Hacker News Reader

Comment by richk449 | Hacker News Reader

The definition of meta used in the piece doesn't match my understanding. Take his final example where he says that adjusting tactics in response to your opponent in ultimate frisbee is meta. No, that just strategy.

Same goes for most of the examples he gives.

Looks like I'm getting old, and the word has been redefined from out under me:

In video games, however, the metagame has its own meaning—and depending on which game you play, the context differs. In short, the metagame in video gaming means using characters or items that are the most powerful at the time to try and find the best and quickest means to victory.

https://dotesports.com/general/news/what-is-the-meta-meaning...

View on HN

>Take his final example where he says that adjusting tactics in response to your opponent in ultimate frisbee is meta. No, that just strategy.

Choice of strategy can be "meta", though. It depends on the context. For example in ultimate frisbee the current meta is to play Vertical offense, and so you see a lot of teams training for how to run it and how to defend against it.

Back in 2004 ish, the dominant teams played Horizontal offense, and we only saw Vert for set plays after a foul or other play stoppage.

The meta has changed because the dominant strategies have changed.

Then you can get even more meta, because perhaps your team is playing "long ball" and you know that if you start calling lots of travels, the other team will reciprocate. And you know that because even a contested travel causes a return to the thrower, it will hurt you more than hurting them.

All of that is both strategy and meta.

Eh, it’s all semantics. What you are calling meta has been called strategy for thousands of years.

No big deal - words change. I’ll get used to it.

The article's usage seems to drift around somewhat, but in esports I follow "meta" refers specifically to the consensus about which strategies are good or bad, not to strategies themselves or to anything someone does in a given game.

E.g. saying "foo is meta right now" means most players consider foo to be stronger than the alternatives, and if a player uses a strategy other than foo one might say they were playing off-meta, etc. But the term is wholly distinct from strategy itself.

You're literally trying to game the game.

Meta is the set of viable strategies GIVEN the strategies that your competitors commonly employ.

Here's a concrete example:

Soccer fundamentals: passing, dribbling, etc.

Soccer strategies: formation, player roles, etc.

Soccer meta: viable formations, player roles, etc.

No one is out there playing a 8-2-1 formation because it's not a viable strategy, i.e. it's not part of the current meta. The current meta in soccer is largely 4-4-2 and 4-4-3.

3 in the back is relatively rare, because it's weak to the player roles that we currently see being employed by competitors. It's not part of the meta because it's a weak strategy against the currently common strategies in the meta.

Goal: to win

High level strategy: wear down opponent, exploit endurance advantage

Low level strategy: aggressive midgame, long passes, high tempo, rotate attackers

Tactics: 4 4 2 formation, joe and Jean on wings, etc. force opponent mike to run side to side to wear out, then focus on scoring in final third of game.

Fundamentals: passing, communication, give and go, etc.

Meta: realizing that you can make more from your Instagram account than from playing the game.

Disclaimer: I don’t know anything about soccer (football)

Feels like you're starting to argue in bad faith with the only purpose of rejecting the concept of "meta" as it's being presented.

If you'd like, you can think of "meta" as short for "meta-strategy", with the distinction between "meta-strategy" and "strategy" as similar to the distinction to "meta-physics" and "physics". People who claim that "meta-physics" is just "physics" would probably be regarded as "pedants".

Meta is an aspect of strategy, but the terms aren't interchangeable.

OP here. Exactly this.

Meta is anything where the best action depends on something outside the game. Identifying the best weapon to challenge your opponent's defense is not meta. Identifying the best weapon to counter your opponent's predicted defense is meta.

Choosing to use a weapon at all is not meta. Choosing to not use a weapon to lure your opponent into trying to grab it while you wait to snipe them, is meta.

Think about rock-paper-scissor. The game is totally random. There is no in-game strategy that can do better. The only way to do better than half chance is to play meta and predict your opponent's strategy.

Meta is weird.

Say you have a game with various weapons. Each weapon has attack power, attack speed, and weight. If everything is balanced right, there could be no singular optimal weapon.

And let's say that the best considered weapons are all of a certain weight. They do the most damage in the least amount of time available.

Playing the metagame would be recognizing the game everyone is playing is using those weapons as best as possible. And then choosing the knife because it lets you run faster than everyone else. And your strategy becomes knifing people in the back and running away before they can fire back.

Then more people catch on to the knife strategy, because the best players are using it. Now most people are using knives and the game is all about maximizing run speed.

So you start using the pistol. It's a very slight hit to your run speed, but you can still fire back on anyone who knifes you in the back. You start just capping knifers left and right.

More people catch on. Pistols beat knives. As more people become pistol wielders, knifers get worse. The game is all about pistols now.

Until someone realizes that shotguns and rifles are only slightly slower than pistols, but do way more damage. Basically, everything of a certain weight is just good when facing a lot of pistols. So the game comes right back around to the start.

This is different from in-game strategy. In-game strategy would be planning routes and knowing how and when to cover. Meta is out-of-game strategy.

