Ludifying Lovecraft in Arkham Horror - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 14

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 Lovecrat 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 Lovecrat'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 Lovecrat's science iction … or the mindless demiurge of the
Cthulhu Mythos tales.” Lovecrat'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. he same can be said for Lovecrat's creation Nyarlathotep,
a creature with many guises and many forms, which Lovecrat also uses
throughout his oeuvre in multiple ways: “he inserts the name Nyarlathotep
into the denouement of the 'he Rats in the Walls,' where it has neither weight
nor much signiicance. … 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 ixed, denying
the uncertainty of Lovecrat's universe. In what Lovecrat himself described
as his own favorite among his stories, “he Colour Out of Space,” the text
“symbolically raises questions … about categoricality and systematization.”
In this way, Lovecrat'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
Lovecrat's world by relying on its underlying algorithms, which players must
comprehend.
Reading Lovecrat as a whole means artiicially 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
he placement of a text within Lovecrat's mythos is a complex process. Some
Lovecrat scholars take great pains to point out which texts do, and which ones
do not, it into the larger scheme. Lin Carter places artiicial boundaries between