Meta-Rules are ‘rules for making rules to live by’.

For example, in the world’s greatest sport, baseball, there are a lot of places where the rules are left open to human interpretation and flexibility. The most obvious is the strike zone, which can be defined differently by each umpire. This increases the dramatic interest of the game and keeps it from devolving into a robotic exercise in simply following strict rules. There’s even a tradition that managers and players are not allowed to argue with even obviously wrong calls on balls and strikes.

Rather than requireing breaking the rules, and thus a violation of the principle of fairness, the subjective human flexibility of baseball’s rules allows the emergence of “story” within the rules themselves.