I would fight H.P. Lovecraft.

That’s my answer to the old Fight Club question, ‘which historical figure would you fight?’ Forget Lincoln, forget Gandhi. If I could have my pick, it’d be H.P.L.

Now, I’m going to lay out the case for my choice, but keep in mind that the point here is to show that there exist means of satisfying this desire, even if the man is dead. I’m talking about Lovecraft-themed games. The best of them is Arkham Horror, a series of board games set in fictional towns invented by Lovecraft. The latest expansion, Innsmouth Horror, went on sale just last month. The genius of these games is that they make losing fun”"and losing to Lovecraft is the ideal way to beat him.

An author from Rhode Island, Lovecraft died in 1937, penniless and in in near-obscurity, the latter due largely to the fact that he wrote for horror pulps. Pulp magazines defined pop culture back then and made rich men of the most successful of their writers. Lovecraft was not among them. Horror had a bad name, and he wrote a particularly odd and unpopular brand of it, which we’ve come to call weird fiction.

His stories convey a dread of otherness never before achieved in literature. Strangeness is their achievement. Lovecraft disdained humanistic themes and humanoid horrors. Ghost stories and sex-crazed axe-murderers turned him off. He favored confrontations with inhuman threats, with things truly alien, and he delivered the goods.

Naturally, he drew his alien terrors effectively by grounding them in exquisite historical, genealogical, and architectural detail. In his work, weird entities traveled across time and space to find a home in Lovecraft’s New England, a place of ancient secrets, tangled landscapes, and withering populations. In “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” one of his few masterpieces and the basis for the newest Arkham Horror game, Lovecraft transforms the town of Gloucester, MA into a paragon of weirdness. An odd dialect, crumbling Georgian steeples, and the careful tracing of family trees make Innsmouth, a town inhabited by half-breed fish-frog people, credible. It’s not just that Innsmouth is Gloucester, that Arkham is Salem, that Dunwich is Wilbraham, and Kingsport is Marblehead, but that they are deeply these places. Lovecraft gets the names right; they ring true. His work reads like the crossing of‚  an almanac, a tour guide, and a comic book, with the dry facticity of the first two belying the bizarreries of the last one.

Lovecraft’s technique appealed greatly to other pulp writers, if not much to pulp audiences. Over the years since his death, this division has remained. Artists, writers, directors, and musicians love his work, take inspiration from it, and allude to it frequently. Pretty much anytime you come across a book of forbidden knowledge, a tentacled monstrosity from the Outer Dark, or a village of degenerates, you’ve found an homage to the Gentleman from Providence. Still, hardly anybody reads his stories. The omnipresence of Lovecraft today”"doesn’t it seem like like every contemporary horror boasts a tentacle and a cult?”"comes from his influence over the creative class, rather than popularity among the masses.

The masses may have something there. As all horror writers do, Lovecraft enlarged and aggravated his own fears in his work, and he had an overwhelming fear of anything that deviated from the world he had known as a child. As a boy, he belonged to Providence’s gentry, a blanched agglutination of Anglo-Saxon Protestants. As he grew older, his family’s fortunes dissipated, immigration drastically changed the demographics of the North East, and he consumed himself with his reading of science and scientific exploration. Lovecraft became poor, racist, atheist, and obsessed with the way science diminished the importance of humanity”"and thereby his own importance, of which he had been much convinced.

As a result of all this, his fiction has three principle fixations, three sources of horror: rural folk, non-Anglos, and the sea, with the latter being the most fundamental. In Lovecraft’s mind, oceanic vastness and the weirdness of aquatic life”"octopi, frogs, molluscs”"represented the ultimate outcome of all learning: to learn is to become cognizant of one’s smallness and to confront things utterly unlike oneself. For him, to meet a Portuguese stevedore or a backwoods farmhand was as outrageous an affront to his sensibilities as coming face-to-mesoglea with a giant jellyfish. His racism erupted from an immediate, visceral repugnance toward the unfamiliar, and this sentiment dominates his work.

