Metagame

Metagaming refers to the relationship between the game and outside elements, including everything from player attitudes and play styles to social reputations and social contexts in which the game is played. Post-game locker room conversations about the match are metagame interactions. Memorizing words in the Scrabble dictionary is a metagame activity, the honing of in-game skills. The typical playing strategies of a particular Go master are metagame information, useful if you are playing agai...

 What We Learn from Games

What also went unremarked was how much I was learning by playing these games: basic ideas such as taking turns and developing patience while others completed their turns, the strengthening of simple memory, improved physical coordination, an ability to recognize and act on patterns, the capacity to see what might happen in a few turns if I took one move as opposed to another, resilience when losing, and the kind of strategic thinking that emerges once you realize that Scrabble is both a game ...