The Game Beyond the Game: The Concept of Metagame and Its Use for Interaction Design

Abstract

The purpose of the article is an comes from our Doctoral research, it investigates an authorial project named Halag, an e-learning platform for game development that uses gamification as a tool for motivation, engagement and to improve the user experience for those students with the platform. As one of the main characteristics of this project, users who consume the platform’s educational content is invited to participate in the production of a game, where the game design elements themselves will be created and selected by the participants, in a collaborative, democratic and sustainable and free ecosystem. We intend to expand our research and concepts seen during our research, for now a concept called Metagame. The word of Greek origin, meta is a prefix that can be interpreted in addition to, on the way to, that when united with a noun, another reflective and conceptual interpretation originates that can discuss various points of the sciences. The use of the meta, being something already understood in the academic environment to describe proposals that scientifically expand the research in question, for example in concepts about metalanguage, metapolitics, metadata, metaphysics, metaverse, among others. In our research, we rely on metadesign research by the authors Maturana (1997) Vassão (2010), Giaccardi (2003) and other authors, to discuss the concept of Metagame, bringing it closer to our research object, framed in a “game produced by game methodologies and created by gamers.”