From the perspective of having basically no interaction with
video games, I found the first lecture interesting when discussing how much of
phenomenon particular video games are. The amount of popularity that some games
have is interesting and I never knew there was a difference between
“mainstream” games and “indie” games. It makes sense though that there would be
both mainstream and alternative games, as this is obviously the case for films
and music.
When reading the extended reading “The Mangle of Play”,
something that I found particularly interesting was the quote that “games are a
“mangle” of production and consumption” (page 200). I assumed that people
played the games and enjoyed the games as the designers had intended, however
that is clearly not the case. It is significant to note that the designers of
video games impact and effect the game they are designing, as well as the
players themselves. The red vs blue modding example clearly shows that and
emphasises how unpredictable these video games can become, to both the producer
and the consumer. The people who enjoy certain video games seem to take the
game further and find new ways of enjoying it by breaking the “rules” of the
game.
Is modding common? Or is it something that people can rarely
do, unless they have been playing that specific video game for a long time?
Modding is actually fairly common, and it runs the gamut from reskins (designing a new model for a character, such as the My Little Pony reskin we saw in class yesterday) through to more extensive, whole game mods-- for example, the realistic war game Arma 2 had an extremely popular zombie apocalypse mod made recently, named Day Z, which was created by a New Zealander named Dean Hall.
ReplyDeleteMany games have dedicated modding communities, some of them run through official channels-- in Team Fortress 2, an online shooter mentioned in the lecture, there is a community called the Steam Workshop run by the game's creators, Valve, where players create new weapons and cosmetic items which might later be added to the official game if they have enough positive feedback. Valve also use fan-made maps in the game, and there are several non-official modded game modes that can be played, such as Vs Saxton Hale, where instead of having two teams of equal numbers fighting as in the official game, one team of players take on a single extremely powerful, player-controlled character.
Outside of visual and holistic overhauls of games, it's extremely common to do simple sound modifications to games-- replacing audio files so that different music or voice clips play. This can be seen fairly often in another of Valve's games, Left 4 Dead, where people often give the opposing zombies voices from TV shows or movies to ease the horrific tone of the game.
If you're interested in seeing any of this modding at work, here are some videos with examples:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7Q8c8jnL3s <- a trailer for Day Z, the aforementioned zombie mod
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOacMbKZx5o <- STAR, a popular Team Fortress 2 player, playing Vs Saxton Hale
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMqPG4S80bo <- Left 4 Dead, modded so that all the zombies are using Randy Savage voice clips
Modding's "common" but those doing the modding have to have programming skillz. And be fanboys/girls of the game of course. I'd guess, really generally speaking, the a lot of pc gamers have played mods but don't make them themselves, that's me at least.
ReplyDeleteUntil reading this post I had forgotten how accessible the modding community is. Back in my early days of high school and the addictive time splurge of The Sims 2 I would go to around a dozen different websites where modded custom content was available for me to download in a zip file, unzip and then cut into the games files on my PC, and although I'm technologically inept it was amazing what these people were able to create and then share with players of the games. Some websites even charged to download what was considered their best "skins" and recolours of those skins. And so if that is exclusive to a single games community then just imagine the scope of the modding community inclusive of all games.
ReplyDelete