reading back, oh so you did. Oh, looking now, there was a Commonplace Book competition, with six other games (although two of the games aren’t in English).
As far as horror in IF, I think I might be in the same boat as I4L here. Though I will make one exception for Ecdysis, little of what is labelled as “Lovecraftian” strikes me as actually horrific in the way my main man HPL can be. I’ve played a few games that I felt were horrific that weren’t intended that way, but as those were all about my own reading and expectations I don’t know they should count (for one, I find something really creepy in underimplementation without totally knowing why). But what I tend to look for in horror isn’t blood or “tentacles” (come now-- nobody but an irrational phobic actually goes looking for just a specific type of appendage for terror) or any such thing, but “a suspension of those natural laws against whose universal dominance our fancies rebel,” that which “permits… the momentary illusion that almost any vista of wonder and beauty might open up, or almost any laws of time or space or matter or energy be marvellously (sic) defeated or reversed or modified or transcended.”
My apologies whilst I veer from the subject of IF to defend Mr. Lovecraft. I recognize I sometimes have a tendency to fly off the handle on the subject. Perhaps another thread is the better place for this or it is unwanted… if so, please just let me know. Begin rant tag.
[rant]
His earlier stories may have been more prone to affectations (largely the Dunsanian tales), but overall Lovecraft’s writing (student of Poe that he was) exhibits a strong unity of effect that “purple prose” just doesn’t hold up to. As for any anxieties he expressed, they were either those of an EIGHTEENTH century gentleman, as he took himself to be through lineage and imaginative escape, or of the early 20th century (where he found himself), or of man’s eternal fear of insignificance in a vast and indifferent cosmos.
I’m going to make a leap here and infer that it was my suggestion you’re referring to. In that case, I’ll reaffirm why I thought it would be important for you to see: specifically because you had repeated a bad stereotype of Lovecraft, that he never describes creatures. 1) Lovecraft is NOT creature horror. 2) You’ll note that At the Mountains of Madness neatly refutes the idea that Lovecraft never describes creatures, as he devotes at least 5 pages (the length of some of his previous entire stories!) describing what become known as “The Elder Ones.” This story aside, even his earlier stories like “From Beyond” clearly describe the horrors their protagonists face.
Yes, it’s easy to see Mountains as a poorly written story if what you focus on is the Spenglerian rhetoric of an elder civilization’s decadent decline from greatness (HPL uses the word “decadent” or variations thereon no less than 20 times throughout the story), and the knee jerk giggle when a penguin is described as “grotesque,” but (at least for me) there’s a more poignant horror going on beyond all of that. This horror comes from the treatment of the Elder Ones. The author says it best when he writes:
Here Lovecraft lays plain the metaphor of the Elder Ones. In this light, they are not monsters, but intelligent, sympathetic creatures, misunderstood MEN whom OUR basic inhumanity has made into something terrible. If your mind still tries to fit them into the scheme of “alien” or “monster,” then I think that is exactly Lovecraft’s point. The piece is practically an imagined autobiographical send-up from Lovecraft’s time in Brooklyn, right down to the horror of imagining, but finding no comfort in, the stations of the Boston-Cambridge subway tunnel.
Perhaps a little known fact? The final paragraph of section XI which describes the shoggoth which decapitated the Elder Ones was originally written by Lovecraft (sans penguins) as a description of a crowd of people on the subway. Here HPL gets to sublimate his own CONTEMPORARY fears and horror safely through the magic of sci-fi fantasy.
In reference only to The Call of Cthulhu, the dreaming of Cthulhu drives men mad (or “fhtagning,” if you prefer-- “Their mode of speech was transmitted thought”-- “and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon.”). Its dreams infiltrate the minds of men, dominate their thoughts and actions not just on a specific, but global scale. Cf. the last paragraph of section I.
