Lovecraftian Games: The Afterlife of Cthulhu on Valve's Steam Client

Abstract

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.