meta

1. Shortened for of "metagame". In any kind of competitive gaming, there exists a kind of extra game on top of the game. Certain tactics are found to be very effective, and because of that, counters to those tactics become effective, and so on. The current state of the interactions between all these tactics is referred to as "the metagame" for a particular game. 2. Self-referential. In film and television, the lexicon has adopted meta to mean anything in a film or TV show that references films or TV shows. 3. Generally, any approach that discusses the sub approaches in a field or media. Metafiction, for example, plays off the expectations of the audience to surprise and delight them. A metaverse is a collection of multiple complete fictional universes. Metadata is the data that describes your data (e.g. in the statement "you have 10 gigs of videos stored on your hard drive", the videos are the data and the information that there are 10 gigs, and that they're on your hard drive is metadata)