17. Authorship Discourse and Lovecraftian Video Games

Adaptation, multiplicities, and paratextual connections are integral to video gaming. No game stands alone; yet, some games have tighter intertextual connections than others, and these can be amplified to attract audiences who understand them. While adaptation status adds its own distinctive layer to the interpretive complexity of gaming and game design, making and playing video games always involve a high degree of creative collaboration. Unlike other collective media, especially films, neither creators nor players tend to understand video games as an auteurist medium—that is, as a form where creative power can be concentrated, or presumed to be concentrated, in a single producer or production role that assumes the status of the work’s “author.” In gaming, factors such as style of play and genre tend to be more highly valued than who or what company produced that game (Günal 2021), although creators/corporations can work to define themselves within either or both of these categories. But the question of authorship in its more traditional sense reemerges when a game draws on material originating in a creator-driven medium like literary fiction. The use of H. P. Lovecraft’s signature brand of horror in the gaming industry offers an intriguing case study for how literary authorship and posthumous legacy can shape the gaming experience. This chapter discusses how the link between literature, Lovecraft, and gaming is articulated in Conarium (2017), Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (2005), Darkest Dungeon (2015) and Bloodborne (2015), and how this connection is used to market these games.