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RE: A review of “The Tragedy of GJ237b”: Is it a story? Is it a game?
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.