The artist Wilcox is the prime example here, and the most obvious one, for his thoughts and dreams are influenced directly by Cthulhu (“poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant”) the nights of March 23rd, 1925 to April 2nd “at about 3 P.M.” I’m not certain if it goes missing in a translation, but my good Dr. Gijsbers, the edition I have describes over the course of two-and-a-half pages the exact maladies which afflict Henry Anthony Wilcox.
Moreover, the narrator’s own derangement and paranoia resulting from his investigation is evident from the moment he begins to sympathize for the “strange survivals” spoken of by theosophists to his confession that “even the skies of spring… must ever afterward be poison to me.” Clearly the associations of a cluster of terrible events from March 23rd-April 2nd with the Cthulhu being and ultimately his own self have disturbed our narrator. We’re not just told his mental state… the entire story shows it.
“God rest them,” he says of the Alert crew, “if there be any rest in the universe.” Our narrator seems to suggest he now believes there to be no rest in the universe. He is no longer able to isolate, anchor, or properly distract his consciousness against the enormous, undying, telepathic THING whose shape is “not made of matter,” who could control him if the stars only became “right” again and whose untold number of secretive followers hide amongst all of us.
It is naive to think anyone would be scared of Cthulhu waiting to “gobble them up.” That’s not what Cthulhu does. I could be wrong-- I’m not going to re-read the whole story just right now-- but I don’t think Cthulhu eats anyone in the whole story. Though he does attack some people with his “flabby tentacles.” At any rate, the primary terror of Cthulhu is not something wrought through physical force.
… have I really been writing at this post for this long? Perhaps it’s time I draw this to a close. I hope none of it comes off as mean-spirited in any way, as I consider all involved in this conversation to be good friends to me. I’m just… maybe a bit touchy about unfortunately common misunderstandings and misrepresentations of Lovecraft, even from incredibly intelligent men like Victor.
Victor, you might be more of a guy for “The Silver Key,” where the primary horror is the loss of the protagonist’s ability to dream. I would hope something like that might strike a chord with a romanticist such as yourself… unless I misunderstand romanticism? Or, if you want to read Lovecraft writing satire, check out “Sweet Ermengarde.”[/rant]
… this thread may now return to its regularly scheduled programming…
I’ve toyed with the idea of doing some of Lovecraft’s stories as IF, inspired by Peter Nepstad’s wonderful treatment of the two Dunsany tales.
If the idea grabs anyone else, we should start up a project.
I liked Mountains of Madness, but if we’re talking the best Lovecraft, I don’t think anything touches The Colour Out of Space. The Music of Erich Zann, maybe.
That one’s my favorite. I’ve read it probably a hundred times, literally. It helps that it’s really short, of course 
Reply to Duncan on Lovecraft:
[rant]Hi Duncan, I knew you would come here to hit me! 
I agree with you that the failure of At the Mountains of Madness is not that it is cliché. The treatment of the Elder Ones is interesting and has, as you point out, a clear dimension of tragedy. So I don’t think we disagree too much about the analysis of the meaning of the piece. But the lifeless prose, and the constant repetition of the same ideas! (You mention the word “decadent”; I believe that at one point, Lovecraft tells us that certain sculptures are decadent no less than five times in two pages.) Some stereotypes about Lovecraft may be wrong, but the stylistic stereotypes are not. Whenever he wants us to feel an uncomfortable emotion, he gets out his list of “horrifying words”: epoch, aeon, elder, eldritch, forbidden, forgotten, nameless, horror, terror, madness, blasphemous, decadent; and he presents us some random combination of these, and assumes that they will do his work. For me, reading At the Mountains of Madness was a chore not because I failed to understand the tragedy and humanity of the story, but because I was constantly irritated by the writing.
My question “What happens to them?” was perhaps not too clear; it was meant to refer to the moment that these people go mad. Central in some (perhaps many ?)of Lovecraft’s stories, and in many stories written to be Lovecraftian, is the “moment that changes a man forever”, and this is the moment that he perceives the transcendent horror and his mind is destroyed. This moment is by its very nature indescribable, and that makes it – in my opinion – a hopeless subject for fiction. Perhaps I am wrong about that, but I have not read the story that proves me wrong.
