I'm So Meta, Even This Acronym
—Douglas Hofstadter's (fictional) 6-word autobiography, xkcd
Sometimes, a process occurs to itself. Frequently manifests as dreaming about dreaming and Breaking the Fourth Wall. For a list of tropes that discuss how we look at things, see Meta-Concepts. See also Shaped Like Itself, where a description is meaningless because it only refers to itself.
Contrast Metafiction. See also Meta Webcomics.
For the company owned by Mark Zuckerberg, see Facebook. Not to be confused with the video game META (2005). Or the old-fashioned, abbreviated form of Magaretha.
Examples:
Video Games
- Hack 'N' Slash: You can, and eventually will have to, hack parts of the hacking system itself.