Playing The Meta

A single drop of sweat dripped into my eye.

I'm going to die.

I felt the pit forming in my stomach. I clenched my fingers.

There's nowhere to go.

I looked at the person across from me. I knew it was over. They knew I knew. I saw a smile creep out from the corner of their mouth.

I want to punch you in the face, I thought.

Instead, I said "good game."

I was about to be exposed to one of the most powerful ideas in the world, an idea with deep roots in everything from game theory to warfare to influence.

I didn't know that at the time, though, so I gathered up my Magic: The Gathering cards and retreated to the McDonald's play area to eat a Big Mac and sulk.

This blog post is the first of a series.

In it, we will cover one of the most profound ideas in the world: playing the meta.

It is an idea that will help you exploit people's weaknesses, find hidden advantages, influence the world around you, and much more.

If you internalize this concept, you will find yourself accomplishing things that seem impossible. What looks like magic from the outside will feel easy to you.

It is as close to "seeing the Matrix" as we can get in real life.

Getting there, however, means starting with humble beginnings:

With that depressed nerd, eating alone in the McDonald's playplace.

I was not a popular kid.

I had a few friends. But I got picked on a lot. I fought a lot. I felt different, rejected, like everyone else knew something I didn't. I had a volatile mix of low self-esteem and huge ego; I thought I was smarter than everyone, and that everyone was better than me. I felt doomed.

Like a lot of nerdy kids, I sought out worlds I could understand and control. I loved video games. I loved the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I loved Dungeons and Dragons. In short, I loved worlds with arcane bodies of knowledge I could master. Knowing the rules made me feel like I had power; the real world made me feel powerless.

It was around this time that I discovered Magic: The Gathering. Magic (or "MtG" for short) was a trading card game. Opponents acted as wizards, casting "spells" from their personally-chosen deck of cards. You each tried to do 20 points of damage to your opponent by lobbing fireballs, summoning creatures, and casting enchantments.

Magic was different from games like chess in that designing your deck - deciding which cards to include, figuring out an overall strategy, trying to find powerful combinations between cards - was a major part of the game. The number of cards - hundreds at the time, over 27,000 now - meant that every deck, and every game, felt unique. It was both manageable as a body of knowledge and interesting - a heady combination for a young kid simultaneously convinced of his own genius and the unfairness of the broader world.

Magic felt like a game I could win.

A nearby game store hosted weekly Magic tournaments inside the local McDonald's. I remember the feeling of my mom dropping me off, nervously walking inside, and sliding into a booth across from people I didn't know. Most were significantly older than me - some were adults.

I'd spent weeks honing my deck (a red/green goblin deck). I'd thought deeply about which cards were best and had stacked my deck with as many of them as I could. Loading my setup with as many "good" cards as possible would lead to success...right?

I didn't win a single game at that first tournament. Everyone was very nice, and I got a ticket for a free burger as part of my $5 entry fee. I was embarrassed but resolved to come back next week with an even better deck.

What followed could only be described as several weeks of abject failure. Yes, I was young; no, I didn't have the budget for buying cards that some of the other players had; no, I hadn't been playing as long as everyone else. But I was smart! I should be able to figure this out. The alternative - that I wasn't as smart as I thought I was - was terrifying.

So I kept trying. And I kept losing.

Which brings us back to that kid, sitting alone in the kid's play area, eating a burger in silence. I stared into the mouth of a slide which emptied into a ball pit and its black recesses seemed like a void that would grow until it ate me alive.

You aren't that smart. Since you don't have anything else going for you, that means you have nothing at all.

I hadn't just lost. I felt like a loser.

And right at that moment, I felt a hand on my shoulder.

I looked up - It was the owner of our local store, the guy who'd organized the tournaments.

"Hey dude! I was wondering - what's in your sideboard?"

I didn't know it, but I was about to learn a concept that would change my life forever.

There are two ways to play a game:

You can play the game itself, or

You can play the players.

Once you transition from thinking about the rules of the game to thinking about the person across from you, you have begun playing the meta.

