If I get invested enough in an idea, I will have no choice but to at least try to materialize it - at the very least, I'd probably end up prototyping it and/or iterating on it at some point.

I don't yet know all that much about "fake video game" culture (is that a thing?) aside from what I've learned by watching a few Supereyepatchwolf video essays a few months ago. Is there some sort of unspoken, or even spoken, prohibition against attempting to actually make one of these games? Like, if the actual creator of Vermis decided to straight up develop and release Vermis tomorrow, would the community feel disappointment at this notion, maybe even anger? Would it be seen as a betrayal or a loss, maybe? 

I recognize why this subgenre of unfiction, and its analogues across other media, is vastly appealing - the realm of possibilities and ideas is always deeper and richer than any material outcome can possibly be. Seeing something from the outside, a cross section with endless empty spaces to fill and imagine, sets the mind racing.

It seems that my brain is just not wired to "let things go," however. It may be some particular aspect of my neurospice cocktail that drives this impulse. I don't know. Could just be art school brainwashing - after so many years of fighting to internalize "make the thing, don't just dream about making the thing," it's gotten difficult to viscerally distinguish between this, which is, from an objective and intellectual standpoint, empirically and without a doubt a type of self contained and valid thing to be made, from the process of "dreaming" or making a mock-up.

So, in the practical sense, I know I want to participate in this jam, but I also know that if I were to do so and were to make something that's even a little bit interesting to me personally, I would not be able to guarantee that I'd not try to turn that endlessly deep well of potential into a flawed, mediocre, finite lump.

Might be a moot point, maybe. I might be too broke, broken, and tired to keep the above impulse going much longer anyway, so it's possible that I will soon be in no danger of indulging in it. But it is nevertheless a question that seems to have gotten stuck in my craw. 

I'd say its okay imo to create a game from the fake game! Someone made a text based VERMIS game a while ago that was really good and fit the feeling really well but didn't feel like it was upsetting the idea of VERMIS or the concept of a "not real" game.