[0:00]Hello, my name is Eric Lang and I'm a game designer and I got to work on Call of Cthulhu and I'm really excited about that and I'm here to talk about the game that I work on. What interested me most about Call of Cthulhu was how, when I grew up playing role-playing games, a lot of them were about the sense of discovery and exploration. And Call of Cthulhu from a very young age was really interesting to me because it was about the exact opposite of that. It was about the slow unraveling of all the things that you thought were true and that discovery of things that were awful. And it really tapped into a specific kind of horror that I feel that no other genre had ever done before. What really draws me to the world of Cthulhu is the fact that it is a very unique and special form of horror. It's not about jump scares, it's not about being afraid of the boogie man under the bed. It's about having your entire perception of reality slowly stripped away from you piece by piece by piece. And that is to me, the most frightening type of horror that there is, because it gets to the core of what it means to be human and the things that we need to cling to in order to survive in this world. In Call of Cthulhu, there are several different types of cultists. There are people who willingly embrace the elder gods, there are people who are tricked into doing it. There are people who don't even know that they're doing it, but they're furthering the cause of these entities from outside. And that's one of the things that makes the cult so insidious is that it's not just a specific type of person or specific type of group. It's all over the place, it's everywhere. And the game really explores how people from every walk of life can either be ensnared by the cult or be working towards its goals in a number of different ways. The thing that makes cults in the Cthulhu mythos so interesting and so scary is the fact that they're not just some fringe group out there in the woods. They're not just some sort of evil organization that is separate from society. They are literally everywhere and they're in every aspect of society. And the fact that you can have cultists that are senators, you can have cultists that are artists, you can have cultists that are just regular everyday people. And the fact that the cult is just this insidious entity that worms its way into every aspect of human life is what makes it so fascinating and so terrifying. My favorite mythos creature would have to be Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. It's a creature that really epitomizes the idea of things that are just beyond human comprehension. It's not something that we can quantify, it's not something that we can even fully understand the horror of. And the idea that such a creature exists and is worshiped by these cults, to me, is the height of horror. And I love its name. It's just such a cool name. If I could give any advice to a new player of Call of Cthulhu, it would be to embrace the inevitable. This is a game about your own destruction and the unraveling of everything that you hold dear. And it is not a game about saving the world. It is a game about trying to delay the inevitable for as long as possible. And to that end, you should embrace the fact that your character is eventually going to go insane or die in a horrific fashion. And that is the fun of the game. And you should try to tell the best story that you can with that in mind. Don't try to win. Try to tell a great story. That's how you win Call of Cthulhu.