<i>[Ed. note: this set of comments was submitted as proofreading notes on a paper copy of the essay; I've tried to convey the effect in html.]</i>
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THE PARSER AT THE THRESHOLD: LOVECRAFTIAN HORROR IN INTERACTIVE FICTION
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"I must be very deliberate now, and choose my words." -- H. P. Lovecraft, "The Rats in the Walls"
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Horror is a wide-open field, not so much a genre in its own right as an atmosphere that can be applied to nearly any <font color = "red">imaginable [strikeout]</font> setting; there is as much horror to be found in the suburban streets of David Cornelson's *Cattus Attrox* <font color = "red">(1998)</font> as in the antiseptic laboratories of Ian Finley's *Babel,* <font color = "red">(1997)</font> or in the ante-bellum backwoods of Adam Cadre's *Shrapnel.* <font color = "red">(2000)</font> It's a challenge, sometimes, to even know where to begin. <font color = "red">(Why?)</font>
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The stories of H. P. Lovecraft occupy a peculiar place in this field. Although the classic tropes of the Lovecraftian tale may also be applied across many kinds of settings, it is nevertheless a highly specific and distinct subgenre. Its trappings and descriptive cues -- the crumbling tomes, the ancient blasphemies, the awful, bubbling divinities outside the boundaries of our universe -- <font color = "RED">these [strikeout]</font> set the story <font color = "RED">apart</font> from more conventional flavors of horror, giving it an immediate context and making it recognizable to any reader who is even casually acquainted with the source literature. This sense of familiarity makes it a comfortable entry point for writers and game designers hoping to craft their own stories in Lovecraft's image.
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However, like any variety of genre fiction, Lovecraftian horror is easy to do, and somewhat more difficult to do well. One can too easily get so lost in the trappings <font color = "RED">as</font> to forget what makes Lovecraft's stories so distinct and compelling -- to lose sight of the forest, as it were, amongst all the tentacles.
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To pose just one example: Lovecraft's stories are not particularly scary. It's true. It is something of an open secret amongst fans of the literature; they are loathe to admit it, but most will if pressed. Oh, it's true, "Cool Air" is undeniably creepy; "The Rats in the Walls" delivers a bit of a shock at the end; "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" has wonderful suspense worthy of any action film . . . <font color = "RED">[remove "...", replace with comma]</font> but the stories aren't frightening, not in a visceral way, not in that way that makes you turn suddenly in your chair, shiver, and check down the darkened stairs before trepidly returning to the computer keyboard to enter your next move. <font color = "RED">And [strikeout]</font> no amount of blasphemous horrors from beyond the universe will ever make them so. The monsters of the Lovecraftian world are often, by the author's own admission, indescribable. Its horrors are unnamable. How can the reader be frightened by something which, he is flatly told, is beyond his every experience?
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What sets Lovecraft apart from almost all other subgenres of horror is that his stories are not really about fear. They are about *revelation.* They are about piecing together an Awful Truth. Piecing that truth together, and possessing that truth once assembled, is not necessarily meant to be scary. It is merely meant to be, in a word, horrible.
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From this perspective, Lovecraftian horror can be ideally suited to the genre of interactive fiction, because the player of the game and the protagonist in the game mirror each other in their goals. Both are presented with a hidden story that is gradually revealed, puzzle by puzzle, to the enterprising seeker. Both sift through fragments of text until the final narrative is laid bare. Hopefully, only one will have cause to regret it when the search is finally over.
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The essence of this sort of tale is not whether the story takes place in the modern day, or in New England in the 1920s, or in the slums of Victorian London. It is not whether the terrible monsters are batrachian, or squamous, or merely rugose. The essence is in how the story is structured. Although there are many variations on the theme, the "classic" Lovecraftian situation can be broken down like so: A lone investigator arrives at an abandoned place, delves into written lore, and pieces together the Awful Truth. <font color = "RED">[Redundant with preceding paragraphs.]</font> We'll examine each of these elements in turn and discuss how it can be applied to game design.
