A review of “The Tragedy of GJ237b”: Is it a story? Is it a game?
The self-styled tabletop role-playing game for no players The Tragedy of GJ237b by Caitlynn Belle and Ben Lehman came to my attention a few days ago via social media, with the news hook being that it was judged to be not-ineligible to be nominated for a Nebula award for short stories (i.e. it hasn't made it to any short lists yet, but it's not presumptively disqualified and some people who are eligible to nominate it have done so). This blog post is basically a review, describing my impressions of it and reactions to it. There are definitely spoilers below, you should read the original yourself first (it's short and free) if you'd like to avoid being spoiled or would prefer to form you own views before being exposed to mine.
An overview
The Tragedy of GJ237b begins with an “encyclopedia entry” style account of the planet GJ 237b, the aliens that lived there, and the catastrophic result of humans landing. The inhabitants of GJ 237b are so different from humans that nearly everything about them defies comprehension:
This intelligence was utterly different than humanity, utterly alien, completely unrecognizable to the human probes or the human explorers that followed them. It is not that they had a simple analogue to human society. They had a rich, nuanced, complicated system of communication and social organization which we not only will never understand, but we can never understand, because we lack even the ability to comprehend their thoughts.
Humans landing on the planet caused an immediate and irrevocable catastrophe that wiped out the entire ecosystem.
After the explanation of the fictional background we're presented with brief procedural text related to a game “about the societies and cultures of GJ 237b”. The game, we're told, involves setting up some materials commonly used in a tabletop roleplaying game (e.g. dice, character sheets, etc.) in a room. Then there's a rule: you're not allowed in the room, the game being played is not for you, and if someone enters the room the game ends as that event corresponds to the human landing on GJ 237b.
Is it a story?
Plenty of SF stories involve “Encyclopedia Galactica” type elements as mood setters, so there's definitely a style of SF writing involved here. Furthermore it chronicles a series of events, so the first part of it seems like it ought to count as a story to me. The interesting complicating factor is that there's more to it than just that, there's some instructional/procedural text that talks about a game. So by hooking in this second element is the whole thing taken out of “story” and into some other category? I'm not sure. Stories can make use of companion elements, like maps or illustrations, without fundamentally changing their form, but this seems like a greater departure than you'd expect, especially since the medium of the game part is also “written text”.
Is it a game?
The text calls itself a game, and the second part is written in the language of game rules. But the rules don't exactly “play fair” with the reader: they claim that the game is being played inside the room, but direct rules like “Stay outside the room” at people who would presumably not be playing the game. So by the rules-content everyone in the world is playing the game and the notion that the game is happening inside the closed room is wrong. It's analogous to a Möbius strip: the rules twist around halfway to reverse the inside/outside player/non-player distinction. I'd guess it also doesn't have much impact if you “play” it without reading the fiction that grounds the situation, leading me to think that the written prose is doing a lot of the work. Since it doesn't function like a game I'd be inclined to say it's not one. That doesn't mean there's no skill or craftsmanship involved – building a conceptual Möbius strip probably didn't happen by accident – but I don't think it's truly at home in the category of “game”.
(image from Wikipedia)
Is it art?
Sure. It's conceptual art. Like with Duchamp's Fountain it's using the contextual trappings of the form of something (in this case a game) to try to make a larger point. I think it's trying to tie the reactance you feel at being told you're not allowed to play a game to the hubris of thinking the whole universe exists just for you to interact with. I think it's using the “sacred space” element of a prepared “magic circle” of a game and leaving it empty to invoke the sepulchral feel of awe and reverence for the extinguished life of GJ 237b. Cross-coupling ideas to achieve an emotional or aesthetic effect is something you expect art to do, so I'm happy to say this falls into the category of art.
But what kind of art?
There are several types of art that are built out of words. Poetry, for example, is usually art where the sounds and rhythm of the language do a lot of the artistic heavy-lifting. Essays are non-fictional works conveying ideas, opinions, or arguments. Games texts describe procedures that get you to interact with a system where that interaction does the artistic heavy-lifting. (I haven't tested this, but my guess is that you get the full effect of this piece merely by reading and contemplating the instructions, you wouldn't gain much by actually carrying them out.) This isn't a prototypical story, but of the categories I've considered I'd say that's probably the closest genre of word-based art.
