It's mostly a matter of what level you're looking at. The metagame is fabulously amusing -- whether it's "playable" in the traditional sense is sort of questionable, but if you go into it with the right mindset it's a helluva lot of fun.
On the other hand, the game-within-the-game is, in fact, the most horribly dreadful thing I've ever seen -- the writers did a bang-up job of taking a huge number of horror stories and squishing them together into one game. Almost every character sheet exemplifies some dreadful error that one should never make. (Sometimes several -- the William Jennings Bryan sheet is one of the most deliciously awful things I've ever read.)
I definitely hope that they rerun it, and I'd recommend to others that they play. But I do find it hard to drop out of the in-game middle persona. That is, I view this game from at least three vantage points: the actual modern player (who finds this a delightful satire of LARP); the fictional modern player trying to reconstruct the original game (who finds it a seminal, but nonetheless dreadful game); and the GM/writer in the game (who doesn't give a damn what anyone thinks, because he is, of course, always right). It's the middle voice I was writing in above, simply because I'm having way too much fun with the century-of-LARP concept still...
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On the other hand, the game-within-the-game is, in fact, the most horribly dreadful thing I've ever seen -- the writers did a bang-up job of taking a huge number of horror stories and squishing them together into one game. Almost every character sheet exemplifies some dreadful error that one should never make. (Sometimes several -- the William Jennings Bryan sheet is one of the most deliciously awful things I've ever read.)
I definitely hope that they rerun it, and I'd recommend to others that they play. But I do find it hard to drop out of the in-game middle persona. That is, I view this game from at least three vantage points: the actual modern player (who finds this a delightful satire of LARP); the fictional modern player trying to reconstruct the original game (who finds it a seminal, but nonetheless dreadful game); and the GM/writer in the game (who doesn't give a damn what anyone thinks, because he is, of course, always right). It's the middle voice I was writing in above, simply because I'm having way too much fun with the century-of-LARP concept still...