but it applies to all games that have incomplete information, MOBAs, Card Games, RTS, and so forth.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1. are certain techniques that are likely to cause injury even with proper protective gear, that sucks in a sport;
2. so we make rules to prohibit using such techniques;
3. so the meta changes so that realistic tactics (which obviously need to protect against the dangerous technique) become suboptimal, and the new meta is 'unnatural' as it leaves the fighters vulnerable to something that's prohibited but would be used in any real situation.
The Houston Astros: It's news to me.
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.
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...
Are you measuring feature completion or business impact? If your managers are happy with your coworkers that “produce less”, then chances are their efforts have the same business impact as yours.
It's a project with a fixed span, and the barrier to entry is very high (government clearance and certain skills) so many people who gain entry exploit the situation because they know we're short on people and won't fire anybody unless they have a negative impact on the business. So the bar is high to get in, but the bar is very low to not be kicked out (have some positive impact). So we'll keep people that only do 1-2 tasks per week because it's better than 0, but don't reward the folks who can do 10 tasks per week.
If you feel stressed, you may be giving too much of yourself. If you are giving more then you like to, to compensate for your teammate, you might need to find teammates that are up to your level, that carr as much as you, an a business that care as much as you too.
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.
It looks grim, and we're going to have to use the few things we've gotten right as a species to fix everything else we've allowed to go wrong.
Places like YC, Twitter, YouTube, etc. have been focusing on insignificant things like clicks and conversions and "content" for years. The public sector has been allowed to fester and become corrupted by people who understand they make more money through controlling the system than they do by actually running it as intended. Meanwhile, BOTH systems are run by a precariously small class of VC's and wanna-be VC's who have become further and further insulated from their consequences.
The real solutions will involve fixing both.
I'm not sure if you're aware or not, but going down that rabbit hole is the least positive thing you could have done (ok, I exaggerate but the point stands).
There's a saying in Arabic "if only" is the devil's work - it sometimes appears to be a positive or constructive thing but in reality, you're just digging yourself deeper into a depressing world view.
Don't focus on what could have been done differently: a) you can't do anything about it now, b) things rarely work out the way you'd think they would, so who knows how things could have gone wrong in that scenario.
Focus on the here and now. You seem to care tremendously about sustainability and the environment. Find a company working in battery tech or renewable energy (it doesn't have to be revolutionary, evolutionary improvements matter just as much, if not more so; e.g. improved Li-ion (LiFePO₄ or otherwise) today can save more species than NiFe or whatever batteries tomorrow) and apply. There are not just dozens of such opportunities, there are thousands - but you'll need to go out of your way to find them. Maybe you'll have to move (and move your family with you?) and maybe that's good for you.
Just do it.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He wrote a great paper on it here: https://edt210gamestechsociety.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/2...
Thesis that learning one thing deeply helps learn other (unrelated) things makes total sense to me.
Also, if you enjoy that sort of thing and action movies, I recommend:
Tai Chi Master
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0108281
Man of Tai Chi
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2016940/
There are also random youtube videos of various ‘push hands’ techniques.
Yet a lot of the same life lessons are passed on through the right, uh, professor.
TBF, MMA has rules that don't apply to bar fights, and knowing how to use a firearm fits closer a martial art that would let you survive on a modern battlefield. Or practicing squad tactics on an airsoft field. Perhaps TMA weapons training would qualify as a martial art in the days before firearms when armies fought with sword and spear, but it shouldn't continue calling itself anything to do with martial in this day and age. Historical dance or reenactment maybe, along the lines of renaissance fair and civil war battle reenactors.
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?
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.
However, I break things down a little differently.
1) How to win. What gets counted to win, usually VPs. If you understand that, and how to efficiently accrue them, then you're a few steps ahead. Then, how to end the game. Can you control how it ends?
You use this in engine vs endgame, but I prefer breaking it out because not all games have two phases. Some simply generate VPs as you go (no compounding engine mechanic), and what you really care about is turn efficiency.
