Evil: The Horror of Humanity
“I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge, or lustre, or name.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Nemesis
An excerpt from a poem by cosmic horror author HP Lovecraft gives the quickest glimpse into the world of his fiction. Where the universe is huge, terrifying, and doesn’t even notice that we exist. With the nihilistic movement growing ever more popular, games and TV shows reflecting this state of mind are permeating the worldwide public.
Figure 1. Cthulhu fantasy art monster apocalyptic destruction dark horror - Kona Painting Store on Aliexpress.com
For those of you who have never read any Lovecraftian books, played any Cthulhu mythos-based games, or ever even heard of Cthulhu (the giant ancient octopus-alien priest) here is a very general synopsis of most stories. The main character is introduced, crazy ancient horrors are introduced, and nothing is resolved. This is a perfect representation of existential nihilism, the philosophy that holds that there is no intrinsic value in life and that individuals have to create their own meaning. This lends itself more toward the games…
Figure 2. Eldritch Horror and Arkham Horror – Fantasy Flight Games
Figure 3. Rulebook for Eldritch Horror Game – Fantasy Flight Games
…bringing the whole mythos into worldwide popular culture, have a way to win: to solve the puzzle and defeat the evil. Games like Eldritch Horror and Arkham Horror are more than Monopoly with a Cthulhu sticker to sell more to the unsuspecting generally secular, fringe, nerdy public. They are cooperative games in which players are investigators in an English-speaking world in the 1920s-30s attempting to save the world from the Great Old Ones, ancient gods who are so large that waking them would wipe out all humanity like we would wipe the dust off our keyboard.
These games do a decent job of reflecting the true evil that you must fight, it’s not the gods like Hastur, Yog-Sothoth, and Azathoth that we, as the characters must actually fight. They don’t even acknowledge humanity’s existence. If Azathoth were ever woken from its -hopefully- eternal rest the entire universe would blink out of existence. Because of this, we cannot classify them as either malevolent or evil. It is merely the cultists’ choices to personify the deities that cause the horror and evil that we can interact with. The game, therefore, makes sure that the antagonists’ activity round is not called the evil round, but instead “the mythos phase” in which “Doom” occurs while the protagonist rounds are “action” and “encounter” phases wherein clues or elder signs are collected and close extra-dimensional doorways.
Lovecraft purposefully wrote his horror on such a grand scale to take sanity and humanity out of the story, but in the game, you have to use intelligence or strength to defeat the small-scale evil threatening the characters’ health and sanity. The ideologically driven cultist society doesn’t differentiate between peoples; nationalities, genders, or races. They exist across the globe solely to reach their goal of the end of the world, even if the universe-ending hurricane of metaphorical evil doesn’t even realise why it’s being woken up by followers and small-scale otherworldly monsters, the latter of which comes through the extra-dimensional gates that the former opens.
However, when the game is narrated on YouTube channels such as TableTop, comments like “there is evil everywhere” will be exclaimed without much thought (Wheaton 2017). But “it’s an acceptable tendency for protagonists to assume that the monstrous, faceless entities that cause destruction and insanity wherever they shamble must be evil; it’s much easier to accept that such cosmic entities are deliberately malicious rather than completely indifferent.” (Brown 2015).
Works Cited
Brown, Ben. Contemporary Lovecraft, WordPress, 9 Sept. 2015, www.contemporarylovecraft.com/2015/09/09/evil-in-lovecraft-is-it-actually-a-problem/.
Geekandsundry. “TableTop: Wil Wheaton Plays Eldritch Horror w/ Patrick Rothfuss, Stef
Woodburn, & Jess Marzipan Pt 1.” YouTube, YouTube, 13 Sept. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=87B1Wlz8fMo.
Lovecraft, H. P. “Nemesis.” The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft. Edited by S. T. Joshi, Hippocampus Press, 2013, pp. 46-8.
Storey, David. "Nihilism, Nature, and the Collapse of the Cosmos". Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy. 2011
