So far, I have been noting some surface elements of the game: characters, clues, tokens, attributes. But looking more deeply at the rules and how they contribute to our understanding of Lovecraft’s particular milieu allows us to develop a more robust analysis of how Arkham Horror uses structure to realize the unstructure
of Lovecraft’s universe. Specifically, I want to look at how the rules governing turn-taking and the functionality of each phase of the turn help to define the unstructure of Lovecraft. Like many paratextual board games, including Game of Thrones: The Card Game, as I discuss in Chapter 7, Arkham Horror’s game play is dominated by a series of turns and phases. Each turn is divided into five phases, and each phase sees each player performing various actions. As the rule book states, “during each phase, every player, starting with the first player and continuing clockwise, performs the actions that take place during that phase.”44 The next phase continues in the same manner, and so on. Thus, for players of Arkham Horror, a “turn” is quite different from what one might expect in a less complex game like Monopoly. A single turn may take upward of an hour to complete. Many of the other paratextual games I discuss throughout the book have similar structures, although most are not as laborious as this. Throughout the turn, the unpredictability and random nature of elements within each of the phases present carefully crafted moments of mythos and story. Below, I outline the phases (and the actions that occur in each one) in order to demonstrate how the complexity of the structured process of play deepens the underlying unstructure of the game. By increasing the chaotic randomness of the play in a measured way, each turn acts like a computerized algorithm. In fact, many of the actions can be phrased as if/then logical statements (I have added the ifs and thens to the following outline, and the parenthetical statements reflect assumed instructions).
I. Phase I: Upkeep
a. (If Cards exhausted, then) Refresh Exhausted Cards
b. (If character has Upkeep Action, then) Perform Upkeep Actions c. (If player wishes, then) Adjust Skills
II. Phase II: Movement
a. (If character is in Arkham, then) Arkham Movement
i. (If leaving area with Monster, then) Evade (or Fight) Monsters ii. (If character ends movement on Clue, then) Pick Up Clues b. (If character is in Other World, then) Other World Movement c. (If character is Delayed, then) Delay Investigator
III. (If character is in Arkham, then) Phase III: Arkham Encounters
a. (If character is not on Gate, then) No Gate Encounters and player picks Encounter Card
i. (If Encounter Card calls for Monster, then) Evade (or Fight) Monsters
b. (If location has Gate, then) Move to the Other World through Gate IV. (If character is in Other World, then) Phase IV: Other World Encounters
a. (If character is on first spot, then) Draw Encounter Card i. (If Encounter Card calls for Monster, then) Evade (or Fight)
Monsters
b. (If character is on second spot, then) Draw Encounter Card i. (If Encounter Card calls for Monster, then) Evade (or Fight)
Monsters V. Phase V: Mythos
a. Open Gate and Spawn Monster
i. (If Location has Elder Sign, then) Do Nothing
ii. (If Location has Open Gate, then) Monster appears at every Open Gate on board
iii. (If Location has neither Elder Sign nor Open Gate, then) 1. The Doom Track Marker Advances
2. A Gate Opens, and 3. A Monster Spawns
iv. (If Gate Opens on Character, then) Character is moved to Other World
b. Place Clue Token
i. (If Location has Gate, then) Do Not Place Clue Token c. Move Monster
i. (If Monster has Black borders, then) Move Monster Normally ii. (If Monster has Yellow borders, then) Do Not Move Monster iii. (If Monster has Red borders, then) Move Monster Twice iv. (If Monster has Green borders, then) Follow Instructions on
Monster Card
v. (If Monster has Blue borders, then) Move Monster to Street Area d. Mythos Ability—Draw Mythos Card
As this outline indicates, almost every action within each phase of each turn in Arkham Horror comes with an associated uncertainty. One does not even need to know what the action actually is. Much ambiguity within the game stems from elements that generate feelings of randomness: for example, the roll of dice as to
whether one defeats the monster, the draw of a card revealing what encounters one might have. The multitude of rules creates a feeling of randomness within the game.
Phases III and IV demonstrate the importance of encounters within Arkham Horror not only by revealing uncertain (or unstructured) elements within the game, but also by continuing the storylines. Arkham Horror has twenty-seven different locations, split three each among the nine streets that line the town (Figure 1.3). At each location, a player draws an Encounter Card that reveals a particular narrative, motive, or event that can alter the progression of the game.
As Kevin Wilson describes, “by carefully crafting these encounters for each location, it is possible to give each place a certain feel, with recurring characters and themes.”45 For example, while in the Rivertown street section of Arkham, a player might find herself in the Graveyard (not truly the wisest place to hide
Figure 1.3 The town of Arkham, Game board from Arkham Horror: The Board Game
© 2005 Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. Photo by the author.
from Lovecraftian monsters, to be sure). During Phase III, she may draw one of seven cards geared toward Rivertown, each with a different event. Wilson writes mini-narratives into the Encounter Cards drawn at each location. For example, one card reveals that at the Graveyard, “You find a man painting a picture of one of the horrible gargoyles lining the walls of the graveyard. Seeing you, he introduces himself as Richard Upton Pickman, a painter visiting from Boston.”
