Feel incredibly lucky to have done another stint as a guest lecturer for Dr. Stephen Seiler‘s Technology in Sport course at the University of Agder in Norway. This course is part of an incredible four-year degree program focused on eSports. Dr. Seiler’s ideas were key pillars of my own approach to endurance training – especially his adaptation of Maslow’s Hierarchy, though admittedly I think I drifted away from his wisdom when I struggled, as is often the case. You abandon the true causes of success because they seem too simple…
It was a treat to get connected with Dr. Seiler and give this lecture to his course last year. A year later, the thread took quite a different turn, though equally interesting I think. Last year, we ended up focusing a lot on cheating in sport – both of the e-variety and traditional and, in particular, the overlap/intersection of the two (a la Zwift but also applicable to any skill-based sport). Riot, for example, focused some of their LoL anti-cheat efforts on actually tracking keystroke input rate, knowing that there were/are reasonable physical limits in this area.
You can watch – or more likely listen; I am not sure the slides add too much – to the admittedly long 2hr discussion here.
But it really gets going in the second half when we start to focus on the idea of a “meta” – by which I mean the intersection of rules, equipment, and *prevailing* “circumstances” (route topography, map choice, weapon balance, typical weather, character abilities, scoring formulae, etc) and examine it as a way of approaching problem solving and systemic design. When you think about approaching competitive design in this way, I believe it provides an incredible framework for thoughtful and methodical design. Players will always take your decisions in unexpected directions – the skill level of the truly elite is just so massively high that it’s essentially impossible to predict how they will react, respond, and shape the actual competitive landscape – either because of or in spite of your decisions.
We also look at it as a way of defining yourself – what is “your” meta, which really means what are those circumstances that play to your strengths, and we discuss the idea of focusing on strengths and only mitigating weaknesses and not dwelling on trying to improve them too much, a mistake I definitely made when I abandoned my own personal recipe for success which was hard courses with an emphasis on bike-run dominance that punished poor pacing and reactive decision making. But I do think I came back to myself in the last year of my racing career, something which truly set me up to find and more thoughtfully pursue my second calling as a software engineer.
The slides don’t add a great deal, but you can find them here for some context.
Jordan Rapp 