Is it good?
I found some of the writing to be a bit overwrought, and I found the message to be a bit heavy-handed. It felt like it was trying very hard to make me feel guilty for an entirely fictional genocide that I had no part in. And since I felt emotionally manipulated I started to think about the ways that the structural twist ought to cut both ways. The piece implicitly takes some swipes at the reader for anthropomorphizing the life on GJ 237b and projecting human values onto it, but guilt about wiping that life out is also a human value – so should we be second-guessing the conclusion that this was a tragedy? It seems to me that the piece is trying to inspire awe and reverence with what might just be a word game: Can you imagine alien life that's so alien that it's unimaginable?
In general I think humans, and humanity as a whole, ought to operate with humility – that seems like a virtuous way to live life. But getting in my face about it and demanding humility does tend to make me ask “says who?”. The piece seems to be trying to get some philosophical mileage out of saying “some things are not for you, and it's arrogant to think otherwise”. But telling someone what is or isn't for them is also potentially arrogant. Who humbles the humblers? Maybe there really are things we shouldn't try to understand, or maybe that's a recipe for closed-mindedness. Is trying to engage with another culture in the only way you know how arrogance, or is it humility? Is treating others as fundamentally unknowable a form of respect or a form of othering? It seems like those could cut both ways, or perhaps different ways depending on the context.
This is what I had to say elsewhere about the game:
The long form description of how I feel about it, "It is an art piece that uses the language, culture and knowledge of games to make its point." That makes it somewhat more than a short story and what less than a game.
I have no problems with it being nominated as a short story in the absence of some more general category like "Best Sci-Fi Piece Written Form" Or "Best Sci-Fi Work of Artistic Expression" both of which would be weird in their own way.
Going down the path of "Is it a short story?" I have this question to ask, "How does this read to people who have no knowledge of games culture?" If you don't know what character sheets are or d12s or what generally goes on at a table with those things on it, does it still do anything for you?
For the "game" part (which I suspect is the most debated element). Here's what I've got. The text certainly describes an activity. And for something to be a "game" to me that's kind of the absolute minimum requirement. It has to be something you can do, and I can certainly do the thing described.
However, I'm not entirely sure if I would get anything more out of actually doing the activity than I would getting out of just reading it. But I don't know for certain because I haven't done it. So that's the first question, "Is enacting the activity more meaningful than just reading about it?" I don't know but I feel like that's part of what makes something a game. The DOING is required for the full experience.
I also think that there is some quality which separates a game from a recipe. Both are activities where doing results in a more meaningful experience than just reading. But there's "one more thing" that distinguishes a recipe from a game. But I'm not sure I can give voice to that thing. And my gut feeling is that "The Tragedy of GJ 237b," is also missing that thing.
Since having posted the above, I do think actually "playing" the game has value. Particularly, if what you are doing is looking at how long a small area of a given space lies undisturbed. And when it is disturbed examining why it was disturbed.
As much as I love Ben Lehman's work, The Tragedy is the exact literary equivalent of the frat boy occupation of holding a corn hole gesture by your side, waiting for someone to glance down, and then loudly proclaiming "you lost the game!"
It just takes a lot more words to get there.
I'm perfectly willing to accept that this is a piece of art, but I would be willing to accept that the childish occupation of trying to get someone to glance at your fingers in a specific combination is also a piece of art – performance art. That doesn't make it good art, and it doesn't really make it meaningful art.
Is this a story? Part of it's a story. Does it deserve to be nominated for an Nebula?
If that's the best sort of thing they have to be nominated for a Nebula, it's been a rough year.
Maybe my expectations are unreasonably high. I'm willing to accept that.
If I were feeling particularly high-handed, I might point out that the mechanics as described in the document violate every rule of consent. After all, they assume that everyone in the world is party to the game. Any of them who enter the room end the game. The side effect of the Mobius flip so executed is to essentially force everyone into the context of gameplay, no matter whether they consent to it or not. It also means that the only people who cannot reasonably play are those who consent to it, because the action of playing is to not play.
