Tabletop RPGs and the Nebula Awards Gets Real

The Nebula-related activity around Ben Lehman and Caitlynn Belle’s The Tragedy of GJ 237b is not what I expected to see when the Nebulas started talking seriously about recognizing game writing. There’s a lot of folks doing writing for video games with large audiences who get little recognition for what they do. I expected the Nebulas were, and are, thinking about them more than anything else. But if tabletop games were being thought about, I also didn’t expect it to be ones like The Tragedy of GJ 237b. No one’s going to give an award for game writing to a purely procedural text, but there’s the tradition of RPGs using fiction and evocative exposition to convey the history and culture of their worlds, and if the Nebulas showed interest in RPGs I expected it would be for writings like these. The Tragedy of GJ 237b is something else entirely. Its power isn’t in a use of language that pulls you into its world, but in how it constructs your understanding of a potential real world gameplay experience, relying just a bit on you having a small understanding of tabletop, and enables you to have an emotional reaction to it. It’s power comes way more from mostly functional exposition and procedure than I’d ever have expected for the Nebulas. I was really happy for the Nebulas wanting to take game writing seriously, but actually now I’m riveted—even if it (likely) doesn’t win it’s going to be exciting to watch how the awards play out over the next few years if SFWA members are thinking like this.

More: https://plus.google.com/u/1/+PaulCzege/posts/7GKbsUUtzfV