Mods: Internet Play-Doh

Who makes the games? The developers right? But who makes the games fun? I would say the players do that. While the developers choose what your restrictions are, but it’s the players who decide how to play. At first this meant things like glitches and secrets, with people seeing how fast they can play, or seeing if they can fight the last boss before even beating the first one, but game developers now recognize this and are starting to offer choice in their games. From games like Bioshock, simply choosing whether you’re the nicest goody-two-shoes to grace the land or the most monstrous horror in the pixilated realm, to games like Grand Theft Auto, full do-anything sandbox games, developers recognize that letting people play their own way is important in a game. And the best way to do this is with modding.

For a long time mods have been a part of gaming. Modifying game files for download is so popular there are entire sites (FPSbanana.com, moddb.com)dedicated to nothing but having lots and lots and lots of mods for download. From simple skins, like making your grenades look like watermelons, to full-blown brand new games, user-created content is becoming increasingly respected by game developers. The Playstation 3’s hit game LittleBigPlanet is proof of this, a simple platformer whose main selling point was the ability to easily create your own maps and make them available for online download. Before even that was Halo 3 with its Forge map editor, allowing you to create custom maps and game types. Back before console online, in the days where PC gaming was king, games like the 1998 Starcraft had deep map editors allowing people to create their own battlefields and even make new game types. In the professional Starcraft leagues in Korea, the only maps used are user created, since the developer Blizzard didn’t make their maps very fair to all three different races you could play. Some games actually started out as simple mods before being picked up by big name developers and made into official releases. Team Fortress was a Quake mod, Counter-Strike was a Half-life mod, and Defense of the Ancients (DOTA) is a popular professional game made from modding Warcraft III. The game Garry’s Mod is a game that allows you to put any item from any game on the Steam gaming platform in any setting from said games. The entire purpose of the game is to give user-created content an easy interface to use. Kind of a “baby’s first modding” if you will.

Of all the game developers, VALVe has probably been the most receptive of user-created content, as they damn well should be considering a significant chunk of their games (Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source, Garry’s Mod, Team Fortress 2) started as mods. They’re well known for making their source coding readily available and easy to find for anyone who wants to mod. They’re also very supportive of it, with their updates for games like Team Fortress 2 consisting of mostly fan-made content they decided to make official.

As people become more computer literate and games become more mod-friendly, I think we can expect to see some really innovative stuff start coming out. From minor time-wasters to the next big gaming revolution, the modding community keeps biggering and biggering and biggering and I think we can expect to see a lot more cool stuff to come.