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Comment by qznc | Hacker News Reader

The “concentrate on one subject” part is interesting. I reminds me of "get good enough in one skill to see the meta game" [0]:

> There seems to be something in getting good at a skill tree that helps in latter life. I’d like to think it is a function of exposure: once you see the competitive meta at the top of one skill tree, you begin looking for it everywhere else.

So the theory is something like: If you achieve mastery in one skill, it helps learning other skills because you know better what to aim for.

[0] https://commoncog.com/blog/to-get-good-go-after-the-metagame...

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I honestly think I got this experience from playing video games.

My real motivation for playing games in my youth was that I enjoyed trying to become better than everyone else. I would come up with my own practice drills to build muscle memory and spent hours studying map layouts -- enough that I knew what each area of the map looked like from my enemy's viewpoint as well as my own. Eventually I started searching for bugs in the game that could give me an advantage over other players. To make the game more challenging, I'd set restrictions for myself and see if I could still win. All of this allowed me to see the game in a way that most other players did not.

I'm convinced that this experience -- which all the adults in my life at the time deemed "unhealthy" -- actually taught me how to learn, and how to get good at something.

I can remember feeling disappointed when everyone stopped playing that game. I felt like I'd spent thousands of hours studying something with no practical application. What a waste of time!. Looking back, I think I may have taken away more than I realized.

Well done! This is why many successful people tell others to work on things that interest them and not blindly follow money

I have heard about "competitive meta" before. What I don't understand is how it's any different than "responding to changes in how a game works"? All of the examples in the link are like this (Magic has new cards, let's figure out how to use them; judo has new rules, let's figure out how to adapt to them; our Ultimate opponent is using a certain strategy, let's try to counter it).

Yes, that's what it is. Although the 'competitive' meta would be limitied to the adaptations of the top players.

The concept is common enough in gaming culture that they popularized a name for it.

I think the difference is that in this context it’s at least as much about what the other players are doing as the way the game actually works. Learning how to operate within the new rules is still just part of the game. Learning how to counter those strategies when your opponents adopt then would be considered the metagame. And sometimes the meta changes not due to changes in the rules, but simply because someone has an innovation in strategy or tactics which starts to be adopted en masse. Then someone figures out how to counter that and the cycle continues.

Here's a different example:

Super Smash Bros Melee is almost 20 years old and still sees competitive play. There's a technique in the game called pivoting, which is a one-frame input used to unlock more movement options. It's been known for a while, but top players didn't make much use of it, as such a demanding mechanic seemed beyond the reach of consistent human performance.

A new(ish) player, Zain, has become one of the best in the world, and he makes frequent use of pivots, among many well-known but underused techniques.

The rules haven't changed. The tools have always been there. But now someone is picking them up. This layer of the game, once thought to be "not worth it," has now entered the metagame.

(There's actually an upcoming documentary about Melee called Metagame. To be released... eventually)

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