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"There was no one in the soaking street, and in all the world there was no one I dared tell." -- H. P. Lovecraft, "The Shunned House"
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Lone investigators are the easy part: nearly the entire corpus of IF revolves around the model of protagonists wandering off by themselves and fiddling with things. Here, at least, is a literary precedent.
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Your protagonist should not be a nameless cipher. Horror is about terrible things happening to *people,* so give the player a person she can care about. Don't be afraid to supply the character's motivations and even, to a certain extent, the character's thoughts <font color = "RED">and</font> feelings in response to events in the game. Although it is the player who will be guiding the protagonist's footsteps and making all the important decisions, a clear motivation helps to put the game in a context that the player can immediately relate to.
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Ideally<font color = "RED">,</font> the explorer should have some personal stake in the investigation. These sorts of journeys are not pleasant, and the merely idly curious will beat a hasty retreat as soon as things begin to get wriggly. The protagonist -- and<font color = "RED">,</font> by extension<font color = "RED">,</font> the player -- should want not to get out, but to go deeper. For example, in *Anchorhead* <font color = "RED">(Gentry, 1997)</font> (as well as in many of Lovecraft's stories), the motivator is family. The heroine has every reason to press on in the face of danger when the life and sanity of her husband is at stake. It needn't be that intimate, however. An archaeologist performing research vital to his career, a detective trying to find a missing girl, a safety inspector investigating a decrepit tenement -- all of these people would have an abiding reason to see the job done.
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<font color = "RED">I</font>n many cases, all you have to do is get <font color = "RED">players</font> to take the first few steps -- and then let the door swing shut and lock behind them.
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". . . that cavernous, aeon-dead honeycomb of primal masonry; that monstrous lair of elder secrets which now echoed for the first time, after uncounted epochs, to the tread of human feet." -- H. P. Lovecraft, "At the Mountains of Madness"
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Since non-player characters are one of the most difficult elements in an IF game to craft well, it is convenient that Lovecraftian settings typically have <font color = "RED">so [strikeout]</font> few of them.
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Every abandoned place is an archaeological dig (including, obviously, an abandoned archaeological dig).  <font color = "RED">(Hmm.)</font> Ghost towns, condemned asylums, ancestral estates -- they have their histories. People once lived there, and once did things there, and evidence of this should be apparent in the room descriptions and <font color = "RED">in</font> the objects that you place. A decaying theatre is more than just dusty furniture and broken glass<font color = "RED">;</font> it is a yellowed program stuffed between two seats, a dried-out makeup kit in the dressing room, notes scribbled in the margins of a crumbling script book. Let the place itself tell something of the people who used to inhabit it.
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The exploratory phase of your game is important. Avoid a sense of urgency. Lovecraft wrote leisurely stories; the evil is always something that occurred in the past, and now lies dormant and deeply buried. Perhaps the player will awaken it once more, inadvertently (but, of course, <font color = "RED"> inevitably [at odds with 'perhaps', above]</font>), but give her time to explore first. Limit your puzzles, if you choose to employ any, to "passive" types -- variations on the locked door, inaccessible areas of the map. Allow the atmosphere to sink in. Let the player get a sense of the space she is now in, and let the implications gradually become apparent: that this empty place once housed people, and now, for *some reason,* the people are all gone.
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"The glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things -- in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor." -- H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
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Someone always writes it down. The written record is the protagonist's primary link to what is really going on, and it is the most important segment of the Lovecraftian quest. Diaries, letters, police reports, newspaper clippings, carved hieroglyphs (which must be translated, <font color = "RED">of course [overuse of "of course" and "obviously. Overuse of {list} -- {fragment}.]</font>), patient files, genealogical records, even the spoken testimony of a broken old man who knows too much -- all pieces of a puzzle told in words. Here is where the actual player and the fictional protagonist are in perfect <font color = "RED">synchronicity [synchronization]</font>: the goal of both is to unlock as much text as possible.