The "metagame" is "all of the decisions, resources, and information that, while not explicitly part of the game, are nonetheless important."

"Playing the meta" refers to a strategy that transcends the immediate conflict and takes into account the situation the conflict is occurring within.

Take any competitive endeavor and you will find people playing the meta.

In Magic:

"Years ago, Hall of Fame pro Frank Karsten developed a method that's still used by many players and writers today. He called it the 'winner's circle metagame.' He would examine recent tournament results (for example, all Standard Grand Prix played in the last two months), he would assign each archetype:

2 points for finishing ninth through sixteenth

3 points for fifth through eighth

4 points for third and fourth

5 points for second

6 points for first

Then he would average out the data and assign each archetype a percentage. These numbers were meant to help predict what decks would be played and perform well the following weekend."

Josh Waitzkin, the chess prodigy who inspired the movie "Searching for Bobby Fischer," recounted his brush with the metagame when he first started playing against adults:

"Older opponents know that kids have less stamina for long battles, so they sometimes made the games drag on to tire me out. Once in Philadelphia, a ruthless fellow made me play for over nine hours. I was ten years old and he sat stalling at the board in front of obvious moves for forty-five minutes at a time. It was terrible, but a lesson learned. On top of everything else, I had to develop the ability to run a mental marathon."

Or take author Tim Ferriss's somewhat dubious path to becoming a kickboxing champion:

"In The 4-Hour Work Week author Tim Ferriss describes how he became the kickboxing champion of the world. While he was engaged in the vital work of building his automated nutraceuticals company, his potential opponents in the ring were spending hours enduring grueling regimens in dank dojos. When Ferriss decided he wanted to take home the title, he saw no reason his lack of comparable talent or training should stand in his way.

To this end, Ferris researched the sport’s rules and uncovered a technicality stating that contestants who step outside the fighting circle three times are disqualified. Armed with this knowledge, he worked out how to wriggle his body in such a way to get his opponents to do just that.

Is Tim Ferriss the best kickboxer in the world? Not even close. But he has the title. And in the age we’re living in, that’s all that matters.”

What all of these approaches have in common is that they focused not on the game itself, but how people expect the game to be played. This often raises a cry of foul play from those who are focused solely on the "spirit of the game" - missing the fact that that "spirit" is to be found nowhere other than in their own minds.

You can complain about it all you want - the metagame is inevitable. The only question is whether you will play the meta or be victimized by it.

Waitzkin again:

"Psychological warfare is at the center of nearly all high-level competitive disciplines—and I mean competitive in the loosest sense imaginable. For example, the car salesman and potential buyer are opponents. When two highly trained minds square off, in any field, the players are in a fight to enter each other's heads. These exchanges feel like epic tennis rallies in which the tilt of battle sways back and forth as one player picks up on a faint tell that may or may not exist long enough to be exploited, and the other has to feel the danger, and swat the rival out of his mind before it is too late."

Prior to that tournament, I hadn't thought about my sideboard even once.

In most Magic tournaments, players construct their decks ahead of time. However, they are allowed to bring a small number of cards - their "sideboard" - which can be swapped in and out of the deck between games.

Sideboards allow you to plan ahead for particular situations that don't merit a full-time position in your limited deck space. If you know everyone plays red but one person is playing blue, you can add your "anti-blue" card to your sideboard and put it into your deck when you need it.

I didn't use a sideboard at all. I put all my best cards in the deck - why bring the cast-offs? I was only thinking about my strategy - the idea of the meta (of thinking about other people's strategies and adapting accordingly) hadn't even occurred to me.

While I never became great at Magic, understanding that the game in front of me was not the only game being played changed my life.

I thought about it when I started my business.

I think about it whenever I start a new project.

I think about it when I choose what to read.

That's because the "metagame" is another name for what game theorists call "common knowledge" - and understanding common knowledge is one of the greatest advantages you can possess.

In the next essay, we'll discuss how common knowledge makes us irrational.

And in the final essay, we'll discuss how to exploit that rationality.

Yours,

Dan

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