Metagames

Metagames are self-referential games, ie. games where another game is an outcome.

The seed of the idea was born with Zwicker's notion of a hypergame - i.e. a game with only one move: "select a finite game to play" - that is intended as a construction of a paradox (is hypergame a fginite game?) It suggests, however, restrictions of the same concept, that are good for more things - like for example strategic selection among games or even rules (game properties or features).

Similarly paradox-driven explorations of the concept followed - see Nomic.

The concept was further developed by Nigel Howard to create metagame analysis - a "nonquantitative" reconstruction of game theory Howard that enabled the analysis of tradeoffs between propositional statements about the world, or of "enforcing a property to be true".

I'm attempting a formal construction of the same / a similar idea by drawing on game semantics.