2) My other rule is compare to similar mechanics from other games.
I have heavily studied other games, so spotting how a draft system works or engine-building and turn efficiency is easily recognizable and I can calculate sorta optimal moves. Similarly this gives you an easy framework to figure out how the specifics of this game compare to each other.
3) Table dynamics. Almost always you can get a huge edge just by knowing what you need to do NOW vs latter. This is mostly about efficiency. If you know player X is going to take Red next turn, then you can decide if denying them is worth it, or that means you're safe to take/ignore Blue. So sussing out what other players are doing, especially if they're cooperating, is especially helpful.
To accomplish this, I actually try to turn the table dynamics to friendly and talkative. Usually in the guise of it's a friendly game and look at my sharing my insight/knowledge. So others freely share what they're thinking. Means discovering strategies in the game happens faster, but I also glean important tips from others.
So I did that, then they said it was beginners luck after I won. Then I won two more times, and they said ‘wow you just must be good at games’, and I said no, I’m good at googling.
That’s my whole IT career in a nutshell.
Splendor has clever subtle player interaction here which I think is a real strong part of its design.
Good players playing against other good players will often grab one or two cheapies in the midgame to deal with resource scarcity. But you simply cannot win by buying cheap cards, building an engine, and picking up nobles. It's just that much slower.
The metagame in Splendor is more subtle, as you say. It's about clever play interaction and depends heavily on the early-game tableau. Does the tableau strongly favor a single color? Then your choice is to jockey for position on that color, or avoid the resource scarcity and go for weaker and/or less-coordinated cards. Does it have a lot of strong cards? Then it's about finding one or two you can get without someone else tying up your resources. Does it have a lot of weak cards? Then it's about finding ways to gain an upper hand for when the stronger cards come out.
Are players holding a lot of chips? Then you need to avoid getting stuck with a poor "hand" of chips - either a full hand that can't buy anything useful, or an empty hand when the chip supply is weak. Are they hoarding the wilds? That's much like the above, but with even more pitfalls.
Unfortunately, there's a skill ceiling to Splendor, and it's fairly low. Once you approach it, improvement is asymptotic, and the luck element of the game spikes tremendously. These days, I don't really like playing without the expansion. But in good news, the expansion refreshes the game wonderfully.
You can become a tremendously consistent winner at all sorts of board games simply by knowing that most local metagames are exploitable, and constantly looking for the exploit. Are players burning their resources too fast, or holding them for too long? Are they undervaluing a resource in one phase and overvaluing it in another? Are they failing to recognize potential resource engines, or building engines to obtain things that can be obtained faster without one? Are they not recognizing or exploiting resource scarcity? Are they failing to recognize situations where they can apply pressure or force actions by threatening to end the game?
I think the concept of 'covered ground' is especially fascinating when it comes to thinking about the meta of building web apps. Do you really appreciate the trade offs between MySQL and MongoDB, if you haven't ran into the scaling issues between the two? I don't think "running a bad migration" is covering enough ground to appreciate the differences. Is struggling to wrangle a bug in an Angular 1 directive enough 'covered ground' to understand the meta in building frontend applications?
And I wonder if the meta is moving towards low code and no code frameworks. Dark Lang looks pretty cool, though I've never really used it. Retool proved really valuable for internal dashboards for managing customer support at my last company.
You could explore the meta at a more fine grained level than just 'web apps', or zoom out to software in general and try to understand the meta (just like you could analyze why certain units in SC2 are just broken, or understand why the economies of the different races mean different opportunities for timing attacks for each race)
Metagame is the 'game outside the game' ie in rock paper scissors the game is trivial the metagame involves guessing what the opponent will pick.
Meta-software-engineering would be things outside of your software stack that affect the overall process. People, sleep patterns, office layouts, commute time, corporate culture etc.
I was thinking more specifically about building web apps (or software systems). I think there's something there as well
In terms of creating web apps or other software, there are organizational, hiring, funding, exit, marketing, and many other meta-games going on — and they're all in constant flux.
