I've attempted something like this for MLG. What I'm about to post is an article my editor found a hole in (which I knew existed when I created it). Essentially the Smash community has taken "mindgames" and "metagame" and sorta confused them.
Case in point, during matches, mindgames are essentially how the person thinks/reacts during the entire match. The level of this thinking can be considered his metagame. But, by the same token, the metagame can be considered on a broad spectrum, ie "the higher level metagame". Or for characters "the metagame of the ice climbers". Some people confuse metagame to mean the peak of any characters ablility to be played, when in reality the metagame is simply a given point in a person learning cycle. The problem is simply differentiating between mindgames and the metagame. In reality mindgames are actually referred to as "Metagaming" by a formal definition. IE in match you are metagaming.
Here is the article I had created that was scrapped (a differant version, containing some of the same points, is still in the works).
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Defining Skill: A Smasher’s Metagame
Each month Smashers from all over the country converge on a single city. It has happened in Chicago. Anaheim. Dallas. New York. Like their Halo brethren, these events provide a rare opportunity for Smashers to commune with a national presence. Unlike their Halo brethren though, these meetings allow Smashers to advance their overall level of play--their
metagame--by leaps and bounds.
From Chess to Soccer, the term metagame has been used for years to describe certain unseen qualities in a game. Smashers have come up with their own definition, morphed through years of slang and discussion by the game’s highest and most dedicated players. In short, a player’s metagame is how they reason and perform during a match by judging, predicting, and reacting to their opponent based on previous and similar encounters. The metagame is usually broken into two components: technical ability and mind-games. These components working in tandem most readily represent a player’s skill level.
Mind-Games: A misnomer of sorts, the phrase “mind games” has long been used to describe the act of tricking and manipulating the opponent. It has since come to embody something more than a simple, single trick pulled on occasion during a match. Mind-games are now used to describe just how a player thinks and manipulates the opponent during the course of an entire match. Just how advanced a player’s mind-games are depends largely on another variable: experience.
Experience builds a player’s ability to reason during a match. The more experience the better, but what is also important is the type of experience player’s have. Tournament experience is far and away more important than any other form, as most players have a tendency to fool around or not play as serious in non-tournament matches.
Technical Ability: Technical ability is the key for progressing to the upper echelon of the Smash community. Every pro is on roughly same ground, although a few, like Mew2King, break the mold as technically superior players. Even players well below this caliber may possess technical prowess--which is why gaining experience to outsmart the opponent is so vital and often the only difference maker in a match (outside of inherent character advantages).
The need for technical ability is not always apparent to a player who dominates their friends without there use. The argument is compounded when the same player meets the same success against technically proficient opponents. The reason is that experience can sometimes outweigh the benefits of technical skill at low or mid level metagame’s, largely because the advantages of newly learned techniques are not fully utilized, or are not utilized consistently.
What makes technical players so dangerous? Options. Simply put, the more options the better. Technical players have fewer limitations than non-technical players. For example, easy counter techniques like shield grabbing are massively effective against a player with low technical ability, but these effects are minimal against players wit h high technical ability because of L-Canceling.
Why are all pros at roughly the same level of technical skill? Picture this: every member of Carbon learns to team shoot double shots consistently (doubling their kill efficiency), creating, at first, a technical skill gap between them and the other top teams. The result is that the other high level teams must also learn to consistently team shoot double shots, lest they be left in the dust. In this way, both Halo and Smash have gone through a very long and tedious process of technical evolution, where new techniques are discovered and integrated into game play over time.
Each curve on this graph starts at a base point where the player has had no experience against human opponents. All three curves have a theoretical asymptote, representing the maximum skill level any player can achieve with their given technical ability level. It should be noted that the metagame will always increase with experience, but the effects become less profound over time as the asymptote is approached. This theoretical maximum also changes as technical ability increases and thus more options become available.
The Low Curve: Most owners of SSBM will never advance past this level of play, though often times they don’t have a need to. These players know how the game works, they understand the concepts, and they know just about everything any casual player will discover through the natural process of playing. How good they are within this set level of play depends largely on the number of opponents they have faced and how often they have played.
The curve does not account for the integration of techniques because there aren’t any techniques to integrate beyond the basics of the game, thus causing the curve to be mostly linear in function.
The Mid Curve: The transition curve in Smash. Technical ability is spotty at best and the application is usually used incorrectly or ineffectively. The concavity at the beginning represents players learning to incorporate their spotty technical ability against humans during matches—a slow process at first.
Many Halo pros who currently experiment with Smash fall somewhere on this curve, having learned most of the advanced techniques but not with the proficiency of someone on the high curve.
The High Curve: There are a host of players on this curve, a testament both to the strength of the competitive community and to MLG. Almost the entire Smash staff falls here, having mastered long ago the advanced techniques. Players on this curve now focus solely on outsmarting the competition, a process learned through tournament experience.
Being on the high curve does not mean someone is a high level player. Keep in mind the property of each curve is reflective of technical ability, not overall ability (the height of the curve at a given point would be the ability). The area highlighted in orange is a gauge of where most pro players lie. Prodigies like Ken and Isai are represented on the yellow portion of the graph.
During each tournament there is an unspoken of exchange of information. Since players practice together within a given region, they have developed similar styles, counters, and strategies—their regional metagame. MLG tournaments progress these metagames as these different play styles collide to form an overall national metagame. Most, even those heavily experienced, leave tournaments with a new appreciation of the game. When Orlando takes place, the process will occur once again, where Smashers from every region exchange what they have learned and incorporated since the last national get-together.
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The problems with the article were...well. I attempted to cover to much in a 2 page constraint. For Smash, this article has referances to Halo, so for this board it isn't quite right. The graph is somewhat arbitrary (sp?), at first I tried 3 differant graphs, with technical skill and mindgames being the separate axis, but then I realized that didn't make any sense (ie technical skill doesn't nessasary increase mindgames, it is that technical + expierance that will cause an increase). Anyways, overall the article was soso, the editor helped me out afterwards on using some of this information for a new article (to be realesed god knows when).
