Bridging Fictional Game Guides and Imaginary Games: The Strange Case of Vermis by Plastiboo

Vermis I - Lost Dungeons and Forbidden Woods (2023), by Plastiboo, is a pocket-sized, unpaginated "Official Guide" to a dungeon crawler that does not exist. This article argues that the book constitutes a fictional game in its own right, one that exists both alongside and within its own secondary world. The authors challenge the prevailing framework for fictional games, which generally presupposes a pre-existing fictional world, and instead propose that Vermis creates its secondary world on its own terms. Their analysis is kaleidoscopic, drawing on play theory (including Huizinga's account of play as free and rule-bound), aesthetics, game design, narratology, and literary reception.

The central thesis is that Vermis functions as a "reading game" whose imagined game exists only in the reader's mind. Its linear, choice-free narrative and its mimicry of the traditional game guide format produce pseudo-choices and ontological gaps that invite an aesthetic striving form of play. Because each reader fills these gaps differently, every reading yields an idiosyncratic experience and generates many unofficial versions of the game. The authors characterize the work as fragmentary and incremental, with its agency and meaning realized in imagination rather than on the printed page.

Building on theories of uncertainty and improvisation from Bateman and Malaby, the authors conclude that the guidebook turns the reader into a player within a nested, meta-level fiction. It operates as a self-playing game that generates aggregated playfulness in its audience. The argument rests on theoretical reasoning rather than empirical or quantitative evidence, and its significance lies in broadening the concept of fictional games to include works that build their own worlds without relying on an existing fiction.