 With Metal Gear Solid 1, Metafiction went mainstream. The famous Psycho Mantis battle has been seared into the collective minds of a generation of gamers, for a simple reason, breaking the fourth wall. He reads the data on our memory card, how much we have saved, and makes judgments about our character. Then, of course, he messes with our controller and our screen, the solution to which is to plug the controller into another port. Freed from the cybernetic interface he reads us through, we can proceed to battle him. Then meshed in the algorithms of play that were momentarily foregrounded. The fourth wall comes from theatre, and refers to the wall facing the audience that separates the fiction from everything else. In games though, the fourth wall takes on a different dimension. In her book Computers' Theatre, Brenda Laurel argues that games are like a theatre production, where the audience has control over events on the stage, our controllers functioning like an umbilical cord, tethering us to an alternate reality in more ways than just the suspension of disbelief. It's not so much breaking the fourth wall as it is questioning if it was ever there in the first place. There is something real but ephemeral about video game space, an inherently liminal medium. Academics who study the formal properties of games also seem to clue into this. In the book Half Real, Jasper Ewell argues that games have real rules, but fictional worlds. We experience mechanics and interaction as tangible things, but the narrative is firmly concealed behind the fourth wall. He says, video games are two rather different things at the same time. Video games are real in that they are made of real rules that players actually interact with, that winning or losing a game is a real event. However, when winning a game by slaying a dragon, the dragon is not a real dragon, but a fictional one. This position has been critiqued, chiefly in the book Mixed Realism, which argues that dividing game experiences in this way makes no sense. It states, where video game studies has lost touch with virtuality, comes from the next step in saying that because the fictional is a representation, it is derivative and inessential. The dragon may not be a dragon, but it is a projection off a dragon, and projections of dragons are real. The argument in essence is that rules and fiction combine, intertwine and conspire to create an experience. An experience that is almost inherently metafictional, as it is always participatory. All games are like Metal Gear Solid 1 in some sense. We are participating in an embodied cybernetic system, a mixed reality. And so when games deemed profound break the fourth wall in ways that they do, it isn't an arbitrary literary construct. It is revealing what was already there in the first place. When Bioshock's Would You Kindly Revelation appears, suggesting our player character was controlled all along, it is pointing out the illusion of freedom inherent in the medium. It is also suggesting this of us, the player participant. Spec Ops does away with nuance, and the loading screens accuse us of wanting a power fantasy. When we stare at a mirror at the end of the game, we are looking at our reflection. Why do we play military shooters? What fantasy are we fulfilling? Undertale drags us into the fiction, questioning the decisions we have made, revealing how choices of consequences that can't be reversed. Metafiction is fiction aware of itself, a sentient text. It draws attention to its own machinery. In games this applies more literally if we are a part of that text. The Stanley Parable acknowledges us, its narrator dynamically responding and authoring the world as we make choices. The implicit recognition being that there is a human beyond the screen. Sometimes the game may not acknowledge this, most games don't, but that doesn't change the fact that we are always there, a ghost in the machine, a dreaming interloper. Metal Gear Solid 5's ending shatters the illusion entirely, not just breaking the fourth wall, but incorporating us into its fiction. We are not big boss, we are a field medic. A player created character assumes his role throughout the game. We are playing a snake, literally, in reality and in fiction. The mixed reality of games fully acknowledged. The fiction is no longer trying to hold on to its integrity as a self-contained object, it is reveling in its incoherence. However, if we acknowledge the real world as part of the stage to begin with, all the game is doing is acknowledging what was already there. Games are not like the Matrix. We can tell that they are both inside and outside the simulation. This was Jean Baudrillard's critique of the film he inspired. The world we live in is so rife and misinformation that we can't mediate between layers of reality. Metal Gear Solid 2 addressed this theme as well. We are steeped in the lies of others and ourselves. If games are a part of our mixed reality, they are then subject to the rules of reality that are no longer a game. Baudrillard coined the term hyperreal to refer to the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of it. We know this is not true of games, they are a meta-communicative medium, but reality itself is not so clear, except the book Mixed Realism states. In short, video games are real life. What if there are elements of games that can't be distinguished from reality, and that they are mediated by processes that can't be discerned in either realm? Before we tackle this, an academic interlude examining the semantics of the term metagame are in order. Just bear with me. When gamers say metagame, this paper argues they do so in three ways. Metagame as in the metagame, what incentives exist beyond the core experience, leveling up rewards, etc. The second is with regards to using information that can't be known within the fiction or mechanics of a game, metagaming, and the third is what fighting game players refer to as the meta, what is the dominant strategy for winning at this point. They propose orthogame for dominant strategy, paragame for stuff beyond the main game, and preserve metagaming for using information outside what should be known. They say, metagaming refers to play-acts that involve or consider resources that are beyond the scope or control of what players consider to be the orthogame. So what is the relationship between metagaming and metafiction, and how does this relate to the fourth wall? When players cheat in Among Us, they are accused of metagaming, using information they shouldn't know, like peeking at someone's stream. Metafictional games don't use information from outside inside the game, but reveal how the information inside the game is mediated by, interacted with, and affected by the outside. The metagamer lives on the boundary between two worlds. The metafictional text does this as well. In his book Gaming, Alexander Galloway coins the term a lego-rhythm, combining allegory and algorithm, to argue that what characterizes games is their algorithmic structure. They program us to act in accordance with their rules, goals, and mandates. Similarly, in his essay, Post-Crypt on the Societies of Control, Gilles Deleuze argues we live in a society of control, where instead of being disciplined overtly, we are denied access to information and platforms, should we deviate from the correct behavior. Back to our question of hyperreality. What if both games and reality are mediated by algorithms of control, and we are incapable of seeing this ourselves? This would reinstate our confusion between game and reality, not because we can't tell the difference in narrative, metafiction, or strategy, metagaming, but in process. Games are a medium that exemplify a society under algorithms of networked control. Mackenzie Wark argued this in the book Gamer Theory. It's not that games are like reality, it's that reality is turning into a game. Gamer is a silly word because it refers mainly to extrinsic processes, real para-games if you will. No game space is the preferred word. In essence, we can tell the difference between reality and a game, but if reality becomes more game-like, it is the logic of gaming that is making reality hyper-real. But this is exactly where the subversive potential of games come from. The logic of the game may be corrupting reality, but the logic of the gamer may see through the charade. When fourth-wall breaking games reveal their own machinery, they clue us into a process of control we are invited to break free of. In Metal Gear Solid 1, Psycho Mantis, the developers, can read our actions, our data. Just like Shoshana Zuboff argues Big Tech collects our information for their profit in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitals, our behavior, our disposition, mapped and then predicted. We can break free though, how? By playful subversion, by metagaming the metafiction, plugging ourselves out of one matrix and into another of our own accord. We subordinate ourselves back into the system, but with an awareness of the mediated interface, the half-real mixed reality of a medium that encompasses the world. Games are cybernetic systems, but then again so are we, intertwined with the cultures, economies and networks we all participated and are subordinated to, and perhaps can escape from.