Tonight on GeekNights, we consider what happens when one chases the meta. This is especially a problem when competitive and casual players mix and is the topic of several GeekNights lectures. In the news, Furality was phenomenal this year, and the Nintendo Direct was underwhelming.
Question about the Furality party - do you get to hear the other participants singing along? I remember trying a folk singing group online during covid times and every time people sang together there was enough lag to ruin it no matter how minimal.
On having a “meta” in perfect information games, I can speak to my personal expertise of Go.
My lone warning is I’ll have to talk about the game in vague terms because to get into the details would be … difficult.
I’ve been playing the game for the better part of the last 25 years and the meta, until recently, had been more of a preference or a fad. Long ago (like several hundred years ago) it was securing quick areas (territory) and then building from that. In the early 1900s through to the 80sish the game became more about loose formations and influence and not sweating the quick solid areas of the past.
The game became less about fighting fist fights and more about peacefully building large areas and disrupting your opponents areas. You can still see this style in a lot of Japanese players, especially older ones. As Korea and China rose in power their style started to become the meta in the 90s through to 2016, this was a very aggressive all or nothing sort of fighting style.
Then Google created AlphaGo and beat one of the toughest reigning champions of Go. I could wax on about how, well at the time he hadn’t been at the top of the Go world for a good 4 or 5 years, blah blah blah. I watched the games live, and while I wouldn’t claim to have a tenth of the strength of Lee Sedol, or any of the commentators for that matter, it was clear AlphaGo was stronger than him. Maybe not the same way that stockfish is better than Magnus Carlson, but still better. A good two or three ranks higher.
Since then the meta is to play like AI, very territorial, very balanced (AI doesn’t go for a win by a huge number of points, it’ll gladly sacrifice a large formation because what it gains elsewhere is literally one point better). This does lead to play that feels unfinished, openings that have been standard for the last 100+ years are now truncated, sequences that were once treated as eh are now in vogue again (notable the 3-3 invasion).
Everyone loves to push their games through analysis tools and look at how closely their moves match what the AI says is “perfect play”. But even the AI says these moves are plus or minus 0.1 of a point. In a game with whole value points, this seems a bit ridiculous but does have utility if you know all the things that go into why a move if worth that.
There was a fashion in professional circles to do what AI suggests and try to be exactly like it. But AI does have a terrifying ability to accurately count and compare situations, this is really how it’s able to value moves down to the tenth of a point. Humans, even professionals, tend to stick to half point valuations (again, the why here is important, it’d take an hour to explain all the judgements that go into that).
The meta has settled into a place where we’ve taken a few new openings and sequences from AI, we use it for review, even though a lot of moves that it says are “good” require a level of reading and fighting ability that would make the top players back away in terror. A lot of people still play with a very territorial style, because it’s the easy direction that the AI takes that humans can emulate.
This has lead to a weird blind spot in newer players games where they don’t know how to deal with large influence based frameworks because that style has fallen out of the meta. In the professional world I don’t think they’ll ever be unable to deal with larger frameworks, but it is entertaining in the amateur world. I’ll play someone who’s only really played against AI or players who have played against AI and they are just befuddled by the different styles of play.