Also, I don’t think I said Lovecraft never describes his creatures? It is just that when he does, their transcendent horror disappears. Of course, the Elder Ones are not the horror of At the Mountains of Madness, so they don’t fall under my theory at all. In this story, the role of horror is filled by the shoggoth, and I don’t think that they are particularly well-handled when they are described as an underground train. Or rather, I’m fine with that description; it is imaginative; but it is not horrifying, and cannot sustain the atmosphere of “elder madness” that Lovecraft has been trying to build up.
I am not denying that Lovecraft has done interesting things. In fact, his continued influence pretty much proves that he has, and his treatment of the Elder Ones in the novella we are speaking of is a good example. If you can read Lovecraft without being constantly annoyed by the prose, more power to you. But I would rather read your analysis of Lovecraft than Lovecraft himself, because his writing really turns me off.[/rant]
I don’t think the conversation could by any means suffer for the segue.
I didn’t mean this literally, of course. However, in Madness from the Sea, we are led to believe that Cthulhu is a thing of destruction, be it intentionally or driven by madness, as he certainly didn’t rise from his slumber for crumpets and a cuddle.
I have issues with this story, however. A lot of issues. I won’t get into them here, especially as I’d like to read it again. I will say, though, that I feel this story cheapened the mythos.
Certainly has my attention and I’ve toyed with the idea of doing exactly that. As my living situation is unstable at the moment, I haven’t had as much time as I’d like to devote to my side project, which I think could handle this sort of thing.
I’ve also been hesitant to recommend any kind of Speed IF because… well… I don’t care for Speed IF. Seems like someone throws out a Speed IF competition every couple of weeks just for the sake of making it seem like the community is doing something. It could perhaps be my own personal adoration for the subject, and I’m certain that there are authors who could produce something worthwhile in a couple of hours, but I don’t believe that cobbling something together in a couple of hours is going to give the subject the treatment it demands.
If someone wants to take up the reins and spearhead something, I’m on board. But I think there does need to be some guidelines. Otherwise, I’ll work on putting something together when I’m able.
Though, wouldn’t that be scarier?
I apologize for making this thread about my aggravation rather than I4L’s. I’m easy bait for this unfortunately, and learning only by recent prodding from housemates to control it. I have a very physical reaction to mentions of Lovecraft, especially to bad Lovecraft stereotypes and most especially to misappropriations of his name and works like in the movie H.P. Lovecraft’s The Tomb (which was nothing more than a cheap Saw knock-off and nearly made me destroy my television after a few minutes) or the unnecessary insertion of Cthulhu into “Symetry.” About a month ago I nearly got kicked out of a restaurant after somebody called Hellboy “Lovecraftian” (it should be noted, I hate that word in general). I don’t want to think of this as a sort of combat, though (I’m a genuine coward with no intention of trying to “hit” or “kick” the author of Attack himself!), but perhaps as a debate, discussion, or maybe, yes, a bit of a rant. I just don’t think it’s right to cast anyone here as opponents.
[rant]
I can see how you might think this is you’ve only read “The Call of Cthulhu” and At the Mountains of Madness, two of the stories from which the majority of all Lovecraft stereotypes have been drawn. Certainly you should avoid reading “The Shunned House,” in which he only indulges more in such language. By my own admission, I didn’t think highly of Mountains until after I’d read a substantial amount of Lovecraft and returned to it later.
But I’m keen to mention your criticism of his use of terms like epoch, aeon, elder, and forgotten. These don’t feel like on-point criticism for a story which discusses beings and events which literally came from another, pre-Cenozoic era. What other words would you have him use to describe such gulfs of time? Not even “millenia” quite gets the point across because we’re talking about millions of years. I can understand wanting leaner prose (though Lovecraft’s verbosity doesn’t work against him when I read him), but this in particular doesn’t seem to fit.
