Let's have a discussion about the usage of "meta"

[Muffin]

What are it's uses, limitations, pitfalls, and anything else related to "meta"?

Does it skew game balance? Does it work?

Most people horridly abuse/misuse meta. Suffice it to say, a lot of people throw out statements like "Oh, so-and-so should know that this is not my scum meta" and for some bizarre reason people tend to swallow it without chewing. See my sig: as soon as a person knows their own meta, it becomes useless. Like that scene from Casino Royale where Bond thinks he's got a great tell on Le Chiffre but then Le Chiffre uses it to clean him out.

It

can

be a powerful tool but I find that 99% of explicit meta mentions I see are fallacious.

[Muffin]

You can manufacture this as scum

This is why I feel strongly that "self meta" is useless.

[Muffin]

That's a really odd way to distort my point and then stretch it to absurdium.

The point is this: If you know your "town meta" then you can play to it as scum. Therefore any and all arguments about how this is or is not "your town game" should be immediately discarded because they are just WIFOM and serve as nothing other than a distraction. I mean what kind of player possesses the self-awareness to know their own meta but lacks the ability to execute even a reasonable facsimile of it?

Look at guys like notscience who are more or less known for being apathetic and low-activity as scum. Then he had a recent large theme where he rolled scum and lolposted his way through most of the game. His activity was high and he was mostly avoiding suspicion because of it, and IIRC even said as much in his QT.

[Muffin]

I'll give an example that is closer to what I am talking about. If you are being scumread, no one is reading the game, and you feel frustrated, but you realize that you made a towntell like 10 pages ago (e.g., especially one that was locally bad had you been scum -- for example, forgetting an aspect of the set-up such that you alienated a town player), it can be really useful information to demonstrate that because it can clarify your motivations. It's definitely 100% better if someone in the town actually plays like town and realizes stuff like that on their own, but it's pretty rare that you can count on people to pick up on stuff because people skim content that isn't related to themselves.

Is that meta, though? A towntell in a game that's only relevant in that game?

I don't really think that that falls under the definition of "meta".

An example of what I'm arguing against is when people are being scumread and reply with "look at my posts and see that this is my town game, not my scum game".