Changing the Meta
What I've learned by playing Wingspan for a year
If you’re interested in the themes that I try to focus on in this newsletter, then you would do yourself a favor by subscribing to The Convivial Society. L.M. Sacasas is easily one of the most thoughtful and talented technology writers in the country, offering, in his words, “shamelessly deliberate considerations of the meaning of technology for human experience.” I will confess that, having subbed for the past couple of years, his work was a primary inspiration for my own desire to return to long-form public writing.
Anyhow, I was thinking about his latest essay, which defies easy summary (but then, that’s what links are for). Having previously written about centripetal/centrifugal forces, and having thought a great deal about the question of surface vs depth, I was already inclined to follow the rest of the essay. In part, it’s an attempt to recast attention (something that Sacasas has devoted multiple essays towards doing) into something a little less transactional and flattened. Drawing on Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing (a book that should be required reading of many/most/all), he talks about the way that “a layer of reality that was always present to my senses only became accessible to me over time through the persistent application of attention.”
(In some ways, this is a much defter way of getting at what I was talking about in terms of scale. And it has the virtue of answering one of the questions that I didn’t really ask in that post, what it means to move from one scale to another, in more concrete terms. Because scales shift our attention, just as our variable investments of attention are what allow us to move from one scale to another.)
Odell talks about the way that, as she got deeper into birdwatching, the attention she invested “changed the granularity of [her] perception,” such that she became capable of distinguishing different birds’ songs. The world expands in response to deep attention, and our knowledge of that particular world deepens as well. Sacasas talks about how that sort of knowledge (and dwelling) can renew us, as opposed to “the exhausting, depleting, surface skimming way of life” that we’ve often created for ourselves through certain technologies (a very different sort of “bird” watching).
I guess that it wasn’t too hard to summarize, although I’m not certain I’ve done it justice. I want to spin off on a parallel though, because there’s a moment in the quote from Odell that sent me elsewhere. Having acquired the ability to distinguish birdsongs, Odell writes, “…now when I walk into the Rose Garden, I inadvertently acknowledge them in my head as though they were people: ‘Hi, raven, robin, song sparrow, chickadee, goldfinch, towhee, hawk, nuthatch …’ and so on.” I’m no birder myself, but that list immediately put me in mind of Wingspan.
Wingspan is an immensely popular board game, made even more so by the pandemic. The game was published in 2019; since then, it’s sold more than a million copies, and Stonemaier Games just released its 3rd expansion for it. I had a chance to play a few games before lockdown, but for me, the digital adaptation was an absolute godsend (the tutorial itself is worth the price of admission). I’ll get to why that is in a second, but first:
There’s a lot to like about this game, not the least of which is that it manages to be detailed and intricate without being initially complex. It’s magnificently designed in that way. I don’t want to spend too much time describing it here, especially since some of you may already be familiar, but it’s important for my purposes here to give some idea. Each player has a board, pictured above, that represents their “ecosystem,” which is the engine that they build/use to score points. There are three habitats, where you’re able to spend resources in order to place birds. There are only four actions that you can take in a given turn: place a bird, gather food, lay eggs, or draw cards (birds). Placing a bird typically costs some amount of food and/or eggs, depending on where you place it (birds always have the same food cost, but their egg costs increase as you go deeper into your habitat). And you want to go deeper, because the more birds you have in a habitat, the more resources that habitat will yield. And many of the birds have powers as well, which can give you additional resources, score you points, etc.
One of the features of the game is that there’s no linear path to victory. Ultimately, who has the most points wins, but you can get points from the birds themselves, by achieving shared goals that pertain to each round, by achieving personal bonus goals (and there are some birds that allow you to draw (and thus score) additional bonus cards. Some birds cache food, most of them can store eggs, and many of them allow you to tuck cards behind them—all of these things translate into endgame points. Your strategy depends upon the birds you’ve drawn, the round goals, and various strategies and/or synergies that you’re able to deploy. It sounds complicated, and it is, but it’s also remarkably easy to start playing, learning the intricacies as you go along.
