Academic literature on the topic 'Cthulhu (Game)'

The article examines how genre is emulated in the first edition of Call of Cthulhu (1981 ), analyzing the game's potential to answer social needs during the Reagan era. Genre is understood in the response aesthetic sense, as collections of traits sedimented from authors' and designers' attempts to meet their audiences. Similar to how software can be engineered to replace older hardware, Call of Cthulhu replaces the genre functions underpinning Lovecraftian stories. Previous research discusses Call of Cthulhu as a horror RPG, mostly referencing later editions. This article's analysis, based on systems theory, deals with the first edition and a more complex genre composition. Emulation is described as autopoiesis-a generative mechanism of simultaneous autonomy and dependency vis-a-vis an environment. The role-playing system selects genre elements through structural couplings to its surroundings, and then recombines them in a new way, giving them new affordances. The result shows the ways in which the first edition of Call of Cthulhu fuses elements from the fantasy role-playing genre with elements from literary horror, detective story, pulp fiction and colonial mystery. The three most prominent characteristics of the game-the characters' mental health, the manner in which they confront Mythos representatives, and their expeditions to remote locations-are solutions to genre tensions, rather than properties of horror. Following the sociohistorical framing of the elements involved, the composite emulation allowed for the processing of perceived threats to the American way oflife during the early Reagan Era. The game offered a colonial fantasy, where real but more diffuse menaces, such as the nuclear arms race of the Cold War or the Iranian Revolution and ensuing energy crisis, could be fictionalized and reconsidered from the perspective of a predominantly white Christian struggle against evil in a 1920s world.

IJRP 12: Full Issue Table of Contents William J. White, Evan Torner, and Sarah Lynne Bowman,“Editorial: The Social Epistemology of Analog Role-Playing Game Studies” Reflections on the interdisciplinary and heterogeneous nature of role-playing games studies, as evident in the five uniquely distinct articles in Issue 12. Tadeu Rodrigues Iuama and Luiz Falcão, “Analog Role-Playing Game Studies: A Brazilian Overview” An overview of the history of role-playing games and their respective game communities in Brazil, as well as the development of role-playing game study scholarship, including research on RPGs in education. Marissa Baker, “An Analysis of the Literature Surrounding the Intersection of Role-Playing Games, Race, and Identity” A review and examination of a body of multidisciplinary scholarship on representation and race in fantasy RPGs such as Dungeons & Dragons and World of Warcraft. Pascal Martinolli, “A Scholarly Character Sheet to Frame Learning Activities and Improve Engagement” An evaluation of the use of role-playing game inspired character sheets in a graduate seminar on library instruction to assess the participants’ knowledge, present the curriculum, and measure the their progress. Hanne Grasmo and Jaakko Stenros, “Nordic Erotic Larp: Designing for Sexual Playfulness” Mapping, organizing, and understanding the phenomena of erotic larp design through a systemic examination of 25 design abstracts of Nordic art larps from the last decade. Christian Mehrstam, “Recomposing Lovecraft: Genre Emulation asAutopoiesis in the First Edition of Call of Cthulhu” An examination of how genre is emulated in the first edition of Call of Cthulhu (1981), analyzing the game’s potential to answer social needs during the Reagan era.

The RPG game. The textual paragraph game. The gamebook. The very names of these genres suggest their literary origin. No wonder, since many of them, particularly the RPG games, derive from the classics of fantasy (Middle Earth based on Tolkien’s fiction), s-f (Cyberpunk 2020, largely inspired by the novels of William Gibson and Philip K. Dick) or gothic horror (The Call of Cthulhu based on H.P. Lovecraft). That select company has been recently joined by Bałwochwał by Mariusz Pisarski and Marcin Bylak, inspired by the short stories of Bruno Schulz.

Today, H. P. Lovecraft's popular culture legacy resides in the shared world of the Cthulhu Mythos and in the iconography of its monsters. Rather than attempt to definitively identify what makes something Lovecraftian, this paper takes a reception theory informed approach to investigate the ways in which the user-defined ‘Lovecraftian’ tag is applied on Steam. This paper identifies the recurrence of sanity mechanics, tentacularity, and parody in the games that users have tagged as ‘Lovecraftian’ and discusses how these elements adapt and respond to Lovecraft's mythos and cosmicist philosophy. The Lovecraftian games available on Steam, as they have been identified by their consumers, indicate that the digital game is a worthwhile platform for adaptations of the works of H. P. Lovecraft due to the interactivity offered by the medium. However, many of these games also contain subversive or parodic elements that undermine Lovecraft's cosmicism.