As to the accusation that HPL expects a certain list of “horrifying words” to create feeling stories, this strikes me as a rather low evaluation of the man rather than his work. HPL’s general aesthetic is one of cosmic horror, of self-loathing, and of imaginative wonder or awe. To say he expected to represent his (quite finely honed) philosophy using just a few words over and over feels, to me, akin to accusing Shakespeare of just saying “Milord” all the time, or of saying J.D. Salinger just called everything “crazy.” No author expects a few choice words to create affect in their stories, nor to carry out their conflicts or concepts.
Another stereotype of Lovecraft, one I was sad to see Maher indulge in The King of Shreds and Patches (it’s curious to me that he, too, and even Michael Gentry seem to express a rather low opinion of Lovecraft as a writer). I recall specifically an ending one obtains by looking into a gem which failed to be effective for its lack of thematic build. It was presented as essentially the sort of “oops, you died,” ending we’d expect in ol’ Ray Montgomery’s work, but themed with strange geometry and with “died” crossed out and replaced with “went insane.”
To help overcome this stereotype, I took the space of a short bus ride to write up a list of some stories by H.P. Lovecraft in which the narrator does not end with the perception of some transcendent horror that destroys his mind.
The Alchemist
The Beast in the Cave
Two Black Bottles
The Music of Erich Zann
The Silver Key
Sweet Ermengarde
The Green Meadow (collaboration)
The Electric Executioner (collaboration)
Herbert West- Reanimator
The Whisperer in the Darkness
The Shadow Out of Time
The White Ship
The Cats of Ulthar
The Temple
The Street
The Tomb
The Tree
The Statement of Randolph Carter
The Quest of Iranon
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
Till A’ the Seas
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The Picture in the House
Cool Air
The Thing on the Doorstep (IMO, one of the most emotionally true romances ever written)
I can’t list Fungi from Yuggoth, as it is a series of poems rather than a story.
Not in this forum, no. I was referring to our discussion at PAX East, where I admittedly butted into the middle of the conversation. You had just indulged yourself in a stereotype about Lovecraft’s overuse of the occultatio. I believe I recommended At the Mountains of Madness as a counter-example, but I could be remembering the events completely incorrectly at this point. PAX East is always such a blur… too many good times!
As for the description of the shoggoth, here we diverge in our opinions. I don’t hold the shoggoth’s actual description to be a description of “elder madness”-- that comes much earlier when describing the way they were used to build cities. Rather, I think it is one of panic. There’s no reason for it to be “elder madness” when the thing is right behind them, in the present, chasing them down. But I suppose it all comes down to what one considers horrifying?[/rant]
I appreciate this compliment. For what it’s worth, I have no problem with people not liking Lovecraft. There’s plenty to not like. It’s the stereotypes, the misappropriations, misuses, and misunderstanding that bother me, as they appear to be rampant. I realize everyone has an author or two they just will never click with (for me it’s Neil Gaiman!) and it’s fine if Mr. Lovecraft is one of yours.
I think you’ve got the wrong idea about the purposes of Speed-IF: it’s not about “making it seem” anything. Speed-IF is primarily for the benefit of the participants. (I agree that two hours is a harsh limit to produce anything in, which is precisely why Speed-IFs rarely have a limit anywhere close to two hours these days.) But yeah, if your complaint is that there are not enough quality games of a certain type, Speed-IF is not the way to remedy that.
(Since I’m already committed to pedantry, there have been five-and-a-bit Speed-IFs this year, which is one about every ten weeks. And that’s a pretty good year.)
I’d guess what you’d want is more of a minicomp with a judging panel.
