Daniel Holmes

Within the past several decades, the horror fiction of Rhode Island native Howard Phillips Lovecraft has emerged from the obscurity of pulp magazines to significant cultural prominence.  His vividly terrifying descriptions of Southern New England have been published on a global scale, with several characters and settings (such as the malevolent deity Cthulhu, or the fictional city of Arkham, Massachusetts) becoming widely recognized properties of popular culture. Perhaps Lovecraft's greatest pop culture influence has been in the medium of electronic gaming: video games based on his fiction began appearing as early as 1979, and now include dozens of major commercial titles.  This, in turn, has attracted increased scholarly attention, including a recent special edition of Studies in Gothic Fiction dedicated to Lovecraftian gaming. There has not, however, been a serious scholarly effort among researchers designed to make these game narratives accessible to non-players.  This project hopes to fill this gap by bringing together undergraduate researchers from the New England Institute of Technology and the wider community of Weird scholarship to produce a public online database of Lovecraftian ludonarratives. This project will rely on the creation of player “Field Journals” which will carefully record both an actual play narrative (as experienced by the player) and a description of potential play narratives (including choices which the player did not select and game conditions which they did not encounter).  Much like the Wangerian gesamtkunstwerk, video games depend upon a wide network of intersecting aesthetic elements, ranging from musical cues to digitally rendered expressions of the visual arts.  Field journals will have sections specifically allowing researchers to document these components, as well as sections outlining the game’s development and commercial history and its presence (if any) in existing scholarship.