For the first time in their existence, the Larry Prater Awards are honoring a work of visual storytelling. That alone says something about the year, but it also says something about how elastic the idea of "reading" has quietly become.

Vermis barely qualifies as a story in the traditional sense. It’s closer to a mythological prism you hold up to your own life. Ostensibly, it’s a player’s guide for a video game that doesn’t exist: no console, no executable code, no glowing screen to do the thinking for you. What you’re left with is a framework: rules, items, enemies, encounters. The language of video games, stripped of the game itself. And in that absence, your imagination starts to overperform.

Like most video game protagonists, the central figure in Vermis has no past and no discernible personality. They exist as a vacancy. Normally, movement and mechanics fill that void. Here, there’s nothing to distract you from it. You project yourself onto this blank avatar until the projection rebounds and you start interrogating your own assumptions: about purpose, about progress, about why we need systems at all to tell us who we are. The less Vermis gives you, the louder your own thoughts become.

Very little is known about Plastiboo. Their identity, gender, background, even nationality remains unclear, which feels less like a marketing choice than an extension of the work itself. Vermis isn’t nostalgia for games that existed; it’s an attempt to mythologize contemporary life by breaking it down into rulesets, inventories, and encounters. Others have done similar things, but deconstructing reality through the grammar of a non-existent game does something sneakier: it lets you dismantle your own relationship to the world without ever announcing that this is what’s happening.

It’s an incredibly simple work and that simplicity is the source of its power. Vermis doesn’t insist on meaning. It creates the conditions for it, then steps aside.

I’m already looking forward to Vermis Vol. 3 and Plastiboo’s other non-game, Godhusk, in 2026—if only to see how something that isn’t real can once again rearrange the way I understand the things that are.

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