What maga said. Someone could do a minicomp, or a non-competitive anthology: lay out the description of what you want to see, line up a couple of committed reviewers to give feedback on each work, promise to release the games to the community together. Maybe have someone put together a nice banner or cover art for the anthologized set. Give it a deadline at least a couple of months off. This is more or less what the Commonplace Book project did, though that also had a museum showing associated with it; there have also been a couple of other genre-specific collections over the years. I did a romance-themed one, oh, a decade ago or so.
Having posted that, Duncan’s post reminds me that, having read “The Thing on the Doorstep” after getting into the Alternia part of Homestuck, I couldn’t keep a straight face when the climactic horrible utterance was “glub… glub… glub.”
“The Rats in the Walls” seriously creeped me out though (shame about the cat’s name). One good thing there was that Lovecraft actually describes some of the horrible things that they discover, and they are indeed horrible. Horror stories and ghost stories often do walk a fine line in deciding what to describe and what to leave to your imagination. “Also, after a judicious interval, Harrington repeated to Dunning something of what he had heard his brother say in his sleep: but it was not long before Dunning stopped him” is effective up to a point, but it gets overused. Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan,” which Lovecraft admired (and specifically mentions in “The Dunwich Horror”), is a big offender.
I don’t have the wrong idea about speed IF. But maybe I applied it poorly. Strike the “maybe”, I certainly applied it poorly. But more in part to my child-like enthusiasm than to my misunderstanding. Speed IF (and “Pudlo”) is the only time I see the community really rally around anything. I brought it (and my dislike of it) up merely as a knee-jerk to ideas for a means to provoke community response. Thinking out loud. There’s an obvious overflowing of talent and none of it is in the direction I’m aiming for. The comment was partially out of context in that I had been entertaining the idea of some kind of comp or speed IF purely to see what could be come up with along the vein of what I’d been looking to see.
This doesn’t change my opinion of speed IF. I still see it as holding no real value, whether you have two weeks or two months to prepare a game. It is, to me, a gimmick-y kind of block party thing with no lasting impact. (Disclaimer: I haven’t followed the timeline of every comp, speed IF or related game ever created.) Quality games are next to non-existent. I fail to see how either the community or the author benefits from it, unless there is a prize involved. In which case, maybe that “prize” would be better donated to one of the more substantial competitions to a game more likely to have a lasting impact. Otherwise, why don’t we just spend a day a week cranking out the fastest IF we can based on a random theme? This week… marsupials. Next week… half-melted candles. Next month… carpet lint.
Okay, maybe I don’t get it. Maybe I don’t understand the point of speed IF. I can still sleep at night comfortable in that revelation.
Would love to see it done. I personally don’t have the imagination to participate. But I’d love to see what comes of it. Which is why I echoed Ben’s suggestion that something be organized. I’ll gladly lend whatever I can offer, be it hosting space, domain name, coding assistance (PHP) or what-have-you. But from a purely selfish standpoint, I’d rather someone established in the community kick it off, so it isn’t as likely to be snubbed completely.
I don’t think lasting impact is actually the goal of a speed IF, though. I think “block party” sounds about right … that, and coding practice. Up against a hot deadline, you can encounter coding challenges and race for solutions that wouldn’t happen in a more considered project. Then, it’s fun to see the silly results (which are occasionally actually quite good). Plus, they’re not (usually?) comps, so non-comp folk such as myself can partake.
How much “lasting impact” do you typically demand of a block party?
I feel a little sad and frustrated when I read this. I can think of various comps and projects that fizzled because the idea was too difficult (asking for long games or sandbox games or things with a bunch of NPCs to be written in a short timeframe) or too esoteric (focusing on a theme hardly anyone was into) or happened to be scheduled poorly (e.g., at the same time of year as other more established comps that were sucking all the oxygen up).
But my impression has always been that an anthology or comp project succeeds or fails based on the choice of parameters and the nature of the incentives (feedback, broader audience, prizes, etc.), and that running one is a totally doable way for someone new to make a distinctive contribution. (Often less work than actually writing a game.)
