![]() ![]() In 2021, CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg changed the social media company’s name to Meta Platforms, and announced that from now on they would be dedicated to the creation of a functioning metaverse. And although videogames conflate the creativity, criticality, and craft of play with the act of consumption, we don’t simply play videogames-we make metagames. By now, all of us in the gaming industry are familiar with the term Metaverse whether we know fully what it means, or not. One of the only books to include original software alongside each chapter, Metagaming transforms videogames from packaged products into instruments, equipment, tools, and toys for intervening in the sensory and political economies of everyday life. is undermined by the endless levels of Infinite Mario, the frustrating pranks of “Asshole Mario,” and even Super Mario Clouds, a ROM hack exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Metacognition, metajoke, and metaphysics are other words in common use that use the word meta without having any direct relation to games. Metagaming is one of many words which the prefix meta creates. Companies like Valve attempt to capture the metagame through international e-sports and online marketplaces while the corporate history of Super Mario Bros. Meta is simply a prefix that generally means 'beyond' or 'after'. Players puzzle through the problems of perspectival rendering in Portal, perform clandestine acts of electronic espionage in EVE Online, compete and commentate in Korean StarCraft, and speedrun The Legend of Zelda in record times (with or without the use of vision). Metagaming uncovers these alternative histories of play by exploring the strange experiences and unexpected effects that emerge in, on, around, and through videogames. In Metagaming, Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux demonstrate how games always extend beyond the screen, and how modders, mappers, streamers, spectators, analysts, and artists are changing the way we play. Elegantly defined as “games about games,” metagames implicate a diverse range of practices that stray outside the boundaries and bend the rules: from technical glitches and forbidden strategies to Renaissance painting, algorithmic trading, professional sports, and the War on Terror. Some works are more meta than others-the movie Birdman, for example, is a movie about an actor who played a superhero in a movie and who now tries to rekindle his career in theater, and that actor is played by an actor who really did play a superhero in a movie and is now trying to rekindle his career in a movie that looks more like a play than a movie.The greatest trick the videogame industry ever pulled was convincing the world that videogames were games rather than a medium for making metagames. In its simplest form, a book in which a character is writing a book or a movie in which a character is making a movie can be described as meta. The self-referencing sense of meta seems especially popular in art. The self-reflection sense of meta has also given rise to the use of the word as a standalone adjective, where meta is used to describe something that’s self-reflective or self-referencing. Metagaming is when someone playing a game is using perception involving content not included with the game, and using it to their advantage. One of the more popular uses of meta today is for the meaning best described by the formula “meta-X equals X about X.” So, if we take the word “data” for our X, and add the prefix meta- to it, we get metadata, or “data about data.” A meta-text is a text about texts, metacognition is thinking about thinking, and a meta-joke is a joke about jokes. ![]() But that’s still not the meta most of us come across today. ![]() When they used it, meta meant “beyond,” “after,” or “behind.” The “beyond” sense of meta still lingers in words like metaphysics or meta-economy. Meta is a word which, like so many other things, we have the ancient Greeks to thank for. ![]()
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