Seen in this light, we can read Lovecraft’s stuff only with the hope that his protagonists”"mainly, sniveling, priggish, dandified white boys clearly standing-in for the author”"will come to a bad and slimy end as soon as possible. In Arkham Horror, we get to participate in this narrative. The game not only imparts an atmosphere authentic to Lovecraft, an achievement in itself, but also redeems the Lovecraftian tale by permitting us to take pleasure in the endless re-gobbling of the Lovecraftian protagonist. Let’s turn, then, to these games , to see how they both appropriate this literature and turn it against itself.

Machete Death in Africa

Does it matter that Vincent Merken and I cut down a crazed, diseased, machete-wielding black man in an African shantytown?

We did it in the Resident Evil 5 demo, playing co-op on Xbox Live; I from the U.S., he from Belgium. Vincent played a hulking bruiser of a white guy, while I played a small, lithe woman who could pass for what‚  Southern Africans call ‘coloured’-a person of mixed race.‚  Together, we hacked at our enemy with our huge knives until he melted into a mass of brown bubbles.

Does it matter why we did this? Or how our characters looked when it happened? Or how we responded to doing it? Would it matter if the man had tentacles sprouting from his face? And why’d we use knives, anyhow?

Answering these questions requires an outlook as cosmopolitan as the game itself, which portrays the outbreak of a contagion that transforms humans into monsters in the small, fictional, sub-Saharan nation of Kijuju. Resident Evil 5 depicts people of many different races, being careful to render them and their surroundings as realistically as possible, while maintaining an atmosphere of sci-fi horror. Both gaming and mainstream media have begun a debate over whether the game’s depiction of black Africans makes use of racist stereotypes.

The debate matters because of the game’s stature. Capcom’s Resident Evil series belongs to the canon of gaming. Its games have sold more than 34 million copies and won wide critical acclaim. Resident Evil 5, the twentieth game in the line, has raised its already high profile with its move to Africa. Imagine‚  one of the innumerable and wildly popular World War II shooters suddenly changing its setting to Vietnam, circa 1969. Very few games feature the Vietnam war, for the same reason that few games feature Africa’s problems with disease, poverty, violence, and exploitation: both subjects evoke shame. Players accept this reasoning on Vietnam; they seem to have more difficulty with Africa.

Also controversial, though less charged, is Resident Evil 5′s control scheme, which remains virtually the same as the one featured in the first game in the series, 1996′s Resident Evil. The hype around the game has placed it under assault from all sides, from both gaming and cultural perspectives. Responding to these issues means placing that murderous moment shared by Vincent and me into context-in both game and real-world terms.

Resident Evil 5 will take a beating. Players will attack the game without mercy, and so will the media. Vincent and I will play the game to death, testing its limits, while critics will decry the game’s handling of its African setting. Both approaches are perfectly justified, because both rely on a certain kind of cosmopolitanism.

There are two senses of ‘cosmopolitan’. One refers to a person who acclimates easily to foreign situations; the other to a morality that ignores cultural boundaries. The first concerns Resident Evil 5′s gameplay, the second concerns the way it portrays black Africans.‚  Understanding this game requires‚  both viewpoints. For this reason, I came calling on Vincent.

Who is Vincent Merken?

Let me tell you about Vincent Merken.

In the vast library of Resident Evil esoterica available on the Internet there is an extraordinary document known formally as “Resident Evil-Plot Guide” and colloquially as “The Resident Evil Thesis”. We’re talking over 115,000 words of Resident Evil plot analysis. Begun by Dan ‘President Evil’ Birlew and overtaken by Thomas Wilde, the text covers the series up to the 2007 port of Resident Evil 4 for the Wii, but just one section concerns us here: an examination of wild theories called “The Weirdest of the Lot”. Birlew and Wilde debunk a rumor that you can unlock Street Fighter’s Akuma as a playable character in Resident Evil 2:

According to Electronic Gaming Monthly, if you beat the game in under an hour and a half, using *only* the handgun and knife, Akuma would become playable. Vincent Merken did it, for he is ninja, and it didn’t work.

Yes; contemplate that passage for a moment, and it will reveal to you the Meaning of Merken and of Resident Evil. From the start, the series has won fans for its flexible gameplay. You can play Resident Evil games in myriad ways-using only the weakest weapons or rushing through the game as quickly as possible. Vincent belongs to a community of players who have pushed this play to extremes. Ripping through Resident Evil 2 at that speed with such limited firepower is downright amazing. This kind of achievement requires both mad dexterity and long study of the game’s mechanics.