Lovecraftian Horror in Story-Driven Games: Narrative Design Challenges and Solutions

Abstract

Cosmic horror, or Lovecraftian horror, is an important subgenre in horror fiction, which is concerned with the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible. In cosmic horror, the thin veil of human sense-making through which we ordinarily perceive the world is inevitably destroyed through a confrontation with a deep and terrible truth about the universe. For the story protagonists, the encounter with the true nature of things practically always results in madness or death, or at least denial of the events that took place. While cosmic horror originates in literature, significant works exist also in films, graphic novels and games. However, while many games include elements from cosmic horror, the themes and genre conventions of cosmic horror mean that it is far from trivial for games to engage genuinely with the genre. This paper explores the potential for games to capture the feelings of experience of a Lovecraft story authentically via their mechanics and design. We give an overview of the genre conventions of literary cosmic horror and identify six narrative design “challenges” where the genre conventions of narrative-driven games appear to be directly incompatible with those of literary cosmic horror. For each challenge, we discuss the depth and nature of the seemingly irreconcilable differences and use examples from narrative horror games (Lovecraftian and otherwise) to identify potential solutions. Can games and cosmic horror really be mixed? And, if so, how?