Rulesets as artforms - writing a game never intended to be played?

[Anonymouswizard]

This type of game exists, though many of them are more art piece than anything. The collective name that went around itch.io is lyric game.

Examples include the tragedy at GJ237b
Where you set up an obscure game ostensibly played by microbes in a room and when someone enters the room they play the human probe that unknowingly destroys that life.

And fight truck. A game about queer people fighting in a truck.

I actually thought of Nobilis first, which is admittedly much more general and probably more playable than the one's you've mentioned. I also get the feeling that weird concepts and unplayable systems have more to do with breaking assumptions than being actually unplayable.

Within tabletop RPGs we have some assumptions that we tend to make in various ways, including a presumed breadth to the simulation and a focus on media emulation. The latter is actually quite interesting to dig into, as it's the entire reason so many RPGs end up defaulting to physical conflict as a focus. When you break that assumption or start redirecting to more obscure media people have less references for how your rules should actually work.