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Somewhere at the borderlands of human knowledge, where faraway words get combined into top-of-the-Google-result articles for the most niche topics, there’s me. I’ve written twenty Wikipedia articles at last count, on matters from rare genetic diseases to the books on the bottom of my shelves, but one of those articles stands grandiose and horrific amongst the rest.

That article is F.A.T.A.L., a tabletop role-playing game from the early 2000s that attracted the attention of fans of the medium for being, to put it lightly, a bit shit. Perhaps it was the fact you rolled to determine your character’s anal circumference, or the fact you determined your attributes using twenty ten-sided dice each, or the fact the GM was called the “MaimMaster”, or that you could accidentally rape someone while wrestling with them, or the spells called out as existing to aid necrophilia. You know – everyday role-playing, just as the Satanic Panic said.

F.A.T.A.L.‘s article has a history of its own, with three attempts to create it between 2005 and 2010 falling into the void of Wikipedia’s twisty, half-coherent “notability” policies that police what we can and can’t write about. In the intervening decade, horrible things have become cool. Vice has written about it. So has Gizmodo. “Real journalists”, to pretend for a moment writing isn’t inherently falsehood, have noticed this atrocity and convinced their corporate masters it’s worth chronicling. In turn, I can point to them and say “Look at this – this is a real game that people are writing about, and I can write about it too”, and ward off all discussion that this might not be a topic Wikipedia should host in the archives of human knowledge.

Wikipedia has six million articles in all. A recently passed milestone trumpeted that #6,000,000 was about a woman scientist. Now women can be history, too

The Wikimedia Foundation – the nonprofit that owns the servers and takes credit for the culture – wants articles about female scientists. The people who write the encyclopedia it takes credit for instead write about whatever cultural detritus we can get our hands on.  A friend of mine has brought to Good Article status the work “Extremely Online”; he is currently embroiled in a vicious debate with the site’s Manual of Style obsessives over whether it is appropriate to rename it to “Extremely online”. Somewhere beneath their feet, the world turns.

Why do we chronicle these things? In the obvious sense, it’s because the rest of the world does. Wikipedia only writes about things that have been covered elsewhere; it is a tertiary source, to use pernicious academic language. I could write about F.A.T.A.L. because Vice and Gizmodo – and Darren MacLennan and Jason Sartin – wrote about it. This just kicks the can down the road, though. “Alright, Max, that’s why you did it, but why did they?”

Why did they? Terrible media is hot. Enough for an industry of Direct-to-Netflix films starring Z-list unsex-symbols and wannabe-Schwarzeneggers who choke out dialogue written by committee to strike the right retching chord, hitting the brain cells of some freak-show viewer to guffaw about how much smarter he is than the movie. It’s a direct line of descent from the carnies hawking the geek biting the heads off chickens. There’s a meaningful distinction, though, between something like Sharknado and something like F.A.T.A.L., which is grotesquely sincere. There’s a four-hour interview I’ll never admit how much of I listened to with James Hausler, one of F.A.T.A.L.‘s co-creators, nearly twenty years on; he is painfully and exquisitely sincere, certain F.A.T.A.L. was a missed masterpiece, something that three universes across from us hosted conventions. (FATALCon! Really! The man believes in his heart it could have been.)

Games have always had a bit of a different relationship to Shitty Art than films or television, our passive-consumption media. Shitty cinema, shitty literature, shitty Youtube comedy is easier to enjoy. Games, video or tabletop, require more active participation – and a bad game is rarely fun to play. F.A.T.A.L. would not be fun to play, not even if you stripped it of every sexual indignity and every affront to human rights. You randomly roll your class – if you happen to get Delouser, well, have fun with your lice-picking RPG.

And yet, bad games happen. In tabletop RPGs, the most notorious bad games are the “fantasy heartbreakers” – sincere attempts to carve one’s name into tabletop history, as created by people whose histories start and end with Dungeons & Dragons. In his seminal piece, Ron Edwards calls the heartbreaker that because it breaks your heart to read them – to know the author genuinely, deeply believed in his game and his success, launching it into a world he expected to revolutionize only to die an ignoble death. The heartbreaker is a bad game because it is something rarely simultaneous; it is both sincere and pablum. It has all the problems of capeshit or franchises or any other mass-produced media, generic and unimaginative, and yet it comes from the heart. Its tragedy is the limit of imagination.

Video gaming also has its heartbreakers. There are millions upon millions of two-dimensional-in-every-sense platformers fighting one another for scraps in the dog-eat-dog landscape. If you load up something like /r/gamedev, you see people still making them, still throwing their hopes and dreams into zero-viewer devblogs and tweets seen only by other aspiring marketers. They march proudly, blindly, into a war they have no odds of winning.

These bad games don’t get Wikipedia articles, except occasionally when our most dedicated subject-matter writers dig up capsule reviews in 1990s back issues of gaming magazines. Yet something about them is more respectable than a lot of things that do. Their flaw of disimagination is the same flaw as every two-hour advertisement on a cinema screen and every “bingeable” piece of sponsored-content fed to people starving for art, and those have, for all their sins, never wanted for engagement. They’re projected from the minds of their makers into a world that never asked for them, their hearts and souls mined solely to make something, anything, out of that human drive to create ceaselessly even when it teeters on the brink of apocalypse. They are refusals both of the concept of imagination and of the idea of letting something stay there.

When all art is shitty, shitty art no longer exists. When film and gaming is defined inescapably by the mass-market and mass-produced, dreck made from the heart catches people’s eyes – it’s a hideous mistake, but it’s a hideous mistake that can only happen if you try. Fantasy heartbreakers shouldn’t be made, but they were made by someone who deeply wanted to tell a story and impress it on the world. F.A.T.A.L. is horrific, grotesque, a paean to rape and torture told by people who should probably have restraining orders from pen and paper, but goddamn is it hilarious to hear James Hausler talk about his and Byron Hall’s plans for a child-friendly edition to be announced at the inaugural FATALCon. When all of one’s options for real games are the same generic moulds, horrible things gain an appeal for novelty alone, ideas so half-baked and bizarre that you can’t look away.

want to read more about FATAL? We don’t! Here’s some of the best historical writing covering it!