how do you use the word “meta”. I hear it all the time and no one that I ask knows what it means.
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Meta can mean a variety of things, but I imagine you’re referring to statements such as:
“In the meta.”
“This is the meta.”
“Follow the meta.”
It commonly refers to a something being good, or strong. Games (both video and board) have metas that refer to strong actions or items to give players an advantage.
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In modern common language “meta” roughly means “about itself”. A metajoke is a joke about jokes, metadata is data about data, etc.
“Meta” generally refers to information or analysis that goes beyond the scope of, or outside of, the subject matter.
Let’s say you are watching a horror movie. You start shouting at the screen “get out of there, black dude! You’re gonna be the first one they kill!” That is meta-information (it’s also a stereotype, but the two aren’t the same thing). Within the story, there’s no reason for the character to think he is more vulnerable than anyone else. What would make the wise-cracking black guy think the chainsaw killer is going after him first, and not the virgin girl? He’s way stronger and faster than her. She went into the creepy house and he stayed outside where it is safe. Why would he be more likely to get killed? The answer is because *that’s what always happens in horror movies*. It’s information outside the scope of the subject matter.
Or suppose that it’s poker night, and you are sitting around playing cards with your friends. You know how much money each person has. You know how many hands have been played. You are trying to keep track of which cards you have seen so far. All of this analysis is within the scope of the game of poker. But you *also* know that starting at about 10:00 pm, Joe’s nagging wife is going to start calling every five minutes. She will come up with any excuse she can to keep him on the phone and disrupt the game. He’ll hold out until about 10:30, and then he will call it quits. It’s about 9:00 at the moment, and so you’ll use this meta-knowledge in how you play the game. Maybe you’ll slow-play things to put Joe at a competitive disadvantage. It’s meta information, because it’s about something that has nothing to do with rules of the game itself, but you’re using it to determine how you play.
In video games, it sometimes refers to game balance. You make your choices not based upon information within the video game, but based upon knowing that the company released an update yesterday that made X character weaker, and Y character stronger.
Finally, in fiction it sometimes refers to the movie/tv show/book/whatever using that out-of-subject-matter knowledge within the story itself. If a group of characters in a horror movie start talking about the “rules” of horror movies, that’s meta discussion.
In narrative fiction (films, TV, fiction, drama, etc), the term is often used to refer to creations that are “aware of themselves”, usually as “metafiction”.
So a simple example of this is when The Simpsons break the “fourth wall” and acknowledge that they’re in a cartoon or know that they’re being watched. Another example is a Stephen King novel I read in which the lead characters meet the author Stephen King.
Broadly speaking, when the artwork reminds you or makes you aware that you’re watching or reading and “takes you out of” the narrative, it’s almost always metafiction at work.
The easiest way I could explain in would be that meta basically means “transcending” (as far as I know) and people typically use it to mean something referencing itself.
An example of a meta joke would be leaving a note on the tippy top of the Empire State Building that says “this is really high, lmao”
A book you read about reading books is meta
Jokes about jokes are meta
So on and so forth
The word has its origins as a Greek prefix, which you can learn about from Etymonline here: [https://www.etymonline.com/word/meta-](https://www.etymonline.com/word/meta-)
In current usage, it is used to indicate a quality of self-referentialness, which seems to be from the word “metacognition”, which is a word for thinking about thinking. The way that I would use the term would be to say that, for example, a video game’s plot could be really “meta” if it were to, for example, break the fourth wall in referring to previous versions of the game.
In meta data, the meta is information about the data contained inside. Eg. You ran a forecast model and produced a data set in the end, output. You might find you’ll run the model many times, and each time the output would be different. It would make sense to hold onto each output individually, but if you want to sort out amongst the outputs themselves, you can store more information about the model run, date, variable changes, etc as meta on top of each output. Then you can not only search the data, but also the meta.
Silly scenario: Didn’t get the result you were looking for in any output? Oh, I forgot to ever change ‘that’ bit, which you could find in the meta.
In games something is meta when something is currently very powerful and/or a lot of people play/use a certain character, item, composition, etc. Something doesn’t have to be strong to be meta, it can also just be something that is very popular to do in the game, for example following a new build that a pro player introduced and suddenly everyone uses it. In general, meta would just refer to ‘currently popular’
In the case of scientific studies, you can analyze a specific study and it’s outcome. When you look at trends across multiple studies or experiments, it’s meta analysis. Individual critics give a score of a movie or game, and when you look at all the scores’ average, you get a meta score.
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