On the "Lovecraft" Tag on Steam

Tim Lanzendörfer

To begin with, a bit of brief theoretical background (apologies! Sometimes you can’t do without.) In the introduction to the edited volume Max and I wrote, we suggest that one of the ways in which the “Lovecraftian” is produced is contextual and ascriptive, rather than formal and descriptive. To say something is “Lovecraftian” names a future reading experience: it makes it so that you will read a text (or play a game) as though it were Lovecraftian, which amounts to basically the same thing as it “being” Lovecraftian. Still with me?

Because I’d like to play off of this idea in this short note discussing the “Lovecraft” tag on Steam. Steam, for those of you here from the distant past, is a computer game distribution service that allows you to purchase computer games online. Steam used to be Valve’s proprietary way of selling its own games, but since 2008, it has been available to all publishers and developers. Like this website, and like most websites with content that is diverse and requires some form of sorting, it operates with tags—labels that are attached to its content, usually single-words that serve as pithy descriptors with a variety of functions related to a game’s visibility. Steam introduced tags in 2014, about the time it had become one of if not the major outlet for (PC and Mac) games. Tags, as Steamworks’s Documentation suggests, serve a set of functions related to visibility within a large set of similar goods. These include getting “better results” when browsing genres and categories, searching, exploring recommendations based on tags, and utilizing the Collections functionality. From a game developer’s point of view, then, tags are a means of generating more sales. They make sure that, among the thousands of games available on the platform, yours can be found by people interested specifically in your offer.

But, on Steam (unlike on this website), it’s not just developers who can indicate how they’d like their games categorized—it’s also most users. Developers just set their tags and weigh them according to their thoughts about how to best describe their game in twenty tags or less (or, for that matter, in how to best market their game, which may or may not have similar tags as a result). User tags are newer, having only arrived in 2019, and they, for obvious reasons, are not just simply added to the game. Instead, they are weighed by votes. It’s not clear to me from documentation how many user tags you can have or how many votes are needed for them to appear, but that’s besides the point for this article. What’s interesting is the user ability to categorize that comes to the fore in this, and for this website, of course, what we’re interested in is Lovecraft.

Here’s an interesting thing. In the announcement of the beta launch of Steam Tags, Steam put a short FAQ at the bottom, including a question from developers: “What if I don’t agree with a tag that has become popular for my game?” The answer Steam gives is intriguing: “Tags can be a good indicator of when there is a mismatch between how you perceive your game, and how your game is perceived by customers. Often this is simply because there is some piece of information regarding the game that customers feel is missing from the store page.” Two things here: one dimension that the Steam team highlights is a simple matter of knowledge: you, the developer, could have put this bit of information on your game, but didn’t. That doesn’t impinge what your game “is,” as it were, in Steam’s view. But, oh, and here’s the second point: this is actually not an answer to the question. Because, of course, the question is “what if I, the developer, don’t agree”. Surely, if the problem was purely informational, that does not apply: you would in fact agree with the tag, and be a bit chagrined that you missed putting it in in the first place. What’s really happening here, by contrast, is that there is “mismatch” between user and producer, between player and maker, between reception and intention. You, the developer, are annoyed that someone tags a game with the “Lovecraft” tag because you do not think it is. And, for you, this is a dispute that goes beyond merely thinking differently about your game. In fact, you think it is potentially harmful to you, the developer, because some of your potential customers may hate Lovecraftian games, or because some customers who love Lovecraftian games will hate yours and leave terrible reviews (because you game “isn’t” Lovecraftian). To us here at Adapting Lovecraft, interested as we are in thinking through the ascriptive, the contextual, and the communal, it’s just great.

