Ludifying Lovecraft in Arkham Horror - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 19

only one adjustment per turn (perhaps her days as a Dilettante have let her a bit
dazed?). In contrast, the student Amanda Sharpe has a focus of three, allowing
her to change her various abilities more oten. hese seemingly minor individual
character diferences in the game actually have quite signiicant consequences:
increasing Amanda's ight from two to four would decrease her will from three to
one. his would then radically alter her ability to complete a “horror check.” he
horror check is a special kind of check enacted when encountering a monster.
If Amanda fails her will check (and with a one, she is likely to), she would lose
sanity and possibly be sent to the insane asylum.
he key Lovecratian element of unstructure at the heart of this game
mechanism is that it is unlikely that a player will know precisely which elements
will need to be increased or decreased during a turn, as the events that befall one
player may afect others. Amanda, increasing her speed because she thinks she
will not have to sneak around a monster, may, in fact, be the complete opposite
of what she “should” do given other players' involvement. he unknowability
of future events is precisely the type of “aporia” that Price describes at the heart
of Lovecrat's work—the philosophical state of puzzlement of the mythos. 43 It
is, at once, both a sense of structure to the character and a sense of unstructure
to the game story.
Ultimately, both the Clue tokens and the character adjustments serve as
microcosms of the larger unstructure of the game, which, in turn, reveals the
underlying unstructure of Lovecrat's original cult texts. And in a larger sense,
it reveals the unstructure at the heart of contemporary digital culture—the
“transcoding” of the game demonstrates the unknowability of today's technology.
We use our technology without quite understanding what it does, or where
the information goes. Despite the ubiquity of new media today, many people
remain ignorant of its basic functionality. New media are suiciently advanced
technologies that appear magic. And although based on hundred-year-old
stories, Arkham Horror relects the unstructure of today's media environment.
Rules and story
So far, I have been noting some surface elements of the game: characters, clues,
tokens, attributes. But looking more deeply at the rules and how they contribute
to our understanding of Lovecrat's particular milieu allows us to develop a more
robust analysis of how Arkham Horror uses structure to realize the unstructure