I think the best thing that I can say about this is, "it's cute." That's also the worst thing I can say.
This is super interesting, glad I came across it. Absolutely great review and analysis of it, I am definitely going to check this out.
I completely agree (in so much as I know) that it seems to be having it both ways by having the "meta-game" rules "the game" whereas actually "the game" is secret from you. Doesn't add up. Can you think of a way they could have figured this out correctly?
I don't think I'd say they didn't "figure it out correctly" necessarily, I think they made the choices they wanted to make for the piece of art they wanted to make. But if I interpret the question as "what would be a good way to make a game on this theme?" or "how would you work with some of these ideas?" that strikes me as an interesting question.
I think I'd want to the theme questionable knowability to feature more prominently, and I'd want the actual experience of playing the game to be the thing that delivered the impact. I think that taking some cues from constrained communication games like Mysterium and constrained information games like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes might help with that.
What I'm thinking is that it would look more like a regular tabletop RPG but with 2 GMs and multiple players. The situation would be that the players are space explorers who have just made a hard landing on a planet, but heavy electrical storms in the atmosphere are interfering with their scanners and some scanners may even have been damaged in the landing (like the beginning of Alien), so they can't be completely sure about what they know about the environment. One GM is playing the world and the inhabitants -- they have a set of rules that is hidden from the other players, including a rule about when "they" die, i.e. if anything from inside the ship is exposed to the planet's environment. The other GM is more like a standard RPG GM that tells players what the results of their actions are, etc., but they don't have all the info, they can only get some of it by asking the planet GM. But the planet GM has weird constraints about how they're allowed to communicate that change from question to question, so maybe on the first question they can respond either "Blue" or "7", and on the second they can respond "Happy Face" or "W", etc. And the regular GM has to do their best to use that answer to tell the players what's going on. The idea would be to get the players emotionally invested in actually trying to engage with the situation and understand if there really is life (and even intelligent life) on the planet, so if they do hit the "twist" element of killing it all it's a big emotional hammer. If that happens the Planet GM just has to say something like "I'm dead" and they're out of the game and can no longer participate (maybe the whole game has to be played over the net via Skype or Hangouts and they're required to disconnect), and that void of non-participation where previously there was ambiguous and frustrating participation might have a lot of punch to it (maybe too much for some people, feeling responsible for hitting that hidden rule might be really uncomfortable).
I find it interesting that both of the games that you cite as potential references for design (and they're both good games) are heavily mechanized.
There is a difference in the mind of players, legitimately so, between "information that is simply obscure" and "information that is deliberately obscured." If a "machine" gives you information that is partial or hazy or mis-interpretable, then that's okay. In this case, any kind of randomizer counts because that's exactly what they do.
But if another person at the table does so, the interaction changes. It becomes adversarial. That counts both ways, of course, which is why you get the "killer GM" trope. When one of the pillars of the game interaction is to obscure information before at the players can make reasonable judgments about it, it becomes a win state to make sure that the other party doesn't get what they want.
That's a real problem for the sort of thing.
I would have to start to break this down into something usable by trying to put together a list of traits which make the game worthwhile. What is or are the key elements which communicate this state of play?
That's where everything has to start.
So this is me getting "rules lawyer"y and a bit meta but here goes:
They say "We do not play out the catastrophe" but who is "we" here? If someone opens the door there are three options. First possibility is that they haven't read the rules, and so "we" doesn't apply to them, as it's addressed at the reader of the rules. The second possibility is that they have read the rules and are ignoring them (or they wouldn't have opened the door in the first place) in which case we can surmise that they plan on playing out the catastrophe. And of course the third possibility is that they hadn't read the rules, but upon entering the room do so, and decide to play the game as best they can from that point forward. What exactly that would look like I don't know but I find it interesting to think about.
Hmm, alien life so alien that is unimaginable. This sentence shook me what it means.
Aliens are practically unimaginable imagination with long dolichocephalic head imagined by someone and taken by others.
Something is wrong with my writing, I. e, I have an imagination but can't express.
The whole concept is new and I think will be the successful one.