Fans to Franchises: How Mods Are Rewriting Gaming History

Question: Could Mr. X be even more terrifying?

When the Resident Evil 2 remake finally landed, it made waves with its updated graphics and tightened controls, so far removed from its first outing that it arguably plays like a different game, but above all else it was in many ways a fond recollection of the original it was based upon. Nostalgia is always an easy moneymaker within the video game industry, and given that the original was already a cult classic for its time, it made every sense for Capcom to strike while the iron was hot – even again for Resident Evil 3: Nemesis to cash on that momentum. With such a fervent following from players of the original game and now a new generation playing the title for the very first time, passion for the game of course made the subject of this essay only inevitable with dedicated and educated fans to, like any one of the infected enemies in game, sink their teeth into the code and feed to their hearts’ content. The resulting outcome?

Thomas the fucking Tank Engine.

Clever modders collaboratively created the monstrous mod for Resident Evil 2 that replaces the already imposing and sinister character of Mr. X with Thomas the Tank Engine (yes, I do mean the one from the children’s show). Instead of the hulking form of Mr. X coming stomping towards in trench coat and hat, his model is instead replaced by the vibrant blue and red of Thomas, complete with unsettlingly soulless eyes and an unwaveringly deadened smile, who cheerily whistles as he charges the player with his peppy theme tune ringing in your ears while you try not to get crushed by his onslaught.

So I ask again, could Mr. X be even more terrifying? Answer: Abso-fucking-lutely.

Murder Thomas was the magical hell spawn of modders ZombieAli and DJ Pop, where they created the 3D model to replace Mr. X and the additional inclusion of his iconic theme tune when approaching respectively. DJ Pop had already surfaced in the wake of Resident Evil 2’s mods by introducing a mod which plays ‘X Gon’ Give It To Ya’ by DMX whenever Mr. X is within the vicinity, something which later inspired the Thomas mod’s eventual creation, and DJ Pop wasn’t alone. Plenty other mods were released for to a variety of ends from those that pay homage to alternate titles to those that play parody on the game itself. Like with any game and its following community, mod culture thrives, reveling in a juxtaposition between high fidelity earning praise and absurdity for comedic intent.

Mod culture exists as a strange but welcome subsection of the gaming community, since its existed as long as players have and yet continues to struggle to negotiate its existence with the mainstream industry at large. Without mod culture, gamers today wouldn’t have some of the most well known and arguably most influential titles in gaming history, meanwhile in the same vein you have developers and corporations seeking to smother and stifle the creativity of their player base in an effort to purify their products. What compounds this matter is that critical study of modding compared to the broader whole of academia regarding video games is, as Nathaniel Poor admits in Computer Game Modders’ Motivations and Sense of Community: A Mixed-Methods Approach: ‘‘the body of academic literature on modding is relatively small.’ Therefore, in this essay we’ll look at how mod culture has shaped gaming history, how it continues to impact the present industry, and the responses and attitudes we’re currently seeing to this and what we should move towards for the culture’s future in a bid to jumpstart conversation to fill the void.

For a simple definition of modding, I think Ryan Wallaca summarises it best in his article Modding: Amateur Authorship and How the Video Game Industry Is Actually Getting It Right, where he states ‘modding is the process of altering, adding to, or deleting video game code to change the way that a particular game is played.’ At the base level, modding is players modifying (hence the name) games in an effort to change the way they are played. More often than not, this activity is not undertaken for mere technical objectives, they are carried out as personal endeavours as either fandom or for experience. For example, Hector Postigo posits three motivations within the modding community in his essay Of Mods and Modders: Chasing Down the Value of Fan-Based Digital Game Modifications. Firstly, modding is considered a creative exercise undertaken as an outlet, secondly that modding allows gamers to develop closer connections to the games they play, and finally that such experience in modification prepares one for a potential career in the video game industry. We can support this, as other critics similarly agree with these triple base, such as Olli Sotamaa who notes in When The Game is Not Enough: Motivations and Practices among Computer Game Modding Culture: ‘mods are digital artefacts that avid gamers design by tinkering with their favourite games.’ This can be furthered as Poor states ‘modding is not an activity taken on by those at game companies … Modding is instead done by players and fans of the game.’ In short, between the observations of Postigo, Poor and Sotamaa, it’s readily illustrated that the modding community is formed from players themselves, fans who are enamoured with their favourite games who take it a step further to play more literally under the hood of the game. The best analogy is that modding is to gaming that fan-fiction is to literature, where the first is a personal appreciation and development upon the parent text.

