From the article: "As a thought experiment, one could imagine we are modders of a different sort; we are not game modders but Web modders....We are invited to participate, to take an active role in constructing profiles, tweets, videos and knowledge bases. Many of these infrastructures are owned by large media corporations and so, like modders modding games, we shape the face of commercial products, extend their market lives and give them dimensions that the original designers of the systems did not anticipate."
This is a great way to put it. A new game comes out, people buy it, play it, share it, and eventually shelve it. This happens with most games, and when you think about it, it kind of sucks. Games aren't cheap these days and many gamers expect more out of them. Modders provide this service. They take the original game and change things to make it new and exciting again, maybe even more fun.
This is especially true with DOTA. I personally don’t usually play games anymore, but this was an exception. I saw my older brother playing DOTA this summer and I was intrigued. I snuck a few games in when he wasn’t home and I admit it was fun, definitely addictive. I eventually bought Warcraft III for myself and played whenever I had free time. This shows how mods can really improve how well a game sells. Warcraft III is not a new game, it’s like seven years old now. The only thing that made me buy the game was a user created mod, and tons of people are still playing it seven years later.
But Blizzard didn’t pay a single penny for people to create DOTA; they just raked in profits. DOTA wasn’t exactly a mod because it was created using map editors, but the following question from the article holds true: are mods just free labors for gaming companies, or are they part of participatory culture? It’s definitely both. Blizzard no doubt made profits from people buying Warcraft III just for DOTA. Valve made profits from Half-Life because of people wanting to play Counter-Strike, and eventually making even more by putting a price tag on it. But it’s also a participatory culture because those users didn’t mod the games looking for profit. They loved the games so much they wanted to do more with them—eventually making great additions to them.
Thank you!
Michael Chan
I like the fact that you (as well as a classmate in an earlier post) brought up DotA, or Defense of the Ancients, as a major mod that has done so much for the blizzard community as well as Blizzard itself. Although it is just a custom map made by a handful of guys who loved the Warcraft 3 engine, I believe that it can definitely be categorized as a mod considering how the game dynamics, narrative, and gameplay is so different from the original game. Moreover, I think that Blizzard has done an amazing job at allowing players to create their own "games" through the map editors that come packaged with their RTS games. Taking into consideration the hundreds if not thousands of custom "maps" that Blizzard's community has developed over the years, I know for a fact that many people have and will continue to purchase these games- such as Starcraft 2 and Warcraft 3- with the understanding that they are not only purchasing a game but a platform from which the potential for new games is endless. Regardless of the motivations of the players behind these custom maps, the fact is that they are given an opportunity to explore and customize their gaming experience. If it so happens that as an externality, albeit an expected one, the company fattens their wallet, why should anyone judge the gaming companies (specifically referring to the modders using the Unreal Engine)?
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