One of the things that has been unfortunate during the development of my book is that the word Metamancer has taken on a new meaning since I selected it.
I picked out the name Metamancer and the central concept of the main character’s talents back in approximately 2002 or maybe 2003. The idea was partly sparked by a conversation with a post-doc at Olin College (where I worked at the time) who described a cartoon with a “meta-genie” that handled wishes about wishes… or something like that. The details are now foggy, but that’s how it started.
A few days later, I was pondering what should happen to Johnny after he becomes an apprentice, and I got the idea that maybe he would have a talent for altering magic. I recall thinking of it as a sort of inverse or variant of Bink in A Spell for Chameleon, whose talent is that he can’t be affected by magic, which is a big deal in the world of Xanth, where everyone has a magical talent.
Since Metadata is data bout data, and a Meta-genie handles wishes about wishes, I coined the term Metamancy to represent magic about magic. Metamancer is the obvious name for a practitioner of Metamancy. If either of these terms existed earlier, I was blissfully unaware of that.
All was good, and I was happy with the term. I continued (slowly) developing the story, but as time passed, the term Metamancer was reinvented by others within the realm of video games. Googling around gives me the impression that it sprung from a gaming community around the game Deepwoken, but that’s just an unscientific guess based on the frequency of YouTube videos using the term.
In the gaming world, there is a concept of “M. E. T. A.” That acronym stands for the “Most Effective Tactics Available.” I think this may be borrowed from military strategy/terminology, but I can’t find a reference for that. In some games, there are combinations of skills or equipment load-outs that are clearly stronger than others, often so strong that they break or trivialize the challenge of the game or, in a player vs player game, force all the other players to conform to that setup.
These player builds (skill sets and load-outs) often center around hard-to-obtain objects or require long periods of grinding out advancement, so players who build these characters are often both hated and envied by the rest of the player base. Metamancer has become a combination slur and accolade (depending on perspective) in these sorts of games and somewhat evolved into a general term for strong and ruthless players. I remained unaware of this until just before I released the book. I had run into the term M. E. T. A. a few years earlier for game-breaking builds, but not “Metamancer”.
Unfortunately, this parallel evolution of the word probably confuses a portion of the folks who (20+ years later) now encounter my book. Twenty years ago, with little else to refer to, “Metamancer” would likely have only called to mind “Necromancer” or perhaps “Neuromancer” or “Chronomancy,” all of which are magic-related. The analogy to metadata and reference to magic should have been clear.
But, since things have become muddled with the gaming concept, this post is meant to set the record straight with respect to the title of my book and the fictional realm it depicts. Here is my official definition of Metamancer:
Metamancer: (n) A spell caster extremely talented in detecting, altering, canceling, and manipulating new and existing magic. Metamancers are often feared or attacked by their peers if discovered.
It is not in any way related to gaming/RPG M.E.T.A. (most effective tactics available)