This year, according to one of my brothers, was the Year of the Bird. Last year, over the holidays, my brothers and I chatted, as we do, and at some point, the topic of Wingspan came up. The four of us span three time zones, and probably only chat one or twice a year, but we decided to try out a game online. We hopped into a Zoom room in January, and played a couple of games through Steam. We had so much fun that we started doing it 2-3 times a month, and playing 1-2 asynchronous games pretty much constantly. We’ve been doing cross-country game nights all year long, we’ve spent more time talking with each other in one year than we probably have over the past decade, and I myself have played hundreds of games of Wingspan in that time.
Here’s the thing: the attention I’ve invested in this game has completely changed the granularity of my perception, to borrow Odell’s terminology. It’s done so for all of us, honestly—we chat about strategy on occasion, talk about which birds are the worst, etc. We can all look at a couple of birds, and tell not only which one is better in general, but which one is better in a specific situation (early game vs mid game, for example) or better for our individual ecosystem. There are birds that have lower point values but larger nest space, others that are mid-tier for points, but have such low cost that they’re worth it, and some whose powers (2-for-1 resource trades, like a raven or a killdeer) are first-pickable. Particularly in the base set, there are certain birds that are really powerful, and strategies that will give you a better-than-average chance to win.
For a broad range of games, and in many gaming communities, this notion, of the optimal strategy (or strategies) for victory, is called “the meta.” At a certain point, games become so complicated that the meta isn’t ever really settled. But it provides an heuristic for experienced/expert players. For example, within a given set in Magic the Gathering, there are always going to be certain color pairs or archetypes that are stronger than others. In World of Warcraft, the best raid compositions or PVP synergies often shift from season to season. In League of Legends, different roles and/or playstyles are buffed and others nerfed as they constantly update and tweak the game and its characters. For expert players, being able to read the meta and adapt to it is part of the game itself.
At the same time, it’s perfectly possible to play, enjoy, and even succeed without attending to the meta. You can enjoy the birdsong without being able to identify it. But there’s something resonant and even rewarding about the ability to access the meta. Sacasas puts it like this: “attention over time discloses not just orders of reality but also temporal rhythms that allow us to inhabit rather than resist time.” In the same way that we might match someone’s pace as we walk beside them, this kind of deep attention becomes almost effortless (and I think that’s part of why it renews us when it happens).
(Interestingly enough, I’ve also written about this in terms of how to teach graduate students to access the field meta, although I didn’t use this same terminology.)
Normally, I’d end here, but as I was writing, it occurred to me that we’re coming up on the time every year when folks explicitly make an effort to change their own meta, in the form of new year’s resolutions.
I’ve never been a resolutions kind of person, and I think that thinking about it in terms of attention has given me some insight into why that is. The interesting thing about it to me is that, these past few years, I’ve made substantial and lasting changes to my life. This past year, I became a lot closer with my family. The year before that, I got back into the habit of writing regularly. The year before that, I managed to build a lasting exercise regimen and lost a bunch of weight.
For me, though, those weren’t resolutions. They weren’t the changes that I made (or even necessarily chose to make). I didn’t know ahead of time, for instance, that Wingspan would become this platform for my family dynamics. In 2021, I didn’t decide to write more—it was an outgrowth of agreeing to join a writing group with a couple of friends, a practice I’d generally avoided to that point. Exercise was more intentional back in 2020, but what made it last for me was having taken the streaming plunge and giving myself a deep pool of things to play on my iPad while I exercised (and the lockdown helped as well).
What I’ve learned about myself is that my meta rarely shifts in response to the kind of resolutions that we normally associate with the new year, no matter how thick the Sharpie or how bright the post-it note. Instead, it’s about nudging the already active habits of mind and body I’ve got in ways that create the conditions for those new developments to emerge. I’m sure that there are plenty of folks out there who have written about them this way, but my most successful resolutions tend to function ecologically within the context of my life. To change my meta, I need to know my meta, and knowing it requires that investment of attention that Sacasas is talking about. So really, his essay is about making New Year’s Resolutions, at least in an obscure, roundabout way.
Happy new year.