If, as I have shown, algorithms guide the most basic understanding of paratextual board games, then it seems contradictory to base a complex game on the work of H. P. Lovecraft. The detailed mythos built up in Lovecraft’s work describes a world existing outside of rules, a world based on the cosmic horror of the unknown and the unknowable. Yet, as I will show in this section, Arkham Horror uses that sense of algorithmic structure as a way of mirroring the very non rules—based mythos of Lovecraft. By relying on multiple sets of rules at once, the game creates what I have termed unstructure—a feeling of randomness generated by an unknowable structure.
Lovecraft’s plots revolve around the fact that the existence of ancient supernatural entities outside of traditional Euclidean and Cartesian realities affects the emotional responses (especially fear, dread, horror, and terror) of individuals. Despite trying to fight back, humans find that victories are usually temporary and costly. But according to Lovecraft expert Donald R. Burleson, Lovecraft’s themes go deeper than this, and reflect his belief that human beings are insignificant in the universe, and our very awareness of this fact leads to madness.29 Yet, as I noted, there is no one “order” to Lovecraft’s work—it is not a series like Lewis’s Narnia books or a complete world like Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
Rather, Lovecraft’s oeuvre is best understood as fitting together thematically.
It is not that the volumes are random and out of order, but that readers (as well as Lovecraft himself) have no overarching organization to guide them.
This is unstructure, where randomness implies a lack of structure. There may be a basic arrangement of elements, and although we may not understand the organization, we know that there must be something underlying it. In this sense, the Lovecraftian universe is fraught with unstructure.
Defining any one aspect of Lovecraft’s “rules” works against the very nature of Lovecraft’s universe. In this sense, Lovecraft’s stories are fluid and dynamic,
where, as Price describes, “the realms of magic turn out to be unsuspected dimensions of non-Euclidean geometry.” We cannot understand the structure of the universe, although we recognize that there is a structure there. In a way, the symbolic nature of the Lovecraft universe, a storyworld “so massive and complex … that no writers can ever utilize enough of it for the reader to surmise the writer’s principle of selection,” mirrors that of Lovecraft’s Ancient Ones themselves. So immense as to be virtually sizeless, the Ancient Ones are a corpus unto themselves. But they are never consistently the same. For example, in one story about the Ancient One Azathoth, “we would have encountered a nightmare ‘daemon-sultan’ bearing little resemblance either to the ‘monstrous nuclear chaos’ of Lovecraft’s science fiction … or the mindless demiurge of the Cthulhu Mythos tales.” Lovecraft’s Azathoth is not consistent, and nor should it be: the sheer unknowability (and unstructurable presence) of ancient aliens/
gods/creatures means that conceptualizing Azathoth as something defeats its very purpose. The same can be said for Lovecraft’s creation Nyarlathotep, a creature with many guises and many forms, which Lovecraft also uses throughout his oeuvre in multiple ways: “he inserts the name Nyarlathotep into the denouement of the ‘The Rats in the Walls,’ where it has neither weight nor much significance. … Here is the Cthulhu Mythos in a nutshell,” argues Price. 30
Yet, Arkham Horror’s structural reliance on enemy characteristics belies this mutability. In the game, any Ancient Ones must remain fixed, denying the uncertainty of Lovecraft’s universe. In what Lovecraft himself described as his own favorite among his stories, “The Colour Out of Space,” the text
“symbolically raises questions … about categoricality and systematization.”
In this way, Lovecraft’s stories eradicate “the basic notion of any stable system that purports, in a settled and comprehensive way, to account for the world as perceived by humankind.”31 Arkham Horror, in turn, almost completely negates Lovecraft’s world by relying on its underlying algorithms, which players must comprehend.
