Lovecraft: December 2007 Archives

I've been writing for the last month about H.P. Lovecraft, meandering from talking about his work to his scientific leanings to his letter writing. It has made me look like such a tremendous geek (or at least that's what my commercial clients tell me.) Part of that was certainly to help illuminate what I mean when I say that Eldritch Errors is inspired more by the author than his works, but I also want to set up a more radical proposition. Lovecraft was working with ideas from the 21st century, but he was forced to explore them with 19th and 20th century technologies (such as letter writing instead of email.)

Lovecraft was an alternate reality game designer, a writer who believed his stories must be "devised with all the care & verisimilitude of an actual hoax," stories that he unfolded like forensic investigations. He was also an Open Source advocate and loved implied share alike licensing (although I suspect the license I linked too is more restrictive than what he believed in.) He delighted when others lifted references from his work and equally delighted incorporating their references back into his work. He had an intimate relationship with his readers, because he was frequently the one mailing them the manuscript to read. It shouldn't be surprising that tabletop gaming and non-tabletop gaming have so embraced his work (now public domain) and played such a key role in preserving and extending it.