Am I wrong about this? I hope not – if cool new IF projects can only happen through the offices of people who have already led at least one group project before, only a tiny percentage of the possible coolness can be realized.
But I realize my perception of the situation may not match other people’s.
Horror will probably always be my first love. Primarily in movie form, less so in book form. And in game form it really went up in importance for me after Resident Evil and Silent Hill and the technical advances that allowed for the console survival horror explosion.
I recently went looking for games tagged ‘horror’ on IFDB and reviewed some of them. One of them with ‘horror’ in the title turned out to be a non-horror Eamon game from 20 years ago
Re: Lovecraft’s presence in IF games… I think it’s just that pastiches of his ideas or style or content appear to be over-represented as a percentage of the horror IF games. When I glance down the list of games tagged horror and groan: ‘What, another Lovecraft game?’ - it’s not because I dislike Lovecraft. Au contraire, I have read probably 90% of his work and I like his ideas and writing. It’s just that I was hoping to find some original horror games, original meaning at least ‘Not being a pastiche of the work of one particular author, namely H P Lovecraft.’ Lovecraft’s already so specific in his aesthetic and concerns, and prolific, that you’ll admit it is a little funny so many people have chosen to imitate something so specific in their IF games.
My problem with Anchorhead was basically that it was too hard, and it has one of those walkthroughs that can just torch your experience if you have to go to it. No separation of different problems. I had to scour the transcript of commands looking for helpful stuff. In the process it made me see, ‘What? I missed A? I missed B, too? I missed, C?’ - the apprehension at once of all I’d missed after the amount of time I’d spent on it already made my spirit klunk onto the floor, and I stopped.
I enjoyed Theatre a lot and I thought the puzzles were really good in being difficult, but solveable if you retrod the ground and considered your inventory and thought about stuff. I haven’t got to my review of it yet. Again with the Lovecraft focus, there are reviews of it complaining about it mixing different types of horror. Of course I can complain with the best of them about things mixing elements that I didn’t think gelled, but certainly there can be no rule about people doing it in the first place. And I didn’t see anything to complain about at all along those lines in Theatre.
I hope my next game will be back in horror again, though that will probably be a long way off.
I don’t think so. I haven’t tried running a competition of any kind, but I did propose/run IF Month* as a total unheard-of tyro – I emailed Zarf to get an idea of where I should even put up the announcements – and got a heartwarmingly positive reaction from the community that I was only, at the time, barely aware of.
I agree that scheduling (both in terms of absolute time allotted and where deadlines fall relative to the rest of the IF social calendar) and incentives (whether in the form of interesting themes or as prizes) are much more important to the success of this sort of thing than “community status.”
*a month-long set of learning exercises to encourage people, including myself, to learn Inform
It’s also, in my opinion, Good For the Soul to actually finish projects, and sometimes tossing off a silly side project can put you in a better mood to work on the “real ones.” And sometimes, a couple hours is all the implementation an idea deserves. I’m not a big fan of overly constrained challenges – I’d rather work on some backburnered idea than have to incorporate a red ball, a moldy orange, and a rainbow-striped umbrella – but some of my best work has been done under time constraints. (I even have a category for that in my portfolio.)
Yes, that rings true. Sometimes I take a break from a long writing project and just make a font, or a map, or something, for similar reasons … it’s nice to just see something from beginning to end and get that little benny of energy at the finish.
This is why I said I’d rather someone more established in the community run this kind of thing. I don’t know the parameters that authors are prepared or willing to work with. I don’t know what kind of “impact” that Spring Thing has on the community. I don’t know what kind of timeline is appropriate for this sort of thing.
I know what I’d like to see. I know what kind of objectives I’d like to see. I know what I’m personally into. I basically asked someone more experienced to pick up the gauntlet. If they don’t or aren’t willing to… I will.
I also have to say that Dark Corners of the Earth was a pretty damn good game until the end.