If life is a game, then part of the game is the water-cooler talk on how to apply the best strategies to play it, whether the rules stay the same or constantly change over time. Cedric Chin offers some advice on how to succeed through playing the metagame, either in games or in real life:
Every sufficiently interesting game has a metagame above it. This is the game about the game. It is often called ‘the meta’.
Sometimes, the metagame is created when new options are introduced from outside the game. Magic The Gathering is famous for having a game system that changes every time the publisher releases a new set of cards. MtG’s metagame is thus a race to see who can discover new card combinations or strategies given the new options. The players who do so are rewarded with easier wins, especially when going up against players who have not adapted to the new possibilities. This makes MtG a game of two levels: the first game is the game you’re playing when you sit down and shuffle cards to battle an opponent; the second game is the race to acquire, analyse and adapt to new cards quicker than your competition.
Metagames like MtG’s also exist in, erm, more physical games. Judo — the sport that I am most familiar with — has a metagame that is shaped by rule changes from the International Judo Federation. A few years after I stopped competing, the IJF banned leg grabs, outlawing a whole class of throws that were part of classical Judo canon — many of them used regularly, even at the top levels of competition. The Judo that exists today is very different from the Judo I left — with changes in gripping strategy, entry styles, and technique combinations — many of them responses to responses to responses to the ruling.
In my field of expertise (piano pedagogy), the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the rules of the game dramatically. For piano teachers, what was a time-honoured, tradition-bound field has been upended, and has now become online learning. By the fall, the need to return to in-person teaching will require attention to health and distancing practices as never seen before.
The teachers who succeed will be the ones who learn skills relevant to both online teaching and public health guidelines in order to navigate a change back to what will hopefully become tradition-bound once again. However, none of us will be left unchanged by what we’ve learned during this time.
Where do you find the piano pedagogy metagame? Here are several places:
On Facebook, Piano Teacher Central and The Art of Piano Pedagogy are two longstanding groups. The AoPP has stronger moderation, although both have lots of viewpoints. For more discussions there is also Piano and Instrumental Teachers with Coronavirus Concerns
The Frances Clark Centre’s Teaching in the Time of COVID-19 has lots of recorded and upcoming webinars that help teachers to navigate the quickly changing circumstances of the profession.
(Photo courtesy of Dave Henri on Unsplash)