Videogames and Metareference: Mapping the Margins of an Interdisciplinary Field

— —

Theresa Krampe (University of Tübingen, Germany) Jan-Noël Thon (Osnabrück University, Germany)

Videogames and Metareference

Mapping the Margins of an Interdisciplinary Field

Theresa Krampe (University of Tübingen, Germany), Jan-Noël Thon (Osnabrück University, Germany)

$305

Hardback

Forthcoming
Pre-Order now

QTY:

English

Routledge
11 June 2025

The Arts: General & Reference; Popular culture; Media studies; Digital animation; Games development & programming

Series: Routledge Advances in Game Studies

Videogames and Metareference is the first edited collection to investigate the rise of metareference in videogames from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Bringing together a group of distinguished scholars from various geographic and disciplinary backgrounds, the book combines in-depth theoretical reflection with a diverse selection of case studies in order to explore how metareference manifests itself in and around a broad range of videogames (from indie to AAA), while also asking what cultural work the videogames in question accomplish in the process. The carefully curated chapters not only provide much-needed expansions and revisions of a concept that was at least initially derived mainly from literary studies but also cover a broad range of videogame genres, discuss the evolution of metareference across videogame history as well as the functions it fulfils in different sociocultural contexts, and scrutinize metareferential elements and examples that have hitherto received little attention.

This book with its interdisciplinary scope will appeal to scholars and students within game studies and game design as well as, more broadly, scholars and students within literary studies, media studies, popular culture studies, and digital culture studies.

Edited by: Theresa Krampe (University of Tübingen Germany), Jan-Noël Thon (Osnabrück University, Germany)
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9781032882949
ISBN 10: 1032882948
Series: Routledge Advances in Game Studies
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 11 June 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

1. Videogames and Metareference: Introduction 2. Metareferentiality as an Indicator of Procedural Poetics 3. Orders of Anti-Illusion: An Analytical Framework for Metareference from a Semiotic Perspective 4. Not Salient Enough? Videogame-Specific Marker Failure of Implicit Metareference in Far Cry 2 and Far Cry 3 5. No Longer Safe Before the Screen? Game-Transcending Metareference in Indie Horror Games 6. When Metareference Is the Gameplay: Examining the Multidimensional Layers of Daniel Mullins’s Inscryption 7. Metareference and Posthuman Subjectivity in Videogames 8. The Visual Metalepsis as a Palimpsest in Alan Wake 2 and Layers of Fear 2 9. Reading (in) Games: Constructing Meaning through Intradiegetic Metareferences to Text 10. “The Name of the Reader”: Constructing the Bookish Player in Pentiment 11. Metareference in Comics Games 12. Postdigital Aesthetics in Recent Indie Games Index

Theresa Krampe is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities (IZEW) at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and a Guest Researcher in Media Studies at Osnabrück University, Germany. Jan-Noël Thon is Professor and Chair of Media Studies and Media Education at Osnabrück University, Germany.