Ludifying Lovecraft in Arkham Horror - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 4

is to follow its rules.” 2 We can tell the diference between diferent games,
however common the aesthetic and surface details, by the diferences in their
rules (although Elias, Garield, and Gutschera argue that game rules are less
important than scholarly literature has implied.) 3 Rules, as Rachel Wagner
notes, “shape games by setting the standards for behavior and the tolerance
for play in relationship to those standards.” 4 Without rules, there would be
no structure in the games we play. Rules also undergird and support our
cultural understanding of how games function in society. Johan Huizinga
describes games as organized around the “proper boundaries of time and space
according to ixed rules.” 5 Roger Caillois famously uses “rules” as one of the six
deining characteristics of play, writing that play happens “governed by rules;
under conditions that suspend ordinary laws, and for the moment establish
new legislation, which alone counts.” hese rules, he describes, are sacrosanct
to the game world:
he confused and intricate laws of ordinary life are replaced, in this ixed space
and for this given time, by precise, arbitrary, unexceptionable rules that must be
accepted as such and that govern the correct playing of the game.… he game
is ruined by the nihilist who denounces the rule as absurd and conventional,
who refuses to play because the game is meaningless.… hat is why its rules are
imperative and absolute, beyond discussion. 6
Rules thus govern the game, and help to deine the game for what it is and also
what it is not.
At the same time, for paratextual board games, the rules of the game are
developed in conjunction with another set of rules: the rules surrounding the
cult world upon which the game is based. Every ictional cult world has its own
rules that determine such factors as the inhabitants, character relationships,
ictional cultures, natural laws, and history of the world. 7 For example, in the cult
world of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth (see Chapter 2), Elves and Dwarves exist
alongside human beings, and magic governs the realm. In the cult world of Star
Trek (see Chapter 5), the rules governing the meeting of cultures (at least for the
United Federation of Planets) are inscribed as the Prime Directive, demanding
noninterference. In the cult worlds of H. P. Lovecrat, as I show in this chapter,
ancient entities have shaped humankind's development through the seemingly
magical manipulation of anxiety and fear. here are thus two sets of rules at
work at once within the paratextual board game: the rules of the game, that set it
apart from the “real world” and place it into a “magic circle” (Huizinga's term for
the playspace of the game world) and the rules of the cult franchise that govern