Drawing the unknowable - Lovecraft’s cosmic horror in Magic: The Gathering and Hearthstone

This chapter explores the influence of Lovecraft’s discussion and description of visual art on the works by Wizards of the Coast (Magic: The Gathering) and Blizzard Entertainment (Hearthstone). It will explore how these two games have been influenced by Lovecraft’s mythos and assess their use of cosmic horror against Lovecraft’s own fictional portrayal of the visual aesthetic. Art plays a central role within Lovecraft’s writings and serves as a focal point for Pickman’s Model (1927), featuring heavily in other influential works, such as Call of Cthulhu (1928) and At the Mountains of Madness (1936). However, as Airaksinen (ibid.) argues, Lovecraft’s descriptions of the artworks that feature heavily in his fictional works are unsuccessful in fully portraying the intended levels of cosmic horror. This chapter argues that there is a paradox in visual artists continuing to attempt to recreate Lovecraft’s cosmic horror in their works, despite Lovecraft’s own admission that such things defy definition: ‘thing that should not be… a terrible, indescribable thing’ (Lovecraft 1936). These ‘things’ that are nameless are alluded to in Lovecraft’s text predominantly by their absence (Jackson 2008, p. 23)—how, then, can they be represented in the visual arts?