Thread by @NickADobos

The MetaGame
How you are losing when playing
League of Legends, Dota2, the S&P 500 and Inflation

Life lessons learned from video games pt2!

No this isn’t about Zuckerberg
Thanks for ruining it @Meta …

I’ve played countless hours of video games. I’m addicted.

Turns out, many of the same strategies for winning complex multiplayer games are really useful outside of games too

League of Legends and Dota2 are particularly great examples of a concept called the Metagame

If you aren’t familiar with these games, they are some of the most popular and competitive in the world

The 2019 LoL world championship had more views than the NFL’s 2019 Super Bowl

These games are both MOBAs

5v5 team battles to slay your opponents and destroy their base

Where each player chooses 1 unique character out of ~150 available in the roster

Each with completely different skills, abilities, strengths, weaknesses and play styles.

So how does the Metagame work?

There are a couple definitions of the root word Meta

The Metagame isn’t about going beyond the universe, or into the the next virtual reality 🤢🤮

The way Zuck seems to be using it for Metaverse

The meta I’m talking about comes in 2 parts

1.

M
E
T
A

Most
Effective
Technique
Available

What strategy is the best?

Some strategies and techniques are just going to be less effective at achieving your goal than others

2. The other major definition of Meta we are talking about is

Self referential. Or somewhat recursive in nature

The metagame is how you most effectively win, when others are also trying to use the most effect technique available to win

Each of these games having so many different characters and strategies to choose from provides some very interesting Metagames to emerge

First off, choosing your character becomes a huge part of winning the game

The game is fair enough and chaotic enough that any character can win if played well, at least at most levels

But it’s not perfectly fair, some characters are stronger

At the highest ranks, simply picking a weak character could cost you a win before there game has begun

When your competitors are using effective techniques, there is less room for weaker techniques to win

Even if you execute well, outplaying can become impossible

In order to keep players on their toes and keep them from getting bored, the devs change the most effective technique to win

Tweaking and adding characters and other game mechanics in order to constantly mix up who is strongest

But that’s not the only way the metagame evolves

Which is where part 2 comes in

As players realize what champions are strongest, that champion naturally gets picked more. Which causes ripple effects

Even if one character is considered the strongest compared to the entire roster of characters, they can’t beat everything

There are always counter strategies, and weaknesses!

Suddenly a character that would normally be very bad in comparison to most of the roster, becomes a perfect counter!

One character being strong raises the relative power of the counter strategy!

Which raises the pick rate of that character in response

Which then raises the strength of the counter to that new character, over and over again recursive way

Even without any direct changes to the game, the best strategies constantly evolve in response to how others play

Even trying to directly create a fair game becomes a nightmare

Small changes to only a single character can change the entire Metagame

Like collapsing a house of cards

Given the complexity of over 150 characters, it becomes completely unpredictable

Making one character weaker, will make all the characters they did well against stronger, potentially too strong

Making one character stronger will make the characters they did well against weaker, potentially entirely removing them from being valid strategies at all!

But this doesn’t just apply to games that are in versus mode, when certain strategies counter another

It also applies to co-op games, including ones in real life

The one I’ve been particularly curious about lately is money

And the ownership of stocks and stock indexes and more

As the world has changed, so have the strategies people have use for creating wealth

It’s easier than ever to learn about and buy companies. More people than ever own stocks

Many have realized that holding vast amounts of different stocks in an index is the new Meta

But what happens when more and more people buy stocks and indexes?

Does that continue to work? Or does it become less effective?

What happens to an individual’s wealth if they don’t use the same strategy? Do they fall even further behind?

I don’t have clear answers to these

I suspect that work, and trading time for cash is becoming less and less effective

And becoming a capitalist, and owner with who directs work and cortisol is becoming more

Look at inflation. When printing trillions to help those with low income, they ended up getting screwed

Increasing the money supply caused the value of money to decrease and the value of assets to increase

The top 1% gained over 400x as much wealth from “bailing out” the poor…

The Metagame is evolving, right before our eyes

Will you play it?

P.S. crypto is set to disrupt Money’s Metagame even more

but that’s a thread for another time

Liked this?

Check out some other lessons learned from video games

and my other #ship30for30 writing here

https://twitter.com/NickADobos/status/1452822325666144263