This usage is common in games that have large, organized play systems or tournament circuits and which feature customized decks of cards, sets of miniatures or other playing pieces for each player. Stephanie Boluk and Patrick Lemieux extend and refine Garfield's term to apply to potentially all forms of play and gaming, arguing that video games in particular are not 'games' but rather 'equipment for making metagames.' In games Adaptation to a specific gaming environment Īnother game-related use of the term 'metagaming' refers to operation on knowledge of the current strategic trends within a game. In a 2000 talk at the Game Developers Conference, Garfield expanded on this, defining 'metagame' as 'how a game interfaces beyond itself', and asserted that this can include 'what you bring to a game, what you take away from a game, what happens between games, what happens during a game'.

The term gained more recent use towards game design by Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering in a column he wrote for The Duelist in 1995. In 1967, the word appeared in a study by Russell Lincoln Ackoff and in the Bulletin of the Operations Research Society of America. It is claimed that the first known use of the term was in Nigel Howard's book Paradoxes of Rationality: Theory of Metagames and Political Behavior published in 1971, where Howard used the term in his analysis of the Cold War political landscape using a variation of the Prisoner's Dilemma., however Howard used the term in Metagame Analysis in Political Problems published in 1966. The word can be found being used in the context of playing zero-sum games in a publication by the Mental Health Research Institute in 1956. The origin of the idea of metagames originally came from the game theory field, with ideas first published in the groundbreaking Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in 1944, though the term itself was not originally used in that work. Thus, we might play a metagame selecting which rules will apply during the play of the game itself. Metagaming might also refer to a game which functions to create or modify the rules of a sub-game. Metagame, hypergame, or game about the game, is an approach to a game that transcends or operates outside of the prescribed rules of the game, uses external factors to affect the game, or goes beyond the supposed limits or environment set by the game. ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)

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Meta in gaming definition