As of the writing of this, if you sort Steam’s offers by the tag “Lovecraft” (note the difference from the “Lovecraftian;” I’ll discuss this a little below), you get about 1200 hits. This includes both standalone games and DLCs (downloadable content—in an older parlance, expansion packs), and a plethora of genres: mostly some form of adventure game, but also puzzle games and shooters. Some games, such as the 2D puzzle game Qop, appear bizarrely miscategorized (that game, interestingly enough, is also tagged with “3D platformer”, “soulslike,” and “nudity,” not to mention incongruously to the latter at least with “family-friendly”; I’m not sure that this is “a mismatch between how you perceive your game, and how your game is regarded by customers”). Other games seem to sit squarely in a Lovecraft cosmos, to the extent that it’s weird anybody felt the need to user-tag them again (such as the various games with “Cthulhu” in the title). And for others yet, it may definitely be a help.

But as per the usual, I’m not here to legislate the choices made in the categorization so much as to think through what it might mean, and a couple of things stand out. One of them, for instance, is the presence of the classic squad tactical game X-Com: Terror from the Deep, originally published in 1995. There “really” is nothing Lovecraftian about X-Com: it’s an alien invasion game, and those aliens aren’t even Great Old Ones or Starspawn, or anything: they’re little grey dudes. It’s striking, too, that this is the only X-Com game that made the list, and presumably, it did so on the strength of its underwater setting, which is very Cthulhu-esque, I’ll admit—and looks like a precursor to 2020’s Stirring Abyss, which is also an isometric tactical shooter set underwater, but has direct Lovecraftian allusions in it. The tag-based categorization produces a remarkably homogenous view of what users understand to be a “Lovecraft” game even so: without, again, too much interest in legislating its correctness, the tag connects a lot of games with what appear to be intersubjectively valid ascriptions of Lovecraftianness. That’s not just because they are obviously intersubjectively valid because that’s what the votes for the tag indicate, but because most of these games are in fact concerned with themes that emerge from a larger, preexisting Lovecraftian.

I noted above that I want to talk about the “Lovecraft” vs. “Lovecraftian” a little, because Max and I suggested the importance of the distinction. Lovecraft, we said, is perhaps best used to signify adaptation of the texts Lovecraft himself wrote; Lovecraftian, by contrast, signals a softer allusiveness “to a core of Lovecraft’s fiction’s most persistent figures and ideas,” that serve “as a marketing tool, and as a malleable signifier” (3). The Lovecraft tag on Steam is a case study in what rates as Lovecraft(ian), and how the category coheres. Some of this is clearly intentional, as in: most of the games categorized by the tag quite affirmatively inscribe themselves in the Lovecraftian mythos-cosmos, and to read them as Lovecraft(ian) is barely a reading at all. For others yet, the categorization of the game as “Lovecraft” amounts to a quasi-spoiler: a game such as Call of the Sea, Curious Expedition, or the Fallout 3 expansion Point Lookout almost certainly would play differently without the explicit allusion to Lovecraft in the tags (or anywhere else, for that matter). For a third set, it’s certainly an interesting way to read the games back into a canon that has little to do with them, and opens—perhaps—new avenues for understanding what they do. In as much as the Steam tags do not hold with the distinction between “Lovecraft” and the “Lovecraftian,” they produce a new version of “Lovecraft”—a far more direct tie than the more amorphous “Lovecraftian” would have produced. In one sense, this is simply wrong: there is little “Lovecraft” in, for instance, Frogware’s 2023 Sherlock Homes: The Awakened, which has no content from Lovecraft, as in: there’s no stuff that relates to Lovecraft’s stories directly. And, in fact, the game’s description more carefully says the game is in the “Lovecraftian style.” (Incidentally, the tag “Arthur Conan Doyle” doesn’t seem to exist.) To tie this game—and all the others—to Lovecraft is to offer a reappraisal of what Lovecraft means in the Lovecraftian: not just the originator of a cosmos, loosely tied together by thematic similarities produced at a remove, but in fact the core around which these games cohere as a group. Whether or not that means that, say, Magrunner is now part of what it means to be a Lovecraft text is really not for me to say, beyond pointing out (and this is why this is a blog post and not an academic article) that it’s interesting to think with.