Ludifying Lovecraft in Arkham Horror - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 24

to allow nonlinear narrative expansion, the game reveals unstructure. We play
through the many if/then algorithms of the game, only to ind in the end that
our decisions had no efect: three bad cards in a row or two poor dice rolls can
change the low of a game despite the player's best eforts.
“he inability of the human mind...”
As Costikyan argues, “if we want to get closer to games that also produce
compelling stories, we're going to have to experiment with diferent approaches.”
Some examples include embedded narratives (like the Encounter Cards) and
“imposing a deined narrative arc on the game, but allowing for a high degree
of player freedom between those ixed points.” But more importantly, we need
to see a hybridization of form and content, something that paratextual board
games bring with them inherently through their connection to cult narratives.
Cult narratives already have a built-in structure—the storyworld exists and the
game must be made to it within its boundaries, however loose they may be. At
the same time, a game must also demonstrate its own luency with uncertainty:
In other words, there's a direct, immediate conlict between the demands of the
story and the demands of a game. Divergence from a story's path is likely to
make for a less satisfying story; restricting a player's freedom of action is likely
to make for a less satisfying game. 49
he fact that the game Arkham Horror explicates so many rules might be the
ultimate irony of the game: according to Barton St. Armand, Lovecrat's visions
of an unknowable universe rest on the unstable world of unreal dreams, “outside
of space, outside of time.” 50 Rules, making the game a game , must necessarily
exist within a speciic time and a speciic place. To ludify Lovecrat requires
not just rewriting the underlying mythos, but undermining it as well. As Price
argues, the Cthulhu mythos is itself largely amorphous: “it is not that all of
[the stories] did happen, but that any of them might h a v e .” 51 he mythos is not
about creating coherence but about nullifying the importance of coherence
altogether. Arkham Horror thus reveals what may be the ultimate Lovecratian
element of the game: by using structure to create unstructure, it undoes the most
Lovecratian of elements to make the game even more Lovecratian. In a chapter
about the role-playing game Call of Cthulhu , Kenneth Hite discusses how the
Cthulhu mythos serves as a background for a series of games with a “high degree