We’ve already established that the term has been around for 30 years, and not just in fictional form. There are many things to challenge in Ball’s vision, but the biggest is his proposition that the metaverse will be a single network as open, interconnected, and interoperable as the internet is now. The influential venture capitalist Matthew Ball, who has written extensively about the metaverse, describes it as “a sort of successor state to the mobile internet.” (Mark Zuckerberg, who last year gave his company Facebook the name Meta and said the metaverse would be its focus, has used an almost identical phrase clearly, Ball’s essays are hugely influential on Silicon Valley thinking.) Remember when smartphones revolutionized tech, the economy, and society itself? The metaverse is expected to be an equivalent watershed, and lots of businesses want to get ahead of that. Rather, it looks to the past and to the now commonplace technologies of the internet and smartphones, and assumes that it will be necessary to invent the metaverse to replace them. This definition isn’t about a vision for the future or a new technology. This definition doesn’t actually describe the metaverse at all, but does explain why everyone thinks it’s so important. But there’s another definition of the metaverse that goes beyond the virtual worlds we know.

This version of the metaverse arguably already exists in the form of video games. Metaverse proponents often focus on the concept of “presence” as a defining factor: feeling like you’re really there, and feeling like other people are really there with you, too. In the broadest terms, the metaverse is understood as a graphically rich virtual space, with some degree of verisimilitude, where people can work, play, shop, socialize - in short, do the things humans like to do together in real life (or, perhaps more to the point, on the internet). But none of them is actually essential to the idea. In the case of Overwatch and general competitive play, it is specifically referring to popular strategies and performance and can also be defined similar to “min-maxing” or “power-gaming”.These three elements - a VR interface, digital ownership, and avatars - still feature prominently in current conceptions of the metaverse. It can be contrasted with live action roleplaying games with a more cinematic style, where the use of metagame references to specific books and films, either before the game or during play, prompts the players as to the atmosphere the organisers are aiming to create. However, some narrativist indie role-playing games deliberately support metagaming in “Director stance”/wiki/Wikipedia:Vagueness) ] and encourage shared storytelling among players. Traditionally, metagaming is generally frowned upon in role-playing communities, as it upsets the suspension of disbelief and affects game balance. This most prominently includes any discussion among players and/or the game’s master about the game’s events and contents. More broadly, metagaming can refer any or all aspects of play that occur outside of a given game’s fictional setting. Outside of role-playing, metagaming simply refers to players using knowledge or understanding of external factors (such as community trends or coincidental events) to gain an advantage in competition. Metagaming is considered unsporting or cheating in a competitive gaming context, and is generally poorly received as it subverts the emphasis of accurate character depiction based on in-game experiences and back-story that defines role-playing games. Metagaming is an example of “ breaking character”, as the character is making decisions based on information they couldn’t know and thus would not make in reality. This can refer to plot information in the game such as secrets or events occurring away from the character, as well as facets of the game’s mechanics such as abstract statistics or the precise limits of abilities.

Metagaming is a term used in role-playing games, which describes a player’s use of real-life knowledge concerning the state of the game to determine their character’s actions, when said character has no relevant knowledge or awareness under the circumstances. It was based of game theory which goes back to Neumann’s work and it was about games, same as it is with eletronic games. Metagame analysis was developed in the 60s about the arms race but the term was not coined then. Games before video games had meta, they are the same concept applied to different things.

Meta definition in theater