Through close consideration of the multiplayer online game The Secret World (2012), this paper works towards a definition of “Weird Games” as a basis for advocating the aesthetic potential of Weird for digital games. The paper forms part of a more expansive project to examine the uses and formal specificities of Gothic and Weird in digital games. While the Weird Tale shares some features with Gothic, it has a very distinctive form that is beautifully summed by H.P. Lovecraft:
The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.
(Cited Joshi, 1990, p. 6. My italics.)
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