Professional paper
Escape from Innsmouth and The Shadow over Innsmouth – The Role of The Reader and Player in Postmodern Multimedial Narratives
Leoni Flower Finocchiaro
Abstract
In 2011 Fantasy Flight Games published an entirely cooperative tabletop game based on the works of Howard Philips Lovecraft. Mansions of Madness, the board game, got a reedition in 2016 and, since then, the four original scenarios of the game have been expanded to include eighteen more. This seminar paper focuses on the Escape from Innsmouth scenario and its relationship with Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth. More precisely, this paper centres on the postmodern nature of Mansions of Madness, with a particular interest in the relationship between the role of the reader and that of the player. With this in view, this paper starts by introducing some fundamental aspects of postmodernism relevant to this relationship, moving to the question of genre regarding both the game and Lovecraft’s story. An exposition of the intertextual essence of the game’s scenario leads to the final underlining of the fundamentally postmodern phenomenon of the expansion of the passive reader’s role to that of an active player.
Keywords
H.P. Lovecraft; board game; Mansions of Madness; Escape from Innsmouth; intertextuality; postmodernism
Hrčak ID:
325116
URI
Publication date:
24.12.2024.
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