Jellyfish Are Not Real
A downloadable game
JELLYFISH ARE NOT REAL
Fiction is not bound by laws of reality, the man does not drown because he does not exist.
Fiction is not bound by laws of reality, the man does not drown because he does not exist.
Remember this.
This is a roleplaying game. In it, you will create fiction. You hold in your hands the tools to drown a man, or to save him.
This man is a jellyfish.
He is fictional.
You are not.
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Comments
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Thought-provoking lyric game that raises questions about the nature of fiction, tabletop roleplaying games, and our obligation to help other people. Minimum price $1, community copies sometimes available.
I liked this overall, though I couldn't really figure out the jellyfish element - perhaps unsurprisingly, as I struggle with lots of non-literal aspects of art. I still enjoyed trying, anyway. The concept of the drowning stranger is a familiar one to me, so that aspect clicked much more easily and I enjoyed the evocative scene-setting and narrator's interruptions to it, and the ending section was a neat rallying call to action (though less topical now - perhaps if a new edition ever comes out, it could feature different suggested action points).
I'm still a newcomer to lyric games in general, so I'm not putting my usual rating out of five at the end of this. Still, I found Jellyfish Are Not Real really interesting and well worth the $1 cost of checking it out.
Me : *reads this game to someone shortly after reading them consider the spoon*
Them : I see why this was tagged anxiety.
Me : no that was the other game.
Them : this should be tagged anxiety.
*some time later*
Them : *quietly* oh no
Me : are you thinking about the jellyfish
Them: no....
Every now and then I come back and read this comment. I read it a lot because y’all *get* this game exactly and it’s very flattering for me as a designer, but more than that it’s frightening for me as a person.
In my undergrad Ethics class we studied the ethics of Obligations, and my professor used a thought exercise that became this game: imagine you’re on a relaxing walk along the beach and you see a man drowning in a foot of water. Would you help him? We assume the answer is “of course, obviously!” Now imagine you’re not on a relaxing walk, you’re late for a meeting. Would you still help him? The thought experiment continues, adding or removing different contexts but always asking “in what circumstances and to what abstractions do we have an obligation to someone else?”
So uh, ha ha, sorry about that but I also wake up thinking about the jellyfish sometimes.
<3
I am not a jellyfish. I am real. Can I drown?