Reading Lovecraft as a whole means artificially creating a structure that the author may never have intended: understanding earlier stories in light of later ones opens up what Jacques Derrida calls “the dangerous supplement,”
or a sense that the sequel in some way determines aspects of the original.32 The placement of a text within Lovecraft’s mythos is a complex process. Some Lovecraft scholars take great pains to point out which texts do, and which ones do not, fit into the larger scheme. Lin Carter places artificial boundaries between
the works, creating a structuralist methodology for examining the mythos: to maintain a discrete border for the mythos, each story must “present us with a significant item of information about the background lore of the Mythos, thus contributing important information to a common body of lore.”33 Yet, Price asks,
“Is this manner of reading fair to the texts? Is it realistic? Here is how I resolve the matter. It is entirely a question of which of the [Mythos] stories you consider any individual story to be a part of.” 34
Such work in concretizing the unconcretizable must be present when translating a cult narrative to a board game. A Game of Thrones: The Board Game must make tangible the multiple relationships between characters; Star Trek:
Fleet Captains must represent the damage ships take during battle. For Arkham Horror, the game uses a procedural rhetoric to formalize the roles of the Ancient Ones, the characters, and the entire Lovecraftian mythos in a way that never formally took place in Lovecraft’s works. Ian Bogost has defined the phrase
“procedural rhetoric” in game studies to refer to the “practice of using [game]
processes persuasively.”35 Games become a way of informally educating from a particular point of view, using play as a pedagogical mechanic.36 Wagner expands on Bogost’s definition, arguing that “to examine procedural rhetoric, then, is to look at how arguments are addressed to users via the things they are doing in interaction with the game.”37 Bogost holds that such procedural translation lies at the heart of paratextual video games, arguing that by “taking themes and figures from [literature] and applying them to games,” we can see how games do not so much remake as they reapply traditional modes of understanding.38 This is how Wilson redesigned the complex set of rules, mythologies, and underlying stories at the heart of Arkham Horror, writing that he had to “respect … a medium’s strengths and weaknesses, but at the same time [look] to see what storytelling techniques other media have to offer.”39 Arkham Horror uses procedural rhetoric to attempt to mirror the unstructure of Lovecraft’s work, through (1) the cooperation mechanics of players within the game and (2) a focus on individual components working within the game to focus on hybridizing story and play. In this case, “procedural rhetoric” refers to the rules of the game as they attempt to mirror the unstructure of the underlying mythos. As Flanagan notes, even play itself is a type of unstructural “subversion,” as it can be a “transgressive and subversive” action.40 Ultimately, these attempts to concretize the unstructure of Lovecraft represent a method of rhetorically hybridizing rules and a story that highlights the unique positioning of paratextual board games within the media environment.
Cooperation
One of the ways Arkham Horror uses its algorithmic structure to realize the unstructure of Lovecraft’s universe is through the board game mechanism of cooperation. Cooperation within Arkham Horror allows for a greater fluidity of human motivation to become part of the game. Much of the nitty-gritty mechanics of Arkham Horror can be electronically automated through digital apps that automate dice rolling, card shuffling, and other mathematical elements.
Indeed, other Lovecraft games can be automated as well: a mobile game based on Elder Sign allows for the computer to do much of the mathematical work.
Jonas Linderoth calls Arkham Horror’s cooperation “pure,” since “all players work together towards a mutual goal.”41 This lies in opposition to what he defines as “tragedy of the commons” style of cooperation, where the system falls apart if players are too individualistic (which I will describe in the next chapter regarding the Lord of the Rings games), and cooperative games with a traitor mechanic (which I describe in Chapter 4 in reference to Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game). Cooperation in this “pure” mode means that no individual will “win” the game by himself or herself. All players, instead, win or lose as a group.
That cooperation is mandated in the game makes the underlying structure of the game more malleable. Each player controls one character, and all characters are bound by individual rules. But when different characters cooperate, the different rules can be enacted in multiple ways. For instance, Jenny Barnes, the dilettante, receives one dollar at the start of every turn. Dollars can be used to purchase items like equipment or to heal a character’s stamina or sanity. Keeping Jenny busy buying items might help the group as items and money can be transferred between players as needed. Further, the professor Harvey Walters has the “strong mind” ability, which allows him to reduce all sanity losses by 1 point.
He also starts the game with what is an enormous number of sanity points, 7 in total. If players are cooperating, they can use Harvey to seal gates or cast spells to combat monsters—his sanity allows him these abilities. Similarly, Michael McGlen, the gangster, has a high stamina (of 7) and his special rule ability is
“strong body,” which allows him to take less damage. Higher stamina allows a character to combat monsters more effectively. Dispersal of character allows the game players to cooperate and work together to use their abilities to defeat the monsters. Here, the individual characters themselves become subsumed within the game world as components within a larger universe. Cooperation
changes game play. The many rules that guide these characters not only help to differentiate them from one another, but more importantly, also bring the different skills that the individual team will need to defeat the Ancient One.
This “coming together to defeat an evil” motif is a structural element of the game that the Lovecraft mythos does not necessarily invite; however, the structural elements of character individuality actually end up providing the same sense of unstructure as in Lovecraft. For example, even with a full game complement of 8 players, not every character in the game will be able to be played—there may be a noticeable absence of some characteristics. This randomness increases the level of unstructure in the game. Further, the cooperation mechanic forces players to communicate to defeat the Ancient One, but the more players that are in the game, the harder the game becomes: less cooperation is possible, more monsters are allowed on the board, the Ancient One can awaken earlier, and fewer monsters can be banished to the “outskirts” of the city. More cooperation means a more difficult game—and more unstructure within the organizational parameters of the game.
