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Call of Cthulhu as a Horror Game
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7538864" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>This does go to a portion of my question, which was, is it even possible to scare a modern audience with cosmic horror. I can't tell if the problem is that the themes of cosmic horror are simply so well known at an intellectual level these days that people have already intellectually dealt with them, or they are simply too big for humans to intellectually process, or if the problem is that right now we are so comfortable as a race its hard to frighten us.</p><p></p><p>For example, faced with the concept of giant alien monsters devastating the Earth, you reply, "Let's just build giant robots to fight them." This indicates to me that at some level, you can't even process the possibility. Your distance from Godzilla is vastly further than the distance which a people who had endured having all of their cities carpet bombed, culminating in the only two uses of nuclear weapons in anger in human history. They I think could conceptualize the fear of a monstrous entity destroying all in its path. You are struggling to even imagine being helpless in the face of a disaster vastly larger than yourself. I don't know that I'm any better off than you in this regard, as the prospect of giant alien monsters rampaging over the Earth doesn't trigger the same response in me, but it doesn't frighten me either. As for Godzilla, it wasn't more than a decade or two before the makers and audience of that film got over their fear of it as well.</p><p></p><p>Lovecraft was terrified of a lot of things. The sight of a cooked fish was sufficient to see him fleeing from the room in a cold sweat, bile building in his stomach, shaking in terror. I think his stories are so effective because he was a man acquainted with fear and subject to it. Of course, he can't quite make the reader as terrified of fish people and octopus headed immortal horrors as he was, and some of his terrors seem as you say pitiable to most modern readers. But I personally feel that what make his stories more enduring is less the visceral squick of seeing fish of a phobic man, but the intellectual horror he wove into the story in response to seeing his intellectual world collapse. It's those intellectual horrors that I'd most want to see channeled by an inventive author.</p><p></p><p>HPL was a well read man of post-Enlightenment European philosophy. He was comfortable even obsessed with the 19th century world view - a materialist, eternal universe without need of a creator, but which had birthed mankind who was in turn destined by the very laws of the universe to progress and evolve to ever greater heights. All of that world view came tumbling down in the early years of his life. Certain fundamental comfortable assumptions about the nature of the universe fell apart. </p><p></p><p>Things that horrified HPL in a very real way include ideas like the insolvability of the Entscheidungsproblem and the insolvability of Diophantine sets. Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle very likely would have shook him to his core. Quantum Mechanics would have been just as uncomfortable of a discovery as it was for Einstein, and I think he would have railed against it in the same way and for the same reasons. The existence of the Big Bang, and thus the finite nature of the universe (or coupled with general relativity, the finite nature of the observable universe) would have been problematic to a person who grew up believing in a world without beginning or end. Now we hear about the heat death of the universe and we just shrug, as HPL would have put it, blissfully unable to correlate all the contents of our own minds. Mechanical predestination doesn't bother us. Nor are we easily frightened by what first frightened me reading a HPL story, which is the vast gulfs of matter which are empty of anything that we can comprehend as anything, so that perhaps we ought to properly view everything including our own bodies as insubstantial wisps of vapor that are realistically speaking barely even there. </p><p></p><p>HPL would have said that we being protected from what we know by the editing of our conscious mind, which continually hides from us the nature of reality which - if we took it seriously - would drive us insane.</p><p></p><p>This is the level which I would like Call of Cthulhu games to work at, but instead they worked mostly on the level of violence and squick and typically involve solutions of employing greater force - like your proposed solution of fighting giant monsters with giant robots.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7538864, member: 4937"] This does go to a portion of my question, which was, is it even possible to scare a modern audience with cosmic horror. I can't tell if the problem is that the themes of cosmic horror are simply so well known at an intellectual level these days that people have already intellectually dealt with them, or they are simply too big for humans to intellectually process, or if the problem is that right now we are so comfortable as a race its hard to frighten us. For example, faced with the concept of giant alien monsters devastating the Earth, you reply, "Let's just build giant robots to fight them." This indicates to me that at some level, you can't even process the possibility. Your distance from Godzilla is vastly further than the distance which a people who had endured having all of their cities carpet bombed, culminating in the only two uses of nuclear weapons in anger in human history. They I think could conceptualize the fear of a monstrous entity destroying all in its path. You are struggling to even imagine being helpless in the face of a disaster vastly larger than yourself. I don't know that I'm any better off than you in this regard, as the prospect of giant alien monsters rampaging over the Earth doesn't trigger the same response in me, but it doesn't frighten me either. As for Godzilla, it wasn't more than a decade or two before the makers and audience of that film got over their fear of it as well. Lovecraft was terrified of a lot of things. The sight of a cooked fish was sufficient to see him fleeing from the room in a cold sweat, bile building in his stomach, shaking in terror. I think his stories are so effective because he was a man acquainted with fear and subject to it. Of course, he can't quite make the reader as terrified of fish people and octopus headed immortal horrors as he was, and some of his terrors seem as you say pitiable to most modern readers. But I personally feel that what make his stories more enduring is less the visceral squick of seeing fish of a phobic man, but the intellectual horror he wove into the story in response to seeing his intellectual world collapse. It's those intellectual horrors that I'd most want to see channeled by an inventive author. HPL was a well read man of post-Enlightenment European philosophy. He was comfortable even obsessed with the 19th century world view - a materialist, eternal universe without need of a creator, but which had birthed mankind who was in turn destined by the very laws of the universe to progress and evolve to ever greater heights. All of that world view came tumbling down in the early years of his life. Certain fundamental comfortable assumptions about the nature of the universe fell apart. Things that horrified HPL in a very real way include ideas like the insolvability of the Entscheidungsproblem and the insolvability of Diophantine sets. Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle very likely would have shook him to his core. Quantum Mechanics would have been just as uncomfortable of a discovery as it was for Einstein, and I think he would have railed against it in the same way and for the same reasons. The existence of the Big Bang, and thus the finite nature of the universe (or coupled with general relativity, the finite nature of the observable universe) would have been problematic to a person who grew up believing in a world without beginning or end. Now we hear about the heat death of the universe and we just shrug, as HPL would have put it, blissfully unable to correlate all the contents of our own minds. Mechanical predestination doesn't bother us. Nor are we easily frightened by what first frightened me reading a HPL story, which is the vast gulfs of matter which are empty of anything that we can comprehend as anything, so that perhaps we ought to properly view everything including our own bodies as insubstantial wisps of vapor that are realistically speaking barely even there. HPL would have said that we being protected from what we know by the editing of our conscious mind, which continually hides from us the nature of reality which - if we took it seriously - would drive us insane. This is the level which I would like Call of Cthulhu games to work at, but instead they worked mostly on the level of violence and squick and typically involve solutions of employing greater force - like your proposed solution of fighting giant monsters with giant robots. [/QUOTE]
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