hmm you're right, i need a more nuanced model for this
i was imagining "mastering the arbitrary rules and/or constructs of an individual game" as being a separate thing from "doing things with a creative flair/flourish/skill that is often applied to other creative pursuits," but, what is magic the gathering if not a very massive hilarious combinatorics problem in disguise, and such skills are totally creative and totally applied to other pursuits
and when you look at the chess games people get excited about and relate in books and stuff, ofentimes the really famous games include wacky strats that people dug partially due to utility but largely b/c of flourish and such (the romantic era of chess was the best)
metagames are fun like that, though it's hard for me to think of "metagame" these days without thinking of the m:tg metagame, which is mostly "reading lots of articles on the internet and figure out how everyone else is beating the mainstream strategies," just because several hundred brains thinking really hard about the problem are going to do better than me all on my lonesome every time
which makes me nostalgic for tournaments in the late 90's, really. there was the internet back then, and magazines talking m:tg strategy, but the metagame evolved much more slowly, and was much more regional in nature, so it was v possible for my brother and i to come up with weird stuff that beat the metagame in our local card shop
(i mean, okay, you can still beat the metagame, i'm still proud that i was rocking g/w elves archetype during lorwyn/shadowmoor a couple weeks before it got big, but, y'know, more a problem of scale/speed and all that)
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Date: 2015-07-18 03:25 am (UTC)i was imagining "mastering the arbitrary rules and/or constructs of an individual game" as being a separate thing from "doing things with a creative flair/flourish/skill that is often applied to other creative pursuits," but, what is magic the gathering if not a very massive hilarious combinatorics problem in disguise, and such skills are totally creative and totally applied to other pursuits
and when you look at the chess games people get excited about and relate in books and stuff, ofentimes the really famous games include wacky strats that people dug partially due to utility but largely b/c of flourish and such (the romantic era of chess was the best)
metagames are fun like that, though it's hard for me to think of "metagame" these days without thinking of the m:tg metagame, which is mostly "reading lots of articles on the internet and figure out how everyone else is beating the mainstream strategies," just because several hundred brains thinking really hard about the problem are going to do better than me all on my lonesome every time
which makes me nostalgic for tournaments in the late 90's, really. there was the internet back then, and magazines talking m:tg strategy, but the metagame evolved much more slowly, and was much more regional in nature, so it was v possible for my brother and i to come up with weird stuff that beat the metagame in our local card shop
(i mean, okay, you can still beat the metagame, i'm still proud that i was rocking g/w elves archetype during lorwyn/shadowmoor a couple weeks before it got big, but, y'know, more a problem of scale/speed and all that)
anyway yeah tl;dr good point