With the infancy of the industry, video games were arguably less strictly controlled than what is seen in the current climate; thanks to the internet and commodification of the ‘experience’ a game developer intends for their players as opposed to the one players write for themselves, modding is far more limited than in its early days. Players modding their favourite games was not perceived as a potential threat to this ascribed experience, as distribution for modding was limited, so developers were either unaware of such communities or simply didn’t care to pursue anything regarding them. It’s therefore no surprise that developers who were aware of the culture and engaged with these communities perhaps instigated some of the most pivotal shifts in the industry in terms of knowledge and attitudes. Most famously are cases such as id Software and their release of Doom, whereby the game didn’t see an immediate commercial release but was instead released as shareware, saving the studio on marketing costs and ultimately birthed perhaps one of the first and most dedicated modding communities to date. In his article It’s a Mod, Mod World, David Kushner observes as much stating ‘modification by the playing public date back to Doom’s December 1993 release … modification went into overdrive … thanks to the openness of the programming structure … and the wide-open distribution network of the burgeoning Internet.’ From this we see how deep the relationship between these two camps becomes, where developers rely on modders and vice versa for both to prosper, and we see all these prior motivations from Postigo begin to blur into the current abstract of mod culture, as he notes in regards to Doom: ‘id Software releases the source code for all of its games; it incorporated the most successful fan-developed game levels into one of its distributions of Doom.’

Because of this free exchange of fandom to developer, Doom quickly became a cult classic for its time, its legacy still thriving to this date as a testament to its longevity. Chris Lombardi evidences this when he wrote in his 1994 article To Hell and Back that ‘Despite the success of their games, id continues to surprise the market by sticking with shareware distribution.’ As mentioned prior, such distribution methods provide id Software with high profits granted that they spend next to nothing on marketing for their game – as Postigo remarks that estimated costs of doing so could equate to $10 million – and as Lombardi furthers, they feel closer as developers to the people who play their games. This exponential growth in both fan-following and profit promotes an incentivised shift in developers welcoming mod communities to their folds as an effort to replicate the same miracle id Software had pulled. Something which Valve Corporation managed to pull off, and like Doom it’s had a staggering influence on the industry to this date.

It’s all thanks to Minh Le, a Canadian game developer who during university in an effort to boost his job prospects following graduation began tinkering with Valve’s Half-Life engine. As Kushner states ‘to create … for a Half-Life mod, for example, fans first use the software development kit, which Valve makes freely available on the internet’, a reflection of id Software’s approach to the release of Doom, Valve had reflected the same ethos in expanding players’ access to their games and engines in an effort to encourage creativity and engagement. Whether by coincidence or fate, id Software’s other title Quake, built on the same engine as Doom also released a software development kit which Le had prior experience with before he moved to Half-Life, and so by fortune there already existed a history of authoring gaming experiences through modding. Le himself admits this in an interview with Gamasutra stating ‘it was natural that I picked up the [software development kit] and started to play around with it.’ Le’s language is indicative of the attitudes many modders take when engaging with the community, that modification for them is equal to playing the game, and connects as much the ludic experience within the game to modifying its code outside of said experience. Le’s work on Half-Life mods combined with the administration of the community and website by Jess Cliffe, would spawn the title Counter-Strike, a name now commonplace among the eSports scene and an original base of support for the current surge of gaming YouTubers and streamers. But Counter-Strike’s inception and ultimate success was not at all easy, and perhaps flags some of the biggest challenges the mod community now faces in pursuing similar paths.

Unlike Doom and its relationship with its shareware distribution model, Valve Corporation didn’t and still doesn’t operate through the same marketing strategies, as titles were published and managed via their own platform Steam as an online distribution service for PC gaming. Thus Counter-Strike only saw publication and endorsement as its own entity not because developers had freely allowed modifications to be made and shared, but instead had received a commercial release through Sierra Studios. The relationship between these different entities, Valve and Counter-Strike, best highlights the problematic position mods pose to video games that see official development and releases as opposed to modders who, for lack of a better way of putting it, piggyback on the foundations already laid out by the former work. This isn’t to diminish the work modders can invest in their games, as already stated their efforts are often undertaken as labours of love and rarely ever done for any ulterior motive, but it puts the issue of authorship versus ownership directly into the firing line.

