For The Love of Mod.

I found this section of the article to be very interesting. In a way it links very closely to a previous blog I wrote on the “Creator versus Consumer”.

Is the term “Free Labour”(2007) used by Mactavish the right one? I think it isn’t because as I’ve said before in my other blog there are more motivating factors in this world than a pay slip. There are some things money can’t buy, for everything else there’s Web 2.0 as these mods are now distributable to a large enthusiastic and growing community. The line between role of game modifiers and game developers has always been fuzzy. The interactivity of Web 2.0 has blurred the barrier to higher degree than before, dimmed in the din of countless prosumers. What’s the original? Who owns that mod? In a sense this level of interactivity has never truly existed with analogue products. Products are malleable and copy able to an extent never seen before. And when it comes to knowing the true original it’s now for the first time hard to see the trees for the forest.

Examples of the unclear nature of authorship in the digital age abound, a good example I came across recently was on the Marvel Comics official blog.

http://marvel.com/blogs/Marvel_Interactive/entry/1623.Psylocke%27s_Top_Five_%27What_the--%3F!%27_Gaming_Moment

To celebrate the release of Psylocke as a downloadable character for the new release of Ultimate Alliance 2, a video game featuring Marvel Super Heroes, they were doing a rundown of her top 5 strangest video game appearances. This was interesting for many reasons.

One it was on a blog, an example of web 2.0 and encouraged the exact spirit of feedback that mods thrive on. Two the addition of Psylocke as a downloadable character is an example of a modification albeit one sanctioned and produced by the original game developers. However the third reason is the most striking.

Nestled in amoung the other four strange video game moments all from normal games by normal developers was a commercial mod of the game Quake. The Ravages of Apocalypse. However playing required users to have to both own Quake the original and this is why most people have never heard of it. Because even as early as 1998 the spirit of Web 2.0 was beginning to show and people were unwilling to pay for a mod when there were already several free, highly successful Quake mods available within their  internet community.

When Mactavish says " the games industry... treat player-production as a[n].......extension and expansion of games sales."(2007) He is correct however we are only truly beginning to see the role of this. Games such as Counter Strike, online multi-player games, have seen sales that have benefit the most from the creation of mods. Perhaps this is linked to their cooperative interactive nature that sees them having the most mods. Again if people do mod for recognition with an internet community it is only natural to expect the first mods to occur within games with built in communities.

Bibliography:

Mactavish, Andrew. “Licensed to Play: Digital Games, Player Modifications and Authorised Production”. A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Ed. Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. 2007. 349-367.