Escaping the Metagame
Evil Monopoly hotel strategies and what they meant for you
(I’m Henry Snow, and you’re reading Another Way.)
Many games, especially board games and video games, have some strategy or set of tactics that are more effective than other forms of play. By nature, they are often less satisfying. If you can pick from 75 characters in a fighting game, it sucks when other players figure out exactly which one and which behaviors are numerically the best. For those of you who don’t play video games, here’s an accessible example.
The already frustrating board game Monopoly (I can hear some of you exhaling at the mention of it) allows for a particularly frustrating strategy. Maximizing rents in Monopoly involves placing house tokens and then ideally building toward a hotel token on your property. There are a finite number of each piece. If all houses are on the board, no player can build a new house. Hotels generate more rent than four houses, but keeping your opponents from building houses is even better than building hotels. By locking up the house supply, building four houses everywhere you can while never trading them in for hotels, you can crush your opponents.
This is a miserable way to play Monopoly. You win by starving others, restricting their ability to access basic game mechanics. And what about the pleasure of a bright red hotel on your spaces? Not to mention that while expensive hotels can knock out an unlucky opponent, cheap houses only slowly bleed their fortune, in an unspectacular and potentially far slower manner. You win, but at what cost?
This is sometimes called a “meta” strategy, because it’s a strategy favored by the “metagame”-- the game-above-the-game of how different competitive strategies do and don’t interact. In small groups, the existence of an unpleasant and singular “meta” strategy isn’t necessarily an issue: social bonds check it. Nobody wants to play with someone who always wins, especially in a frustrating way. But the larger a circle gets, the more “the meta” becomes mandatory. If your opponents are drawn from a pool of thousands of people you will never interact with again and cannot communicate with, you have no way to influence their choices.
You can imagine how bad this problem is for human behavior writ large when you consider that it is a problem in virtually every online multiplayer video game– an arena in which, outside money tournaments, stakes are entirely fictional and as low as they could possibly be for any human activity. The problem is not that people suck. Many of those who complain loudly about the meta are also people who use it, because they feel they have to.
While games are a poor way to describe human behavior writ large, they are partially analogous to competitive behavior specifically– which is an enormous part of our political and economic life. I have spent many, many issues of this newsletter attempting in various ways to insist human beings are not merely selfish optimizers. One thing I have not done nearly enough of yet is write about how we can collectively decide to be better. Strategies in gaming communities for dealing with the metagame have a lot to tell us for other areas of life where we feel resigned to embrace competitive but harmful tactics.
As an individual, one simple form of resistance is personal choice. Competition restricts your agency! It does not remove it. Individual competitors can choose what I call a whimsy strategy– making competitive choices for non-competitive reasons, such as building hotels because you like the color red, or choosing a weaker video game character because you find their abilities more fun.
The whimsy strategy cannot change the world. It’s modest. It won’t spread like wildfire, because you’re going to lose more often when you do this. But it can be rewarding in other ways. It becomes much easier to handle losing at something when you have already chosen a less effective strategy, and while it’s bad sportsmanship to tell your opponents this after losing, knowing it yourself can make it easier to accept defeat. The whimsy strategy forces you to focus on enjoying play rather than victory– and given that in many games you will lose a majority of the time, and that in all games you spend the majority of your time playing rather than tabulating winning, that’s a reasonable trade-off in many cases.
As we move from individuals to groups, new anti-meta strategies become available to us. The bouncer strategy involves setting informal community boundaries. A friends’ regular game night, a family’s holiday Monopoly game, or a local league can informally make clear that fun is the point. If I start hoarding hotels when my family plays Monopoly over Christmas, my cousins will rightly be annoyed at me and be less likely to play next time, or at least likely to shame me at every available occasion. Players who refuse to provide a good time can be isolated or excluded as appropriate from different communities.The bouncer strategy isn’t as punitive as it sounds, either. There’s a time and place for every kind of play. If you want to play Monopoly like this, you can find people who do.
Finally, for a concrete example that works even well above the local/family/club level, we can look to the Smogon strategy, which I’ve named for a forum community that controls one of the most popular formats for online competitive Pokemon. Smogon plays a different kind of game than most players. Most of their rulesets outright ban some strategies, such as putting your opponent’s entire team to sleep, or raising the probability of evading enemy attacks. The argument here is that these strategies are random and therefore not fun. Thus, by formal rule, Smogon excludes these strategies from play and thus from any possibility of becoming part of the metagame.
They go much further than this, however. Smogon is best known for its formally divided tiers of characters, which limit players’ choices by power level. Some of the most powerful characters are simply so strong in this game, they would crowd out all other options. The most popular of these is Overused, or OU, which allows most characters, but bans a small subset of them. Below these are tiers like Rarely Used, Never Used, etc. which are meant to restrict options in order to Each of these tiers has its own metagame– its own competitive space of licit strategies. A character that is barely useful or merely situational in OU might be one of the standouts in RU.
Within these tiers, competitive players do still pursue meta strategies. Criticism of Smogon (yes, this exists; competitive Pokemon is much bigger than you think it is) tends to come from two, ironically contradictory, directions: criticism of Smogon rules for eliminating strategies and characters by rules (e.g. calling them sore losers for banning a character you like to a higher tier), and criticism of Smogon players for pursuing meta strategies (e.g. complaining that everyone you play against in Smogon-defined tiers seems to use the same meta characters and strategies). Because many of them do. If you take your all Ice-type team into the OU bracket, you will hit a wall. Having a diversity of characters, or bringing the strongest rather than your favorites, is simply better. Not always, not in all circumstances, but in general.
The Smogon strategy acknowledges that the emergence of “the meta” is inevitable– it’s a part of gaming– and thus seeks to shape its development instead. A healthy metagame means having many options, but not infinite options. It’s acceptable if the same 20 characters are common, but not if the same 2 are absolutely necessary. And this is decided on by a combination of experiment– having test games to gather data on how powerful a strategy or character is– and democracy– voting. In short: this strategy democratically optimizes based on community values. Unlike the bouncer strategy, the Smogon strategy is formal, which means it scales up better, and that it doesn’t risk some players abusing social power or others’ discomfort.
All three of these strategies have a place in modern economic and political life. On the personal level, the whimsy strategy means avoiding shortcuts and acting according to both your values and your personality– choosing to take a lower-paying job that you enjoy, to be honest rather than lie where it would benefit you, not to cheat on a test. Within our communities, the bouncer strategy can help us determine what’s acceptable.
And at the level of states and nations, the Smogon strategy offers a powerful lesson in policy. Even if we assume people are, or have to sometimes act, as utility-maximizing optimizers, we can still choose what, how, and when they can optimize. We can come together and decide what kind of games we want to play, and what we want winning to look like.