Walt Scacchi explains the ramifications of ownership governing the allocation of resources towards the game’s development in Computer Game Mods, Modders, Modding, and the Mod Scene, where ultimately executive power is held over who can do what with the text. He states ‘such a perspective centralizes governance with those who control ownership of property … and the means of game mod production.’ In light of Valve purchasing Counter-Strike in 2000, Le himself confesses ‘When we did sell the rights to Valve, it was pretty clear who had the rights to [Counter-Strike].’ The function of ownership over authorship comes under scrutiny here, similarly with other mods for any other games. Though Le and Cliffe together built the foundations of the game, alongside a host of other designers and mappers to build the finished product, their subsequent acquisition by Valve Corporation challenges the status quo of authorship within the gaming demographic.

Prior to Valve’s entrance to this scene, id Software had set the standard to be a symbiotic one: developers engaged with modders as much as modders later supported developers. These attitudes emerged from the id Software’s self-confessed democratic and anarchic model of operations, as Lombardi and further Dan Pinchbeck have observed. By providing and enabling players with software development kits and freely available source code, id Software understood that such approaches afforded them collective content contribution, Pinchbeck remarks ‘as John Carmack admits, the members of the id Software team weren’t actually so different from the vilified hackers that this model purportedly supported, empowered, and encouraged.’ He adds that such behaviours by game consumers to hack and understand the code and engines behind video games were already long withstanding within the community, so whilst id Software didn’t revolutionise the modding scene, they did provide a platform from which to operate with greater legitimacy, which Pinchbeck agrees to, as Doom generated ‘a community of fans … by enabling them to create and share their own content around the networks.’ This is a far cry from what Valve moved to achieve in the commodification of the independent scene. With Steam serving as the easiest and therefore most popular platform for far smaller individuals and teams, titles that would otherwise never see a mainstream reception can burgeon their hopes with this alternative. Scacchi acknowledges, for example, that ‘modding is a ‘Do It Yourself’ approach to technology personalization that can establish both socio-technical and distributed cognitions for how to innovate by resting control over technology design from their producers.’ To summarise, modders are reclaiming a position of authorship over games that developers didn’t fully intend for them to have. However, this mindset is problematic, as it fosters an ‘us versus them’ mentality, but further still Scacchi admits that in reclaiming the ability to manipulate and personalise gaming code, players inadvertently become producers themselves, reissuing the modified content and sharing their new texts with others. Contrary to his earlier statement, he digresses that ‘there is no systematic distinction between developers and users in these communities.’ Le is again the best example of this, whereby mods turn to game, which turn to official releases, and completes a cycle of almost renegade game development where the modders comes full circle to be a developer themselves.

This type of relationship between commercial entities and playing individuals, between modders and developers, is impossible to fully dissect. Both seek to claim authorship of their games, but in doing so they begin to move into positions that oppose one another. Examining such a relationship through the lens of modding communities is therefore difficult, as moreover the industry appears to both support and discourage such behaviours simultaneously, dependent on which studios helm which texts. Current academia continues to struggle with this paradoxical state as Sotamaa evidences ‘These accounts position mods in clear opposition with the products of corporate media culture’. For examples of this we need look no further than Nintendo. Numerous fan projects have seen challenges to their work with infamous cease and desists, whereby Nintendo or any other studio under its umbrella for game development shuts down independent game designers seeking to create content based and inspired upon their favourite titles. Projects such as Pokémon Uranium, Pixelmon, Mario Royale, and ironically most recently The Big House were all shut down via Nintendo issuing DMCAs or cease and desists. Sadly, many within the gaming community realise that not everyone within the industry is as welcoming to fans tinkering with their games, as Wallace evidenced, ‘not all game development companies are mod friendly.’