Individual components
Another method which Arkham Horror uses to realize the unstructure of Lovecraft’s universe is through individual components in the game. For example, throughout the game various clues are scattered around the game board representing the town of Arkham. Clues are both a means of tracking progress in the game (the number of clues corresponding to how well the team is playing), and tools that all the investigators can use to defeat the Ancient One.
The rule book states, “Clue tokens represent information about the mythos threat that an investigator may acquire. A player may spend Clue tokens, one at a time, after any skill check … to roll one additional die.”42 In addition, as the town of Arkham is slowly being overrun with gates to the “Other World” (one gate appears at the end of every turn), the investigators have to close each one.
If too many gates are open at once, the Ancient One immediately awakens and begins his destruction of the town. Clues can be used to seal these gates. A player can spend five Clue tokens to seal the gate forever. This is a powerful move in the game, as sealing six gates wins the game.
Yet, the “Clues” themselves are pieces of non-information—images of mag-nifying glasses instead of text. There is no actual, textual clue as to the meaning of the Ancient Ones; rather, the Clue tokens are simulacra of information.
Players can never “find out” the answer, the underlying structure: the Clue token simply provides a mechanism by which answers are known to be known. There are no answers at the end of the game; players simply stop (or do not stop) the monster. The structure of the game—the larger set of underlying thematics that rule this world—is able to mirror the “unknowability” of Lovecraft’s mythos through the mechanism of literal undiegesis. As players, we have to know that knowledge exists without comprehending what that knowledge is. This unknowable unknown simulates the type of knowledge comprehension that characters create in Lovecraft’s worlds as well, as characters must interact with the Ancient Ones all the while knowing that there are aspects that they don’t know.
Further, the character attributes help to perpetuate a sense of unstructure in the game. At the start of every turn, players can adjust three different settings on their character’s card—“speed/sneak”; “fight/will”; and “lore/luck”
(see Figure 1.2). As characters increase speed, they must conversely decrease sneak. The same applies to fight/will (e.g., as their ability to fight increases, their desire to do so decreases) and to lore/luck. Ideologically, this last pairing is an interesting linkage, suggesting that as your knowledge of your enemies increases, your luck decreases (perhaps education reduces one’s ability to rely on intangible results). The amount of change in these three pairs depends on the character’s “focus”—Jenny Barnes has a focus of just one, meaning she can make
Figure 1.2 Character cards for “Jenny Barnes” and “Amanda Sharpe” from Arkham Horror. The Board Game © 2005 Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. Photo by the author.
only one adjustment per turn (perhaps her days as a Dilettante have left her a bit dazed?). In contrast, the student Amanda Sharpe has a focus of three, allowing her to change her various abilities more often. These seemingly minor individual character differences in the game actually have quite significant consequences:
increasing Amanda’s fight from two to four would decrease her will from three to one. This would then radically alter her ability to complete a “horror check.” The horror check is a special kind of check enacted when encountering a monster.
If Amanda fails her will check (and with a one, she is likely to), she would lose sanity and possibly be sent to the insane asylum.
The key Lovecraftian element of unstructure at the heart of this game mechanism is that it is unlikely that a player will know precisely which elements will need to be increased or decreased during a turn, as the events that befall one player may affect others. Amanda, increasing her speed because she thinks she will not have to sneak around a monster, may, in fact, be the complete opposite of what she “should” do given other players’ involvement. The unknowability of future events is precisely the type of “aporia” that Price describes at the heart of Lovecraft’s work—the philosophical state of puzzlement of the mythos.43 It is, at once, both a sense of structure to the character and a sense of unstructure to the game story.
Ultimately, both the Clue tokens and the character adjustments serve as microcosms of the larger unstructure of the game, which, in turn, reveals the underlying unstructure of Lovecraft’s original cult texts. And in a larger sense, it reveals the unstructure at the heart of contemporary digital culture—the
“transcoding” of the game demonstrates the unknowability of today’s technology.
We use our technology without quite understanding what it does, or where the information goes. Despite the ubiquity of new media today, many people remain ignorant of its basic functionality. New media are sufficiently advanced technologies that appear magic. And although based on hundred-year-old stories, Arkham Horror reflects the unstructure of today’s media environment.