Like, investing in infrastructure, technology, etc is all war meta. It lets you approach the situation in ways your opponent isn't thinking about. You can make their strategies during the war irrelevant.

I think the "meta" in this case would be your entire post. Ie. "use knives when heavy weapons are popular, use pistols when knives are popular, use highest dps weapon when none are popular" is The Meta... assuming lots of people agree that its the best way to win.

Yes. That's why I said it's different from in-game strategy. In what manner did you think I was implying that what I was talking about wasn't talking about an example of the metagame?

I had the same - the "choice of strategies" in Splendor is just that - strategy. The "meta game" would be the level above that.

The Splendor part was a but confusing. The author's point is that the simple strategy has no meta, because players can't interfere with each other. It's just a race. But the strategy of saving up points opens up a metagame because players can now interfere with each other, so the game becomes about guessing opponent strategies and counterstrategies.

Another analogy is a bicycle race. You could have everyone run separately and compare their best times. But by racing together, you get peloton and team effects where players can attack opponentns and support teammates, but expose weakness that could be exploited, and the success of an act, like passing or drafting, depends on how others react.

That’s exactly my point. Nobody calls a peloton meta racing. A peloton is just strategy. Always has been.

The peloton strategy is the current meta.

In this instance, the metagame is the optimal strategy given your gaming group’s current strategic preferences.

I’ve found that over time, the dominant tactics in Splendor for my group swing between build and buy. People do whatever is necessary to win. Tactics used 50 games ago go away and then get brought back. People hold grudges against others over old games, and act to disrupt each other. All of this can be predicted and folded into game strategy.

I’ll admit, it’s a little difficult to see this type of meta in most gaming groups — my group happened to be my entire office, and we played Splendor every lunch break for probably a year. That’s hundreds of games within a small group of people.

You do see this in Chess, various openings fall in and out of favour over time. I guess you could call this "meta" - tactics change in line with strategy, strategies change in line with the meta game. But as GP says, I've always considered this as just "strategy".

Made me think, though. Thanks :)

I think a good example that aids definition is "meta-optimisation" (aka "meta-computation).

Optimisation is a process that aims to find the best possible solution to a problem. E.g. let's use Dijkstra's algorithm to find the shortest path between two locations.

Meta-optimisation is finding the best possible process to do optimisation. E.g. let's use A* with a reasonable heuristic instead of Dijkstra's algorithm, because it'll be faster to run and give the same optimal result.

The meta-game here is that time-to-compute PLUS travel the path is the real thing that needs optimising - not just the path length.

Yeah meta in games is used very loosely — the M4 in CoD is meta, meaning the best available.

I got the feeling reading this that the author is more familiar with the video game usage and worked backwards to give it some more substance.

I don't think it's that loose actually, at least not the way I see it used. usually the "meta" is about choosing between two or more roughly equipotent strategies/tactics based on what you expect your opponent to do. you predict what your opponent will do by observing current trends in the game. the meta certainly changes after balance updates, but it can also change organically over time as people try different things.

This interpretation seems to unnecessarily constrain strategy. A strategy is not just something you pick at random. A good strategy is chosen with all context in mind - including your opponents choice of tactics and strategy.

that's a fair point; "meta" is probably a subset of what people generally mean by "strategy", especially in military contexts.

in games though, I consider strategy to be something that arises more directly from the game mechanics and perhaps in response to your opponent over the course of a match, while meta comes from understanding the greater community ("meta" because the community exists outside of the game itself).

This is “meta” as in Most Effective Tactic Available, as opposed to the normal use of the word “meta” (“referring to itself or to the conventions of its genre; self-referential.”)

I don't know about this acronym... "meta" from the article is certainly not using it. The acronym definition breaks down because technically something can be meta and not be the most effective tactic available. Eg. when the rules of a game are too complex to solve in a short time, you will see players rally around a "meta" strategy until a more optimal one is discovered and vetted.

I think the author lack the context of META being the acronym for "most effective tactics available", as most of the gaming world is using it.

But the former is the latter because the most effective tactic available depends on what all of the other player in the game are going to do. The most effective tactic available is only the most effective given that other players are also going to choose the most effective tactic available.

thank you for this! I was reading the article with the latter meaning in mind, and got quite confused. Should read the comments on HN first!

So what is your definition? :)

I can think of two definitions:

1) a higher level of abstraction. For example, creating a class is programming. Creating a class factory (a class that creates classes) is meta programming.

2) self referential. The movie Adaption is meta, because it is about itself.

I would not call 1 metaprogramming. Meta means something like "outside of". Metaprogramming usually means higher order programming (programs that produce programs, such as source generation, lisp macros or templates).

Okay. It’s outside my area of expertise, so maybe I didn’t pick the best example. The internet seems to imply that there is a lot of debate as to what is meta programming.

This article is about the metagame, which is derived from this meaning. It just gets confusingly shortened back to meta in some contexts

Reply on news.ycombinator.com