Ludifying Lovecraft in Arkham Horror - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 13

Nyarlathotep tends to be more closely aligned with the knowable, human world
and is thus less abject than the Ancient Ones that exist outside humanity's
understanding entirely. he rules of the game present variations that signiicantly
afect both the narrative of and the play within the game; yet, because those rules
are part of the game, the variations become the element that deines the game.
he horror of structure and unstructure
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. Lovecrat. he detailed mythos built up in Lovecrat'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 Lovecrat. 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.
Lovecrat's plots revolve around the fact that the existence of ancient
supernatural entities outside of traditional Euclidean and Cartesian realities
afects the emotional responses (especially fear, dread, horror, and terror) of
individuals. Despite trying to ight back, humans ind that victories are usually
temporary and costly. But according to Lovecrat expert Donald R. Burleson,
Lovecrat's themes go deeper than this, and relect his belief that human beings
are insigniicant in the universe, and our very awareness of this fact leads to
madness. 29 Yet, as I noted, there is no one “order” to Lovecrat's work—it is not a
series like Lewis's Narnia topics or a complete world like Tolkien's Middle-earth.
Rather, Lovecrat's oeuvre is best understood as itting together thematically.
It is not that the volumes are random and out of order, but that readers (as
well as Lovecrat himself ) have no overarching organization to guide them.
his is unstructure , where randomness implies a lack of structure. here 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 Lovecratian universe is fraught with unstructure.
Deining any one aspect of Lovecrat's “rules” works against the very nature
of Lovecrat's universe. In this sense, Lovecrat's stories are luid and dynamic,