That player then has a choice (another if/then algorithm): “If you spend monster trophies [monsters that you have defeated] that have a total of 5 toughness, [then] Pickman takes a liking to you. Take his Ally card [he becomes an ally of yours]. If it is not available, [then] he teaches you an incantation instead. Draw 1 spell.” One must have an immense amount of information in order to determine the effect of this card, and any future events will depend on that uncertainty throughout the game. Another card for the Graveyard reads: “Entering a stone crypt, you are surprised to find a beautiful fresco and some inspirational words upon the wall. There is an almost magical peace within the chamber” and you gain two sanity points for entering. Another card reads “A monster appears!”
and you must then evade or fight. The point here is not that the Graveyard or any other location allows you to participate in the game in these various ways, but rather that building these types of different mini-narratives into the game allows for more unstructure to enter the game. Understanding the “narrative” of any one location requires a nonlinear reading of the cards, a nonlinear play of the game.
Regarding one location in the game where a character named Harney Jones might or might not help out the player, Wilson reveals that “Due to the random nature of the location decks, it’s possible for [Harney] … to die immediately the first time a player enters that location. However, with repeated plays, the players learn and remember the story as [Wilson] intended it.”46 Only with repeated play and engaged memory can the player understand this embedded narrative. The story told within each of these locations allows the play to happen while the plot engages in a nonlinear structure. Lovecraft’s themes of timeless uncertainty and expansion here find root in the nonlinear expansion of a micronarrative within the larger game structure.47 Drawing cards at random increases the unstructure of the game play.
As Costikyan reminds us, stories are linear while games are nonlinear.48 Arkham Horror, though, reveals not only that linearity is not the key to understanding Lovecraft’s universe but also that the whole idea of linearity as a structure is antithetical to the underlying story. The encounters may reveal part of a story or may reveal no story at all. But because that game is structured so as
to allow nonlinear narrative expansion, the game reveals unstructure. We play through the many if/then algorithms of the game, only to find in the end that our decisions had no effect: three bad cards in a row or two poor dice rolls can change the flow of a game despite the player’s best efforts.
“The inability of the human mind...”
As Costikyan argues, “if we want to get closer to games that also produce compelling stories, we’re going to have to experiment with different approaches.”
Some examples include embedded narratives (like the Encounter Cards) and
“imposing a defined narrative arc on the game, but allowing for a high degree of player freedom between those fixed points.” But more importantly, we need to see a hybridization of form and content, something that paratextual board games bring with them inherently through their connection to cult narratives.
Cult narratives already have a built-in structure—the storyworld exists and the game must be made to fit within its boundaries, however loose they may be. At the same time, a game must also demonstrate its own fluency with uncertainty:
In other words, there’s a direct, immediate conflict between the demands of the story and the demands of a game. Divergence from a story’s path is likely to make for a less satisfying story; restricting a player’s freedom of action is likely to make for a less satisfying game.49
The fact that the game Arkham Horror explicates so many rules might be the ultimate irony of the game: according to Barton St. Armand, Lovecraft’s visions of an unknowable universe rest on the unstable world of unreal dreams, “outside of space, outside of time.”50 Rules, making the game a game, must necessarily exist within a specific time and a specific place. To ludify Lovecraft requires not just rewriting the underlying mythos, but undermining it as well. As Price argues, the Cthulhu mythos is itself largely amorphous: “it is not that all of [the stories] did happen, but that any of them might have.”51 The mythos is not about creating coherence but about nullifying the importance of coherence altogether. Arkham Horror thus reveals what may be the ultimate Lovecraftian element of the game: by using structure to create unstructure, it undoes the most Lovecraftian of elements to make the game even more Lovecraftian. In a chapter about the role-playing game Call of Cthulhu, Kenneth Hite discusses how the Cthulhu mythos serves as a background for a series of games with a “high degree
of standardization.” Indeed, because all the Call of Cthulhu role-play games and expansions feature the same type of play—“a dramatically constricted series of horrific discoveries in a mystery story plot”—the game itself is knowable and consistently structured. Although Hite concedes that many Lovecraft stories do not fit into this mold, he does argue that each follows a certain set of rules that determine the ending—good or bad, sane or mad. These rules, the “anti-mythology,” roughly coincide with the “thematic and mythic” elements residing in his stories.52
For Price:
There is no denying that Lovecraft was fashioning a common background for his narrative universe, but equally one cannot deny it is rife with contradictions, there is a limit to which one can read any one story as a chapter of some other.
When we try to harmonize all the details, we are reading the story against the grain: we are taking what was intended to be background and yanking it into the foreground. 53
Attempting to concretize the unstructure of the Lovecraftian universe(s) through a game becomes a way of hybridizing rules and story, and is something that paratextual board games are uniquely positioned for. Such reliance on hybridization and concretization mirrors the Manovichian sense of automation and variability within algorithmic culture. New media rely on rules to govern their behavior, but from those rules flow multiple and various ways of interacting with technology, media, and content. Paratextual board games reveal such interactions within analog media as well, not as separate paratextual connections, but rather as integral elements of the paratextual media environment in total.54 Players of Arkham Horror enter the Lovecraftian universe during the game play, not because of the specific connections to Lovecraft’s stories but because of the underlying algorithmic unstructure that governs the (unknowable) universe.