Beyond Metagames: Analyzing Metareference in Videogames

Looking at recent trends in AAA as well as indie game design, one could be forgiven to think that videogames have gone "fully meta."From highly self-reflexive "games about games" such as The Beginner 's Guide (2015), The Magic Circle (2015), or There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension (2020) via experimental meta-horror titles such as IMSCARED (2016), Doki Doki Literature Club (2017), or Inscryption (2021) to "postdigital" games such as What Remains of Edith Finch (2017), Pentiment (2022), or The Plucky Squire (2024) that play with the mediality of other media forms, metareferential videogames have not only become more frequent and more visible in videogame culture but also more radical in the way they experiment with the formal possibilities of the medium and draw players' attention to their own artifice.Arguably, this development comes at a moment of crisis.Videogames have reached a stage of maturation at which established aesthetic and representational conventions have been overused to the point of losing not only their originality but their very impact.This is further exacerbated by a "permacrisis" of reference fueled by the loss of trust in images and "truth" as well as software and data.Metareferential videogames respond to these tensions with self-reflexive irony, but also with a resurging creativity that gives rise to new forms of ludic as well as narrative expression.Yet, while a substantial body of research on metareferential videogames has emerged in and beyond game studies (e.g.,