The concept of metagames can be of use to philosophers of sport and games. However, the term “metagame” is used throughout the literature in several different, distinct senses, few of which are clearly defined, and as a result there remains ambiguity about what, precisely, this term means. In this paper, I attempt to disambiguate the term metagame. I have come across at least four different senses of “metagame” in academic literature about games. Of these four senses, most (...) relevant to philosophers of sport and games is what I have termed “ludic” metagames. Ludic metagames involve playing a game “on top of” another game. I attempt to spell out this concept in particular detail, distinguishing it from related – but distinct – ways in which the formal features of a game can be modified without giving rise to metagames. (shrink)

Speedrunning is a kind of ‘metagame’ involving video games. Though it does not yet have the kind of profile of multiplayer e-sports, speedrunning is fast approaching e-sports in popularity. Aside from audience numbers, however, from the perspective of the philosophy of sport and games, speedrunning is particularly interesting. To the casual player or viewer, speedrunning appears to be a highly irreverent, even pointless, way of playing games, particularly due to the incorporation of “glitches”. For many outside the speedrunning community, (...) the use of glitches appears to be cheating. For speedrunners, however, glitches are entirely within the bounds of acceptability. Because of this, however, speedrunning frequently involves sidestepping what are typically taken to be the core challenges of the game. By examining the distinction between the use of glitches and cheating in speedrunning, we can gain a greater understanding of the unique ethos of this activity; that is, we can make sense of what fundamentally constitutes speedrunning as a metagame. I argue that by understanding the code of the game not as rules but as physics, and by examining what actions are deemed impermissible by the speedrunning community – such as hardware modification and hacking – we can see that the ethos of speedrunning has three components: constitutive skills (including dexterity, memorisation and mental fortitude); a collective, fine-grained knowledge of the game and the desire to subvert the intentions of the programmers. Each of these components limits and structures the earlier ones: collective knowledge takes priority over constitutive skills, and subversion takes priority over both. These three components form the ethos that structures speedrunning as a metagame, expressing what speedrunners take to be its central aim. (shrink)

The advent of AI calls for an existential self-redefinition of humanity. It necessitates the establishment of a pluralistic global humanist culture that enables us to coexist in the new world of active media and autopoietic technology. In this paper, related philosophical questions give rise to the proposal of a novel metaculture that elevates human heritages and cultural memories to the plane of a digital AI- based infrastructure. I argue for a balanced and holistic approach to human-to-human and human–AI interactions and (...) metaculture that can be developed in the form of combinatorial “metagames” that reflect the potential of human consciousness, transcend the boundaries between technology, human embodiment and biology, the arts, sciences and humanities, and philosophy, and, finally, include the element of meaningful coincidence and spontaneity “in the second potency.” Hermann Hesse’s final novel, The Glass Bead Game, offers a key to understanding this basic idea. His vision is extremely relevant today. Based on this, the concept of cultivating global cultural memories through innovative aesthetic-epistemic “Glass Bead Games 2.0” is discussed further from a systematic angle. To complement this, reference is also made to Hesse’s own source of inspiration: Novalis’s “encyclopedist” approach interlinks aesthetic and epistemic productivity in a way that could become a major starting point to create a new holistic metaculture in the Age of AI. (shrink)