Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: 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., Backe 2018;Ensslin 2014;Ferri et al. 2016;Fest 2016;Gualeni 2016;Jannidis 2009;Krampe 2023;Krampe et al. 2022;Waszkiewicz 2024), not all relevant cases have received the same degree of scholarly attention, leading to the persistence of considerable theoretical and analytical lacunae.To address that issue, this extended abstract proposes a comprehensive framework for the analysis of a broad range of metareferential strategies that takes into account the medium specificity of videogames and that can be productively applied beyond so-called meta games (see also Krampe 2025a; and the contributions in Krampe and Thon 2025).
Authors: Theresa Krampe, Jan-Noël Thon
Institution: University of Tübingen
Language: English
Topic: Digital Games and Media
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4411974226