Krzywinska_Reanimating HP Lovecraft

Reanimating HP Lovecraft: The Ludic Paradox of Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth
Tanya Krzywinska, Brunel University , UK.
'Experience the horror of HP Lovecraft like never before in the most chilling survival horror game
ever', bawls the back cover marketing tease for Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth
(Bethesda/Ubisoft, 2006). Out of the darkness I hear the creaking sound of a stiffly indignant corpse
rotating in its grave, motioned by the horror of having been 'remediated'. Fantasy projections aside,
Lovecraft was convinced that writing for commercial purposes diminished its value as art.
Nonetheless, his adjective-encrusted tales of cosmic horror and strange cults, set against the
backdrop of fantastical dreamscapes twisted by incipient insanity, hold an oft-revered place in the
history of the horror genre. While certainly owing a debt to the fantastical writings of Poe and Lord
Dunsany, the particular brand of sublime terror found in Lovecraft's Cthulhu tales eschew actionbased
good-triumphs-over-evil horror, favouring instead the vertiginous, mind-blowing contours of
cosmic space, where the alienating other is never humanized or overcome.
It might seem therefore that the lack of muscular action and highly present pessimistic ethos of the
Cthulhu mythos is ill-suited to the mainstream videogame market, where, like so much popular
fiction, the pace is furious, the hero prevails and human values are consolidated through a
feel-good resolution. Yet, in the re -animated and endlessly echoing environs of the contemporary
mediascape, which increasingly thrives on the fat of established brands, various game designers and
developers have become possessed by the spirit of the Cthulhu mythos, some paying tacit homage -
Alone in the Dark, Silent Hill, Bioshock -- and others more fully mantled, as with Call of Cthulhu: Dark
Corners of the Earth and Cthulhu Nation.
Part of my labor in this paper is to account for the appeal of the Cthulhu mythos for game designers
working within the particular parameters of videogame form. A core factor in this regard is that
Lovecraft created a fictionally coherent world (if we want to be literal, a cosmos), built around an
expandable myth system, and he actively encouraged others to share in the process of deepening
and expanding the world and its myths, while remaining faithful to its general ethos. Fictional world
creation such as this, emergent in this case from a range of different tales written over several
decades, lends itself well to games[1]
, but Lovecraft's 'world' has not the heroic ethos, human comforts, moral and metaphysical
certainties of Tolkein's near contemporary Middle Earth. And, rather than the vigorous hacking and
slashing, shooting and leaping, that lies at the heart of many videogames, Bethesda's Call of Cthulhu:
Dark Corners of the Earth takes a different approach by exploiting the spatial, temporal,
architectural, cinematic and multimedial features of games. These are used in a variety of ways (as I
will show) to create the atmosphere and mood that is integral to Lovecraft's work and which he
thought more important to the creation of 'horror' (or weird as he called it) than muscular action
(which I would suggest is prevalent in some survival horror games). One of the central concerns of
this essay is how the atmosphere, pessimism and inaction associated with truly affective fictionbased
horror squares with the fact that games are sold and defined in terms of 'doing', of
being/becoming an agent, of acting in progressively decisive and controlled ways. To explore this
apparent paradox in greater detail and to open up questions about what is pleasurable about horror
fiction I develop some of my earlier work on the dynamic relationship between agency and
determination in games. Building on analysis of these features I will then seek to suggest what
aspects and powers of Lovecraft tales have been lost and what might be found in their re-animation
into videogame form.

Tanya Krzywinska is Professor in Screen Studies at Brunel University. She is the author of several
books and many articles on different aspects of videogames, horror and fantasy and is particularly
interested in occult fiction and fantasy worlds. She is the co-author of Tomb Raiders and Space
Invaders: Videogames Forms and Meanings (IB Tauris, 2006), Sex and the Cinema (Wallflower, 2006),
A Skin For Dancing In: Witchcraft, Possession and Voodoo in film (2001), and co-editor of ScreenPlay:
Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces (Wallflower Press, 2002) and videogame/player/text (MUP, 2007).
She convenes a Masters programme in Digital Games: Theory and Design at Brunel University,
London, and is President of the Digital Games Research Association.
She can be contacted at Tanya.krzywinska@brunel.ac.uk
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[1]
A tabletop roleplaying game entitled Call of Cthulhu was published in 1981 by Chaosium and is still
going strong.
Prof. Tanya Krzywinska
Convener MA Digital Games Theory and Design
President DIGRA www.digra.org
*MA Digital Games Theory and Design*
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/courses/pg/cdata/d/Digital+Games+Theory+and+Design+MA