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the works, creating a structuralist methodology for examining the mythos: to
maintain a discrete border for the mythos, each story must “present us with a
signiicant item of information about the background lore of the Mythos, thus
contributing important information to a common body of lore.” 33 Yet, Price asks,
“Is this manner of reading fair to the texts? Is it realistic? Here is how I resolve
the matter. It is entirely a question of which of the [Mythos] stories you consider
any individual story to be a part of.” 34
Such work in concretizing the unconcretizable must be present when
translating a cult narrative to a board game. A Game of hrones: he Board Game
must make tangible the multiple relationships between characters; Star Trek:
Fleet Captains must represent the damage ships take during battle. For Arkham
Horror, the game uses a procedural rhetoric to formalize the roles of the Ancient
Ones, the characters, and the entire Lovecratian mythos in a way that never
formally took place in Lovecrat's works. Ian Bogost has deined the phrase
“procedural rhetoric” in game studies to refer to the “practice of using [game]
processes persuasively.” 35 Games become a way of informally educating from a
particular point of view, using play as a pedagogical mechanic. 36 Wagner expands
on Bogost's deinition, arguing that “to examine procedural rhetoric, then, is to
look at how arguments are addressed to users via the things they are doing in
interaction with the game.” 37 Bogost holds that such procedural translation lies at
the heart of paratextual video games, arguing that by “taking themes and igures
from [literature] and applying them to games,” we can see how games do not so
much remake as they reapply traditional modes of understanding. 38 his is how
Wilson redesigned the complex set of rules, mythologies, and underlying stories
at the heart of Arkham Horror , writing that he had to “respect … a medium's
strengths and weaknesses, but at the same time [look] to see what storytelling
techniques other media have to ofer.” 39 Arkham Horror uses procedural rhetoric
to attempt to mirror the unstructure of Lovecrat's work, through (1) the
cooperation mechanics of players within the game and (2) a focus on individual
components working within the game to focus on hybridizing story and play. In
this case, “procedural rhetoric” refers to the rules of the game as they attempt
to mirror the unstructure of the underlying mythos. As Flanagan notes, even
play itself is a type of unstructural “subversion,” as it can be a “transgressive and
subversive” action. 40 Ultimately, these attempts to concretize the unstructure of
Lovecrat represent a method of rhetorically hybridizing rules and a story that
highlights the unique positioning of paratextual board games within the media
environment.
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