Ludifying Lovecraft in Arkham Horror - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 25

of standardization.” Indeed, because all the Call of Cthulhu role-play games and
expansions feature the same type of play—“a dramatically constricted series of
horriic discoveries in a mystery story plot”—the game itself is knowable and
consistently structured. Although Hite concedes that many Lovecrat stories
do not it into this mold, he does argue that each follows a certain set of rules
that determine the ending—good or bad, sane or mad. hese rules, the “anti-
mythology,” roughly coincide with the “thematic and mythic” elements residing
in his stories. 52
For Price:
here is no denying that Lovecrat was fashioning a common background for
his narrative universe, but equally one cannot deny it is rife with contradictions,
there is a limit to which one can read any one story as a chapter of some other.
When we try to harmonize all the details, we are reading the story against the
grain: we are taking what was intended to be background and yanking it into
the foreground. 53
Attempting to concretize the unstructure of the Lovecratian universe(s)
through a game becomes a way of hybridizing rules and story, and is
something that paratextual board games are uniquely positioned for. Such
reliance on hybridization and concretization mirrors the Manovichian sense
of automation and variability within algorithmic culture. New media rely on
rules to govern their behavior, but from those rules low multiple and various
ways of interacting with technology, media, and content. Paratextual board
games reveal such interactions within analog media as well, not as separate
paratextual connections, but rather as integral elements of the paratextual
media environment in total. 54 Players of Arkham Horror enter the Lovecratian
universe during the game play, not because of the speciic connections to
Lovecrat's stories but because of the underlying algorithmic unstructure that
governs the (unknowable) universe.