It would be unfair to criticise Nintendo for attempting to prohibit the development and propagation of fan-made content. Unfortunately for the industry, the internet will and forever always abide by its own agenda and do as it will, and so it less a question of if players will mod their own games but when and how. However as Kushner, Wallace, and many other critics all comment, the matter is compounded by the ill-defined legality of game modifications, as current laws have failed to yet update themselves to digital distribution and intellectual property rights. It’s of course ironic, and perhaps a little insulting and salt to the wound, that within the wake of these projects being forcibly shut down, similar concepts then emerge to fill the void that are official, such as Pokemon Quest or Super Mario Bros. 35. Game developers have a natural inclination to want to protect the integrity of their games, both to protect profits but also to capitalise on concepts. However this additionally extends further, as developers are also keen to maintain the integrity of their brand. For example, though the existing build and narrative of Doom remains as its own independent entity, as Kushner observes ‘id [Software] however, without a user license to govern the distribution of these early mods, had no control over how mods of its games might be represented or even sold.’ As such, the studio is therefore unable to prevent or limit to use of their game for illegitimate purposes. The most stark and tragic case of this is the Columbine massacre in the US, in which it was revealed through police investigation into the incident that the perpetrators had used a mod of Doom to rehearse the massacre. Such actions are of course deplorable and rightly condemned, and sadly it is incidents like these which have fuelled the narrative of gun violence being encouraged by gaming. It is therefore not just understandable but perhaps even expected that a modern gaming industry would now seek to heavily control the use of their games in light of this. It’s a worst case scenario, but it’s too high a cost to risk. Nintendo as a self-portrayed family-friendly brand whose biggest IPs include the likes of Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Pokémon and Splatoon would want to distance themselves as far as possible from unofficial or illegitimate projects.

---

This leaves us then at a precarious juncture between the modding communities existence and industry developers themselves. Both sides are dependent on one another as has been demonstrated throughout this essay, but the mantle of power is rooted within the latter’s camp. Modding communities are either herded to specific encampments where their activities can be monitored, capitalised on and maybe someday succeed beyond the culture itself, or they’re stamped out altogether, with fans’ efforts quashed before they have a chance to reach their prime or even while they are experiencing a surge of notoriety and popularity.

Current platforms for mod communities to at least exist without too much disruption is thanks to Valve’s Steam Workshop. By providing the community with a dedicated space for players to mod freely – or as free as could be under Valve’s terms of service and similar legality – have enabled future modders with tools and services to give them the capacity to continue authoring their own experience and enjoyment from games, even providing them, for a time, a means of income from such work. As Sotamaa observed ‘the support mod making has gained from the game industry has been crucial in the rise of the modding phenomenon as a whole.’ As Steam serves as the easiest foothold for players to engage with the modding community should tey be lacking in technical know-how, Valve has monopolised access to the community, which fortunately for the time being they aren’t seeking to exploit. For example, in 2015 Valve moved to remove paid mods from Steam which caused understandable uproar within the community. This example like others illustrates the uncomfortable climate they face, whereby the industry can simply assert its will over the community with little regard to those it affects and with little means of resisting or protesting such actions. In many ways, there’s the impression from the industry that they would like to have their cake and to eat it too, in that they would like to benefit from the interest and development of mods for their own games, but simultaneously don’t want to allow modders any credit or authority over such actions.

My belief is that the modding community needs to be further embraced and allowed its retraints eased on games, as when this is the case we can see that games thrive in almost all instances. Minecraft continues to outpace all other titles as one of the most successful and famous games of all time, and even today still does so with a healthy mod community subsisting beneath it. Its success has not all been hampered by the mods who work on projects they wish to see in the game, but more excels in that players can engage with their games in more exciting and enjoyable ways. To deny mod communities, much like how Nintendo shuts down any projects deemed to threaten their own work or brand, is a futile fight and ultimately only resorts in infuriating your player base and worsening your reputation, like a bizarre Streisand effect where to protect your image you only serve to worsen it. It is a common position that modding communities will always exist within the shadow of games, as even Pinchbeck admits ‘modding was going to happen anyway, so at issue [is] how best to harness it.’

Why fight the community when you could just welcome them with open arms and see what potential they can bring to the scene? Best case scenario, not only does the game succeed but new features are developed, more fans gathered, and a brighter future made for the franchise as a whole.

Worst case scenario? Murder Thomas the Tank Engine.

Scribed by The Arcademic

For references please click the links.