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.