Tanya Krzywinska
Tanya Krzywinska is a Professor in Film and TV Studies at Brunel University, West London. She is President of the Digital Games Research Association (www.digra.org) and has published widely on different aspects of videogames, co-authoring Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: videogames forms and contexts and co-editing ScreenPlay: cinema/videogames/interfaces and Videogame/player/text. She is also the author of: A Skin For Dancing In: Possession, Witchcraft and Voodoo in Film and Sex and the Cinema, plus co-author with Geoff King of Science Fiction Cinema: From Outer Space to Cyberspace ). (Wallflower Press, 2000).
You can read more about Tanya at her website
Reanimating HP Lovecraft: The Ludic Paradox of Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth
Abstract
'Experience the horror of HP Lovecraft like never before in the most chilling survival horror game ever', spouts 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 action-based 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 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 paper is how atmosphere, pessimism and inaction of associated with truly affective fiction-based 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.
David Hayward
David Hayward is a games industry consultant and freelance writer. He is project coordinator for Pixel Lab Ltd. Pixel-Lab is a UK-based consultancy and production company that works to expand and support the videogames and digital content industries. Pixel-Lab’s portfolio includes regional development agencies, universities and the London Games Festival. David also writes for the Gamasutra website.
