Open Source Literary Game Design in the 1920s

Marvel for a moment with me that the combination of traits Lovecraft played with (game design, open source, letter writing, weird fiction) has produced a 70 year legacy of "fan art" richer and more diverse than his own writings ever really were. Yes, much of that fan art has been created by young gamers and writers and filmmakers playing with the most obvious and surface of Lovecraft's themes. Some of that fan art, though, has been from people like Neil Gaimen and Stephen King. In the introduction King wrote to another book, he described the story that was too scary for even him to write and offered it up to other writers who might want to take a stab at it, in the finest tradition of Lovecraft's Open Source perspective.

Stephen King was in Providence strolling past a pawn shop when he had a flash of inspiration. He imagined a stained ordinary pillow in the shop window, and imagined himself wandering into the store to inquire about it, only to be told that it was the pillow of H.P. Lovecraft himself. Imagine the horrible nightmares Lovecraft had on that pillow, and what residue it might have left if you bought it and took it home to rest your own sleeping head. He decided, after much effort, that he couldn't bring himself to go there, that to do the concept justice was too scary of a proposition, even for Stephen King. Last year, a short filmmaker made "Lovecraft's Pillow" and happily explained it was a "Stephen King concept". Viva la Open Source!

Some will argue that in my desire to look for artistic antecedents I'm stretching the definitions of some of these concepts too far for them to remain meaningful. Those critics might give me a push on "Open Source," as Lovecraft legacy is a massively impressive example of the long-term effects of a "share alike" mentality. They might even grudgingly give me the "alternate reality" argument as well ... Stephen King was certainly in an alternate reality that day in Providence. The argument will come down, I suspect, to the definition of "game design," and the criticisms of that perspective will be remarkably close to the critiques of my own work as well. People who like the more explicit end of gameplay sometimes find my work "more like a story" than like a game, while those who enjoy my work are more likely to also accept a less explicit definition of game.

Ponder What a Game Is

My view of game design is heavily shaped by one particular experience: trying to describe to really bright filmmakers in 2002 how the structures of game and narrative work together. Fortunately, I was able to play second fiddle in that heavy lifting to the immensely brilliant Zach Booth Simpson (doing amazing work at Mine-Control). Zach focused on "game" as being "a set of rules designed to reproduce particular narrative experiences." Basketball games getting a lttle slow? Institute a possession timeclock. Why? Because the designers of the reproducible experience of basketball want it to be fast paced and have a high incidence of ties until late in the game: that is a more satisfying narrative experience whether you're sitting in the stands or watching at home on television.

Narrativists have these same kind of rules. We can talk about three act structures, conflict resolution, the hero myth cycle and hundreds of other rules for writing good narratives. The difference between a narrativist and a game designer is often (but not always) whether or not you make those rules exposed to the audience. In a game, the rules and the players are very apparant, and the narrative frequently seems like a complete surprise to the audience even though it is self evident in an analysis of the rules (and our general concept of "fairness of rules".)

Others will have more stringent definitions of what constitutes a game. I find this particular construct useful primarily for those places where narrative and game must tango in unison. With those eyes, I look back at Lovecraft -- especially his letters -- and see an artist inventing new rules, pondering the new kinds of experiences that ruleset ("weird fiction") can create, and teaching those rules to other artists and fans. The size of this audience, while Lovecraft was alive, was exceptionally small. The proportion of people who learned the rules from Lovecraft to those who read his work was unusually high, especially from the viewpoint of "mass produced 20th century art". Because we have so many of his letters preserved and published, I can even the learn the rules directly from Lovecraft's informal coorespondence with his own fans and peers more than 70 years later.

Chickenthulhu!

I'm not sure I can effectively argue against someone who wanted to prove "this isn't game design," but I suspect my snarky answer might be something like, "this is not a game" or "all game design is a subset of reader response theory." We're in a chicken-and-egg argument about something that is really integrated. I concede that the more interesting question is, "If Lovecraft lived today, and had email instead of letters, and a website instead of being unpublished, and could have read modern dialog about game and modern narrative theory, what would he have done?"

A part of me likes to imagine he would have been mailing out bas-relief sculptures of unspeakable gods, accompanied by notes from the artist describing their horrible nightmares that lead to this work, all as rabbit holes for his new ARG called "The Call of Cthulhu." He probably would have argued vehemently in Unfiction META that he wasn't making ARGs at all, but was making "weird reality fiction" (WRF?!?) or some such, as Lovecraft loved him some good META.

Not many artists have played with this concept yet outside of the RPG universe (such as Delta Green); there's a surprisingly good very-short story about a Miskatonic Electronics modem that turns everything someone posts to flamewar material (Lawrence Watt-Evans' punnily-titled "Pickman's Modem"), but it was published in 1992 before the real age of the Internet had dawned. Eldritch Errors is an attempt to explore the question further, to experiment with the rules of "weird fiction" (as H.P. Lovecraft practiced and explained them) with the new tools of 21st century platformless storytelling, where the world and everything in it can be both part of the story and the delivery vehicle of the story.