Agata Waszkiewicz, Metagames

Popular culture responded to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s with Strange Days (1995), ExistenZ (1999), and, most famously, The Matrix (1999).All three movies warned their viewers about technology-dependent alternative reality which, at the moment of early experiments with VR, seemed just behind the corner.Time has passed, the emergence of AI marked yet another pivotal point in humanity's experiments with technology, shedding new light on speculative fictions' fear of thinking machines (this time embodied by Ex Machina's Ava rather than The Terminator's T-800), and even though the technology that would allow complete immersion in a computer-generated world has not yet been perfected, its imperfect version is now part of the rapidly-developing gaming industry.Once accessible only as moving images on the silver screen, spectacular visions of (im)possible worlds can be now experienced by players equipped with hardware available at every electronic store.Numerous gameworlds tempt consumers with photorealistic visuals and, more importantly, engaging plots and round characters, for technological progress has affected the way the medium tells stories.Still, in spite of their indebtedness to the tenth muse, video games remain their own medium, one that is uniquely self-aware.On the one hand, in spite of developers' attempts at transparent immediacy, players rarely (if ever) forget that they are playing a game; on the other, neither do games.Agata Waszkiewicz's book Metagames: Games about Games investigates this unique connection between the player and the (metareferential) game.The first chapter, "Fourth-wall breaking and the twofold play", opens with a discussion of metaleptic transgressions in digital games.Waszkiewicz divides them into four categories: one-directional, two-directional, twofold play, and a player-initiated fourthwall breaks (21). 1 The first two categories differ in the extent of agency granted to the player."While both acknowledge the player and their role in the game, the former does not permit them to participate in the very process of breaking the fourth wall, posing it as a narrative device that occurs outside of players' agency.On the other hand, the latter

Embodied cognition · Illusion · Immersion (mathematics) · Imperfect · Matrix (chemical analysis) · Point (geometry) · Thought experiment · Vision · Digital Games and Media · Diverse Academic Research Studies · Language and Culture