Man, Technics, and Competition

How important is the meta-game and how does this reach beyond sports?

A long time back, my local Racquetball club hosted a pro-level tournament. The club was not prestigious by any stretch of the imagination, but still managed to get some big-name players who happened to be in town, with several in the top twenty in the nation.

The local pros ranked from between 100 and 200, not too shabby. Unfortunately, they got absolutely wrecked by these elites, many only getting one or two pity points in the entire match. The caliber pf skill was starker than anyone of the poor saps could ever fathom. As the tournament progressed, it came down to an 18-year-old upstart and a grizzled, experienced 40-year-old man. The tournament officials, seemingly caught off guard by the caliber of the players entering the tournament, only had a local man as the referee and the older, veteran player smelled blood.

For those unfamiliar with Racquetball, it’s an incredibly fast sport with the ball whipping through the court at around 150 MPH. A player serves, like in Tennis, and both take turns hitting the ball, hitting as many walls as they want as long as it hits the front wall without skipping. It takes a very well-trained man to see if the ball made the wall, as they easily slam the ball only inches above the wall.

The other critical aspect is they all are in the same area, meaning the other player has to give his opponent not only enough room to hit the ball, but can’t maliciously block paths to the front wall. This requires a very good sense of angles, abilities of the players to move, and assessing logical shot picking.

Needless to say, the referee struggled in all three. The old, grizzled vet slowly starting to constrain his younger opponent’s shots by his location, moving just enough to block a clean shot but have plausible deniability. He did this until the younger player yelled at the referee in a fit of rage, while the veteran player messed with the head of both his opponent and the referee with some amusing banter.

The scene getting tense, game continued, and the referee called a skip on a clean kill shot, giving the old man a point. The young man raged at the referee at the missed call again, and they went back and forth. The old man watched with wry amusement until his enraged opponent entered the court again, where he then winked at him and said “That was a nice shot.”

Of course, even if the opponent admits it was a botched call, it doesn’t matter. This proved too much for the young man, who played completely off the rest of the match and the old man won the championship. The referee apologized to the young player afterwards, more or less realizing he got just as trapped in head games that largely led to the young man’s loss.

If someone chided the man for winning unfairly, he would argue back that the ref was going to make bad calls, so they might as well be in his favor. He would argue that his placement on the court was his discretion, and if he was blocking the shot, that was the referee’s problem to call, not his. It would make zero sense to judge his actions based on how the referee “should” call. It wasn’t like he bribed the referee or spiked his opponent’s drink, he simply took advantage of the opportunities given to him. That the young man didn’t do the same was the young man’s fault. And he would be right.

Another poignant memory I have is in High School, where the girl’s basketball team of my small rural team was playing for the state championship. They were playing their arch-rivals in the conference, adding extra spice to the meetup. What culminated was the most blatant rigging of a game I have ever witnessed. They called fouls on my home team if they breathed wrong, travels on perfectly acceptable pivots, and seemingly every loose ball was given to their opponents.

The stands on my home’s side were near a riot, with dozens of people screaming over the railings at the refs until halftime gave a respite. By this time, my team was losing by 15, so the refs backed off. It was so embarrassing that even the opponent’s side seemed embarrassed by the entire debacle. In summary, someone did some major politicking for this small-fry meaningless small school matchup.

These thoughts came to mind upon hearing that Major League Baseball’s most notorious umpire, Angel Hernandez, was retiring. For those unfamiliar, this was a man responsible for countless botched calls, not just with regards to strike zones, but judgement calls regarding getting on base and even Home Runs. It’s seriously impressive the sheer level of incompetence over his long career.

On top of this, he was overly confrontational, throwing players out for very small infractions and affecting the outcome of countless games. He was the sort of umpire that makes one wonder if he was taking kickbacks somewhere or simply bore a lot of grudges that clouded his judgment.

An interesting conversation that came out is whether there is even a need for umpires in a very regimented and black-and-white game like Baseball. The technology exists to read a strike and ball without an umpire, and technology exists to ascertain if the ball hit the first baseman’s glove or the batter touched first. All of these are clearly specified rules with no real wiggle room for judgement calls.

