The Metagame - What Happens Before You Do Anything, and How That Changes What You Will Do

So Peter touched on a subject near the end of his last article which I thought that I could expand on further - the Metagame. It seems really weird at first, but it’s important to consider for games, and it’s not actually all that complicated, though the word sounds foreign.

Peter put the metagame in pretty good terms by saying that it “is all of the out-of-game information players consider while playing the game.” The metagame is, in a nutshell, a collection of information about how players have played the game in the past, which informs players how it will be played in the present and in the future. By understanding what has or hasn’t worked in the past, players can figure out why the game is being played the way it is right now. Understanding how the game is played now lets players develop strategies to succeed in the future.

If there’s strategy, there’s a metagame. The metagame shifts and evolves - someone will discover a new strategy which performs well against the old strategies. These new strategies will shake up how the game is played. Maybe they’ll trump the old strategies, replacing them as the new norm of the game. With enough time, even newer strategies can form to counter this new normal of the game.

Baseball has a metagame. There’s no set position for any of the outfielders except the pitcher and catcher - the others could all pile deep into the outfield if they wanted, but that’s terrible and it’d never work. Outfielders space themselves out to cover more ground because that has shown positive results. Coaches will call in pinch hitters because they think they could really use the hit - that started because someone thought that it might get that one hit, they tried it, and it was at least successful enough to keep going. Pitchers will intentionally walk a hitter every so often, the idea being that sometimes it’s better to definitely let someone get a base than to maybe get a run. It works often enough that it gets repeated.

Innovation happens all the time, and sometimes it comes from unexpected sources. In the last few years, baseball has experienced huge changes due to, of all things, the iPad. With the rising levels of information in this day and age, it’s been easier for players to analyze trends than ever before. There are iPad apps which let you see how often a player will hit a certain pitch; if they do hit it, it’ll show you where their hits are most likely to land. You can see every curveball a pitcher has thrown this entire season. This huge wealth of knowledge is really starting to make waves in baseball because the iPad is more portable than a laptop, while bigger and easier to use than an iPod, giving players constant access to easy-to-view information. It lets players tap into baseball’s metagame - figuring out when to apply certain strategies, based on when they’ve been successful - in a much more accessible way than ever before. (There’s an entire article about it, found  here, if you’d like to read more in-depth than I could ever explain. It's pretty fascinating.)

Chess has a metagame. Over the centuries the game has been played, people have collectively figured out the most successful ways to start a game, sequences of moves called “openings”. A quick google search indicates that there are over a thousand openings, most of which I’d imagine are viable. Good chess players stick to these openings, because they’ve been shown to work. Chess is another game where technology is forcing the game to evolve - there are chess-playing programs which trailblaze new viable strategies that would probably take humans decades to figure out.

Super Mario Bros. and other single player games have metagames associated with them. As you play a single player game, you take note of what does or does not work when presented with certain challenges, and you use that information to tackle challenges like it in the future. It might not evolve as fast as other metagames, but it’s certainly there. If you happen to look up strategy guides or videos of the game, you’re likely to take the information from there into your own play, evolving it and keeping the metagame shifting.

Magic: the Gathering is practically defined by its metagame. Every few months new cards are released, which shake up what decks are successful. Popular deck types will get boosted or weakened, sometimes fringe decks will get that fighting edge they really needed, and sometimes new decks will appear out of nowhere, as a strategy which didn’t exist is pulled together by the existence of a single new card. One style of play removes the oldest cards from legality, forcing large metagame shifts each year when sudden absences allow different decks to fill the competitive void. Some strategies will get too dominant, and will have some cards banned in order to keep them in check; this promotes new growth. Since the game is fairly focused on how different decks work against one another, each tournament informs players what the new “good” is, and this can shift each week.

The metagame isn’t something you can escape, no matter what game you’re playing. The metagame is a reflection of players seeking any edge they can get against others, and it will stagnate over time as existing strategies are explored more deeply, and executed more tightly. Magic essentially changes its rules every few months to keep everything fresh, to keep a sense of discovery. Even something like Tic-Tac-Toe has a metagame, though it’s simple enough that an unbeatable strategy is easily memorized. That’s a rare case of a game which can’t experience a metagame shift - there is no play space to be explored anymore, as every possible round of play has been explored.

It’s a weird thing that is always changing with every single game that gets played, which changes how the game is played in a continuous feedback loop. It’s pretty neat that game players are able to draw from such an ephemeral, shifting idea.

-Jacob