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Whatever you do, don't dump the entire backstory on the player all at once. Make him work for it. Scramble it, scatter it, reveal it in fragments and in the wrong order. Locating and collating all the pieces is the <font color = "RED">macguffin</font> that drives your <font color = "RED">puzzles [no]</font> through this part of the game; every torn page is a treasure, and the protagonist's notebook is the trophy case. Some pages may be in code. Some pages may be incomprehensible without reference to other pages. Some pages may contain clues to the whereabouts of other pages. All of them will be hard-won.
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This is the story of your game<font color = "RED">:</font> the story of what happened before<font color = "RED">. E</font>mbellish it. Make it grandiose and complex. Use several different sources of information to introduce a variety of conflicting perspectives. Don't simply confirm what the player must have already guessed. As the fragmentary accounts slowly begin to resolve into a complete history, details of the setting will attain new significance. The barber chair with leather straps up in the attic is unsettling in its own right when first discovered -- when the protagonist reads the diary entries that explain *why* it is there, it should be all the more menacing.
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"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." -- H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
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There will come a time when the player has collected all the pages, read all the history, <font color = "RED">and</font> made all the necessary connections. <font color = "RED">This (?)</font> is a point when the final, Awful Truth of the situation will be made clear. This is the end game, the climax of your story. This is the moment when history catches up with the present, when everything the protagonist has learned comes to bear on where she is *right now* -- when she realizes that the giant has been slumbering beneath her feet this whole time, and now it is about to awaken.
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Here is where you want to instill urgency. Time-sensitive puzzles and life-or-death decisions have their place in this segment of the game. Even Lovecraft himself was not above adding the occasional action sequence; a flight across rooftops with torch-bearing cultists swarming the streets below would not be at all out of genre. However, avoid making these sorts of puzzles overly difficult or finicky about precise verbiage. Nothing dispels the suspense more effectively than having to replay the most gripping scene in the game ten times because you can't figure out how to get out of the handcuffs. <font color = "RED">starts generic, ends specific</font> (Wisdom I dearly wish I'd had when I wrote *Anchorhead.*) Throw obstacles in the player's path, certainly, but make the solutions obvious, so she can most past them quickly and get on with her breathless flight.
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Resist the temptation to overdescribe. Although strict faithfulness to Lovecraft's style sometimes requires that the climax be *a labored restatement of the obvious, written entirely in horrified italics,* the truth is that overblown, detail-laden descriptions of slimy, bubbling nastiness tend to leave readers more bemused than fearful. The art of suggestion by concealment is nowhere more important. Remember that the Awful Truth cannot truly be described, only implied.
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The Awful Truth is not how gross and slimy the monster is, but what the very existence of that monster implies. There runs through much of Lovecraft's work a theme of cosmic nihilism -- the sense that the universe is so vast and impersonal, and humankind<font color = "RED">'s</font> place in it so insignificant, that to confront living, breathing proof of it is to go mad. In *Anchorhead,* that the earth was nearly devoured by a giant squid-god is terrible; that, to the squid-god, our earth is merely a single crumb amongst many, a morsel hardly worthy of attention except for the tiny noise made by a handful of cultists -- *that* is the Awful Truth.
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Consider how, or if, you wish to reflect this in the ending of your game. The "winning" move in a Lovecraftian story may well be to go mad, or die, or go mad *and* die. Perhaps the protagonist escapes without stopping the evil, knowing that it can never be stopped, only hidden. Perhaps the protagonist's reward is to be forever burdened with the responsibility of hiding it from others. In any case, that last message,
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*** You have won ***
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should always be read with a hefty grain of salt, if it <font color = "RED">is</font> to be read at all.
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"Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise." -- H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
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I have attempted to <font color = "RED">break out [circled]</font> what I consider the most basic elements of the "classic," or archetypal, Lovecraftian story, to show how they might be implemented in interactive fiction. As I said at the beginning, there is always room for variations on the theme. There are many, many ways to do Lovecraft, and any or all of these elements can be twisted, altered, or rearranged to suit your own personal vision of cosmic nihilism. Good luck.