Another such example is Tennis, where the game has made heavy, and effective, use of technology to determine if a ball was in or out. This became almost a necessity, as the speed of shots, especially on serves, made it hard for any human to make calls with consistency. Now a high beep tells when a serve is faulted, and a clever challenge system allows a player to challenge a human judgement with the cold, hard calculation of advanced computer technology.

What is rarely asked, though, is at what cost are we automating these sports? The obvious upside is you can always be assured a fair game, with no shenanigans behind the scenes mucking up what is assumed to be a by-the-books affair. For the basketball game I witnessed, the cold calculating machine would not overt biases, shady deals, or other forms of corruption. The game will be regimented, consistent, and create trust in the system.

But when human factors are removed, it will become predictable, but sometimes in ways totally outside the spirit of said rules. Take this interpretation of the No-Fly Rule for instance:

From a purely technical standpoint, the call was right. From a simple sanity check though, the call was insane. There always needs to be leeway from the hard and fast rules to make a game that makes sense.

It will also lose a lot of the meta-game, which can sometimes be as exciting and deep as the actual game. Think about the old man in the Racquetball game, playing against a greener but better player. Isn’t the head game just as much a part of competing as everything else? Baseball catchers use all sorts of tricks to gain an advantage with the very human umpire in assessing balls and strikes, adding a depth and flavor that will go away in cold calculation.

This isn’t constrained to sports either. While standardized tests are supposed to evoke a sense of fairness in a system, a lot is lost when more opaque means of testing, such as oral exams have been done away with. What was once a competition on several levels, trying to find an advantage at every angle from gaining favor of the examiner to maybe even psyching out his competition becomes just filling bubbles in a sterile room to find out who goes forward. The meta-game, a large portion of which signifies not only talent, but grit, disappears.

Of course, everyone looks to take advantage to get ahead, and people are always going to use their unfair leverage to get the outcome they want. This is largely done in the background though, and privately. Most of the time, a man in the modern environment will likely never even know who his opponent is, much less directly compete. It becomes sterilized and impersonal.

It no longer becomes a meta-battle between the mind of the player and the referee, or the student and the instructor, but a sterile analysis of a computer assessing a play, or the student and a sheet of paper. It makes things more fair and less prone to corruption in the right hands, but at the same time washes away the human factors that are part of every endeavor.

Also, by moving this direct competition away, you allow an opportunity for bad actors who have control of the system to destroy up and coming adversaries from behind the scenes. This is all too common in modern academia, and we can look at Stephen Wolfe’s phenomenal Kingdom of Speech as an example. The story gives a harrowing glimpse of a powerful man who worked to destroy a competing theory of language that threatened his hegemony. In the book, it goes into detail how a researcher, Daniel Everett, who actually went out into the field to study, found a tribe that totally upended Noam Chomsky’s theory of language. His real-world studies embarrassed the academics, who studied language from the comfort of their offices.

Chomsky doesn’t directly confront Everett’s theories, instead relying on institutional red tape and smear jobs to try to destroy the upstart. The very academic system that was designed to be fair and impartial was weaponized against the anthropologist even though his research was bulletproof. Even in defeat, Chomsky and the academic world carried on like nothing happened.

Imagine people like that designing the “fair and impartial” computer system that will deem was is “within the rules” of scientific inquiry. It will, of course, be hacked to favor their own pet theories while making it near impossible to counter them. The secondary system will simply be a layer of protection separating those with power from upstarts who seek to upend them, to everyone’s detriment. if one looks at modern lobotomized chatbots, that’s our “impartial” jury.

It becomes a question of tradeoffs. Do we want a “pure” form of grading, whether in sports, academics, or the workforce? Are we willing to accept the tradeoffs of backroom manipulation or irrationality to allow at least consistency?

Do we want our systems fully human based, unregulated, with direct conflict, but also prone to massive corruption and escalating disputes?

What’s the happy medium between these options? As it stands, society has deemed sterility, “scientific” assessment, and consistency as the highest good. The question then becomes: What will we lose in this quest for an unreachable purity?