Idea: Learning How To Move Towards The Metagame
I have just finished watching someone play a variant of Brick Breaker. A variant I became intimately familiar with, indeed, obsessed, as I strove to hit the top 40 all time score which scrolled past me each time I failed, mocking me.
And this reminded me of an interesting post I read: To Get Good, Go After The Metagame. The title, however, doesn’t say it all, so I’ll quote the relevant section
“I’ve noticed that the ‘feel’ of improving in pursuit of a meta is strangely similar across skill trees. I noticed this after climbing high enough in the Judo skill tree to see the meta for the first time. Later, when I moved to university, learning the craft of programming became slightly easier. Ditto for content marketing, and email marketing, and so on.”
This was interesting to me, as I am currently reviewing rationality techniques which generalize, and I don’t think I have noticed this one mentioned elsewhere. In fact, I thought “I have never reached a meta in my life, and it sounds like so very much effort to even see the meta in anything, I guess I just have to take this on faith”. But my memory is poor, and I forgot I have reached the meta a couple of times in my life by playing video games. And that when I pursue a video game to mastery, there is a clear difference in the kinds of learning that help me. I suspect, however, that this is not the skill that the post is talking about. So why mention this at all?
Because I think that you might be able to check if this ability exists pretty easily. First, find a video game with a high skill ceiling, ideally one that is new. Then, check if it has a competitive scene where people share their performances. If so, proceed. Else, find another game or consider trying to set up such a scene yourself. Then, play the game until you hit the current meta by analysing what the best players do.
This experiment seems cheap, and has some very high value. So I think I’ll pursue it after my current literature review ends, gain this skill, then use it to write an addendum to whatever post I write on Ambitious Methods in Education.
Having read the linked piece, I think it may be more a case of common cause then learning a new skill. People who are good at deciphering one complex system are going to be good at deciphering other complex systems. And people with experience doing that are going to be better than those without. “Seeing the meta” is just a way to ID people who have learned how to learn systems.
Depending on what level of competition and scope you are looking for, here are some suggestions:
For a tiny group (dozens of players), see https://forums.sirlingames.com/
For a larger (thousands), but still moderately easy to learn, https://storybookbrawl.com/
For actual global competition (millions, good luck): https://magic.wizards.com/en/mtgarena or https://hearthstone.blizzard.com/en-us
I predict that 10-100k is the sweet spot, provided that there is some kind of competitive scene. So storybookbrawl looks like it might work.