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.
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).
It also has the metagame of carefully crafting your weight to optimally fit in your preferred weight class
I don't think that's metagaming so much as just simple min-maxing.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
I think this can be done systematically...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
in games though, I consider strategy to be something that arises more directly from the game mechanics and perhaps in response to your opponent over the course of a match, while meta comes from understanding the greater community ("meta" because the community exists outside of the game itself).
1) a higher level of abstraction. For example, creating a class is programming. Creating a class factory (a class that creates classes) is meta programming.
2) self referential. The movie Adaption is meta, because it is about itself.
I’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.
Made me think, though. Thanks :)
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.
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.
No big deal - words change. I’ll get used to it.
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.
Here's a concrete example:
Soccer fundamentals: passing, dribbling, etc.
Soccer strategies: formation, player roles, etc.
Soccer meta: viable formations, player roles, etc.
No one is out there playing a 8-2-1 formation because it's not a viable strategy, i.e. it's not part of the current meta. The current meta in soccer is largely 4-4-2 and 4-4-3.
3 in the back is relatively rare, because it's weak to the player roles that we currently see being employed by competitors. It's not part of the meta because it's a weak strategy against the currently common strategies in the meta.
High level strategy: wear down opponent, exploit endurance advantage
Low level strategy: aggressive midgame, long passes, high tempo, rotate attackers
Tactics: 4 4 2 formation, joe and Jean on wings, etc. force opponent mike to run side to side to wear out, then focus on scoring in final third of game.
Fundamentals: passing, communication, give and go, etc.
Meta: realizing that you can make more from your Instagram account than from playing the game.
Disclaimer: I don’t know anything about soccer (football)
If you'd like, you can think of "meta" as short for "meta-strategy", with the distinction between "meta-strategy" and "strategy" as similar to the distinction to "meta-physics" and "physics". People who claim that "meta-physics" is just "physics" would probably be regarded as "pedants".
Choosing to use a weapon at all is not meta. Choosing to not use a weapon to lure your opponent into trying to grab it while you wait to snipe them, is meta.
Think about rock-paper-scissor. The game is totally random. There is no in-game strategy that can do better. The only way to do better than half chance is to play meta and predict your opponent's strategy.
Say you have a game with various weapons. Each weapon has attack power, attack speed, and weight. If everything is balanced right, there could be no singular optimal weapon.
And let's say that the best considered weapons are all of a certain weight. They do the most damage in the least amount of time available.
Playing the metagame would be recognizing the game everyone is playing is using those weapons as best as possible. And then choosing the knife because it lets you run faster than everyone else. And your strategy becomes knifing people in the back and running away before they can fire back.
Then more people catch on to the knife strategy, because the best players are using it. Now most people are using knives and the game is all about maximizing run speed.
So you start using the pistol. It's a very slight hit to your run speed, but you can still fire back on anyone who knifes you in the back. You start just capping knifers left and right.
More people catch on. Pistols beat knives. As more people become pistol wielders, knifers get worse. The game is all about pistols now.
Until someone realizes that shotguns and rifles are only slightly slower than pistols, but do way more damage. Basically, everything of a certain weight is just good when facing a lot of pistols. So the game comes right back around to the start.
This is different from in-game strategy. In-game strategy would be planning routes and knowing how and when to cover. Meta is out-of-game strategy.
Like, investing in infrastructure, technology, etc is all war meta. It lets you approach the situation in ways your opponent isn't thinking about. You can make their strategies during the war irrelevant.
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.
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!
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.
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.
"for content marketing [...] now we do longer, more comprehensive guides, and we cross-launch those to Product Hunt and Hacker News"
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?
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.
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.
you can apply this zen mastery to basically any physical game and always 'win'
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.
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...
Is it adapting to rule changes? Or simply focusing on abusing the rules instead of just being good at the fundamentals of the game?
Hi shadowsun7!
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.
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)
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.
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.
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).
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.