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To get good, go after the metagame

commoncog.com

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Re: To get good, go after the metagame

#141

Post by jay_kyburz »

jstanley wrote: post #54
EdwardCoffin wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest improvement in chess came after comprehending The Theory of Steinitz [1]: 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,…

> 2. Correct play on both sides maintains this equilibrium and leads to a drawn game. Note that this is still not actually proven! But it is generally accepted.

It assumes both players are of equal skill I guess.

Re: To get good, go after the metagame

#142

Post by seniorsassycat »

Donkeyspace is my favorite idea derived from metagames, but I can't find any good descriptions online.

As any given meta becomes dominant, other playstyles become viable that would not be viable in a game against players unaware of the meta, or in a different meta. A counter-meta. Sometimes there's counter-counter-meta and then you're really in Donkeyspace.

Re: To get good, go after the metagame

#143

Post by simonebrunozzi »

Proziam wrote: post #3

Getting good in almost all games is based on understanding and mastering the fundamentals to the extent that you can make consistently correct (or at least a high degree of 'correctness') decisions based on them. This is true for all esports titles, and probably all games in general. Mastering the fundamentals will make you 'good' to a level that very few people ever reach. It's not until you reach a level where ever…

I would be really interested in reading a long blog post about your experience. I'm sure it would reveal many details that most people (including me) wouldn't easily guess.

Re: To get good, go after the metagame

#144

Post by scott_s »

A saying I have related to this is "Rules make sports." The skills and strategies that matter in a sport develop around the rules. Change the rules and you change the sport.

The judo example the author presented is actually one of my go-to examples as well. Not only did disallowing grabbing the legs take out an entire suite of offensive options, it took out defensive options in judo. In judo, the main way to win is to throw your opponent such that they land on their back. Before, a judo player could grab their opponents legs as a way to counter a throw. Now grabbing the legs is a penalty. But allowing yourself to be thrown is going to at least result in your opponent getting a point, and has potential for you to lose the match. So the solution is, in some situations, judo players will just intentionally face-plant onto the mat to avoid the throw. It looks silly, no one would do it in a self-defense situation, but rules make sports.

Note that just about all combat and grappling sports have this quirk: because they have rules, and are not just a free-form fight, you're going to encounter situations where the optimal thing to do in the sport would be terrible to do in a real fight.

Re: To get good, go after the metagame

#145

Post by JackFr »

mercer wrote: post #61
Proziam wrote: post #3

Getting good in almost all games is based on understanding and mastering the fundamentals to the extent that you can make consistently correct (or at least a high degree of 'correctness') decisions based on them. This is true for all esports titles, and probably all games in general. Mastering the fundamentals will make you 'good' to a level that very few people ever reach. It's not until you reach a level where ever…

I've noticed this to be true for table tennis and other sports too. When I play against a less experienced player, it's quite frustrating to notice that most of the points I score are clear mistakes on their part, rather than any kind of skilled moves on my part.

I used to play chess in college with a master (now grandmaster) player. He would always let me take back moves when I did something stupid (sometimes even a couple). As he put it it was no fun to win on someones goof, what was fun was winning when they were playing the best possible game they could.

Re: To get good, go after the metagame

#146

Post by downerending »

euix wrote: post #24

There is also the ultimate version of the metagame i.e. your personal human condition. Blindly pursuing your career or chasing money without understanding the finite duration of your own physical existence, the scale of the universe, where you want to be in terms of life goals and family.

One of the benefits of long experience is often being able to see forward quite a distance. If you can see that the project you're working on will fail with high probability, you can avoid a lot of useless work/angst. And perhaps even enjoy the wreck.

Re: To get good, go after the metagame

#147

Post by Thriptic »

dfxm12 wrote: post #65
inerte wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes entertain myself watching "knowing the rules" sport videos on YouTube, for example https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=football+knowin... 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.

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.

It's more complicated than that. Largely, it just seems that way because most people never bother to understand the rules past a cursory Google whereas big companies have teams of very experienced regulatory professionals from the agencies themselves who are all about it and therefore know every way to tweak inputs so that they trigger certain regulations rather than others. I was working on a regulatory compliance product for a bit and the first thing I did was pull every applicable regulation, standard, and rule governing the space and read them. This took about a month and made me much more knowledgeable than the vast majority of people in the field who didn't even try. Being an expert is about taking the time to sit down and read the RFCs, basically. We don't have many experts because no one wants to do it.

Re: To get good, go after the metagame

#148

Post by JackFr »

ska wrote: post #107
clairity wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not having read the book, that seems insightful on the surface but isn’t particularly useful or actionable. 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 think the idea is that if you aren't operating at "pro league" level in anything, you should focus mostly on getting the basics right and not making mistakes. But if you are operating at that level, this is table stakes and you need to do more, or your competition will overrun you. I suspect most people/organizations operating at the highest level understand or have internalized this, but many in the other category…

Until you get to the level of college and NFL, being successful as a quarterback is largely about being physically gifted. At those lofty levels though sometimes a QB who looked unstoppable at a lower level looks lost at sea. That because everyone on the field is a supremely gifted athlete, the game becomes far more intellectual, and these guys find themselves unable to handle the complexity of the defensive schemes and offensive systems.

Re: To get good, go after the metagame

#149

Post by tylerjwilk00 »

If you find metagame strategies interesting, you may enjoy Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene [1] and specifically Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS)[2]. Of course ESS takes place over a much longer timeline. Summary of ESS in this video by Veritasium [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUxt--mMjwA

Re: To get good, go after the metagame

#150

Post by UnFleshedOne »

bena wrote: post #96
Aardwolf wrote: post #26

> Judo — the sport that I am most familiar with — has a metagame that is shaped by rule changes from the International Judo Federation. A few years after I stopped competing, the IJF banned leg grabs, outlawing a whole class of throws that were part of classical Judo canon It also has the metagame of carefully crafting your weight to optimally fit in your preferred weight class

I think that's true of every sport with a weight class. You want to be the heaviest guy in your classification. I don't think that's metagaming so much as just simple min-maxing.

I wonder why sports with weight categories don't implement floating weight windows? If there is 10kg spread in a given category, place every participant in the center of their own category so they always fight somebody at most 5 kg different from them in either direction and adjust points being earned appropriately (based on weight difference and an impact factor of weight in given sport).

Then points will be normalized and you can compare skill of underfed ballerina and a sumo fighter directly if they compete in the same sport.

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