Metareferentiality as an Indicator of Procedural Poetics

The concept of poetics has been central to literature since antiquity, and is still widely used today, often with new dimensions and nuances, such as in the German idea of "Kulturpoetik." Other domains have adapted the concept, e.g., Igor Stravinsky's Poetics of Music (1947), Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation (1997), Albin Zak's Poetics of Rock (2001), or Paul Frosh's Poetics of Digital Media (2018). In connection with videogames, though, poetics has never been as widely used as rhetoric (see Bogost 2007) or aesthetics (see Hunicke et al. 2004). Where the term occurs, it is predominantly used to conceptualize poetic games as a category or genre (see Ensslin 2014; Mitchell et al. 2020), or to situate videogames in larger contexts like interactive drama (see Mateas 2001) or interactive narrative (see Ryan 2006). The chapter proposes—before the background of the existing, predominantly prescriptive and theoretical poetics of videogames—a descriptive, analytical poetics that explains relationships between works more nuancedly than established notions like genre. Metareferentiality is crucial for such a poetics, as moments of reflection on a work's own features and on its medium are markers and comments on the immanent poetics of a work.