Ludifying Lovecraft in Arkham Horror - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 5

the player's understanding of the larger world of the game. his understanding
is relected in the irst principle of paratextual board games:
Principle 1: Paratextual board games rely on two sets of guiding rules: the rules of
the game and the rules of the world upon which the game is based. hese rules do
not have to match, and can work well even when in conlict with one another.
In the same way that rules control both the way games are played and the way
cult texts are perceived, so too do rules underlie the way that media technologies
are used and understood. Rules are a determining part of the new media
environment, and thus understanding games—even so-called “old fashioned”
board games—becomes a metaphor for understanding how we take part in
the new media environment. A third set of rules applies to this discussion: the
algorithmic rules that govern new media. Using the work of Lev Manovich,
I discuss how the complexity of rules in both paratextual board games and in
their requisite cult franchises relects the larger cultural ramiications of an
algorithmic understanding of contemporary media. his leads to the second
principle:
Principle 2: he rules governing paratextual board games work algorithmically,
and, in conjunction with uncertainty like randomness and player action, create
unstructure.
Here, I am deining unstructure not as the absence of structure, but as the
inability to deine or recognize the underlying basis for a structure within a
system. Unstructure exists when elements appear random, but we simply don't
know enough about a system to see the organizational patterns. As author
Arthur C. Clarke famously writes: “Any suiciently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic.” 8 When we do not understand something, it can
appear to be random. Unstructure is the deliberate application of this structured
randomness for an efect.
In general, we base our understanding of structure on the norms of linearity.
Understanding unstructure can be elemental in the conceptualization of
paratextual game rules as an alternative to this norm. Unstructure relects
in the work of H. P. Lovecrat, whose Cthulhu mythos and otherworldly
descriptions of ethereal horror manifest in a universe where the “rules” we live
by are undermined by beings beyond our control, creating discomfort at the
unexplained randomness.
Lovecrat's unstructure, the horror of the non-rule, contrasts with the very
games based upon his universe. here are multiple board games built around