Computer Game Modding
From Mod Mania
Contents |
Introduction:
Computer game mods are becoming an increasingly stronger practice among the gaming community, with more and more game developers encouraging mods of their games and with support and accessibility to them for the average game enthusiast increasing exponentially.
This introduction to computer game modding is not necessarily intended to give a history of computer game modding, but rather an incite in the change and development of recent computer game modding culture, communities and developer support.
Brief Summary of Computer Game Modding
Recently, computer games have often been designed with modifications in mind, this, in turn, allows computer games to be modified by gamers without much difficulty. These mods can add an extra level of replayability and interest, which in turn propagate the life of the game.
The Internet provides a very dynamic way to promote and distribute mods, as well as a strong and flexible environment for people to collaborate with fellow modders on mod projects (forums, instant messaging, teamspeak/ventrilo, wiki's) and is therefore the perfect breeding grounds for modding communitys to establish themselves. With intellectual property set aside, game developers have targeted modding as a primary factor to make their games commercially succesful. Game developers such as Bethesda Softworks, id Software, Valve Software, Crytek, Epic Games and Blizzard Entertainment ship their games with the very development tools or at least some of them, which were used by the game developers, along with increasingly better documentation to assist game modders, this opens up the doors for the level of success seen by immensely popular mods such as the Half-Life mods 'Counter-Strike' and 'Day of Defeat'. In turn it also lowers the amount of experience needed to 'mod' and thus increases the number of potential modders.
Types of Game Mods
There are two distinct types of game mods that the majority of computer game mods can be classified under. These are 'partial conversions', small additions or changes to a game and 'total conversions', mods which completely revamp a game to make it seem like an entirely new, different game.
Partial Conversion
A Partial Conversion is a term used in computer game modding culture to describe a mod that only changes part of the original version of a game, for example making Super Mario's nose blue. The majority of computer games allow the modders to change how certain parts of the game works, such as sounds, weapons, enemy behaviour and levels (or adding entirely new levels, for example with tools like Blizzard Entertainment's 'Warcraft 3 World Editor'). Modifying some of these things and leaving the majority of the other parts of the game in their original or 'vanilla' state is commonly referred to as a 'partial conversion'.
Total Conversion
A Total Conversion is a mod of a game that commonly replaces almost all of the art content of a game (characters, environment, buildings etc) and sometimes even changes some of the core gameplay mechanics, in rare cases changing the genre of the game entirely. In some cases modders also set out with the aim of selling their finished mod, though this is rarely possible due to the fact that many game developer companies restrict the sale of mods based on their game. Though this is not impossible (sometimes games become freeware, or already are) the commercial success of these mods is usually very limited due to the fact that freeware games arent generally very popular and also by the time that a popular game becomes freeware, for example when you could get Age of Empires 1 in boxes of Nutri-Grain, it is usually very outdated in terms of visuals and has already lost alot of its fan base.
Some very succesful Total conversions, or TC's, to note are 'Counter-Strike', which greatly exceeded the popularity of the original game 'Half-Life' and Team Fortress, which is regarded as one of the most popular mods ever made (which was originally a conversion for Quake), a sequel has also been made due to its immense popularity.
Modding's Benefits for Game Developers
In recent years the amount of computer games that ship with construction sets, adventure editors or any other sort of tool (map editors for real time strategy games etc) which consumers can use to edit or add to the game (or completely revamp the whole game and make it a totally different new game!)they have purchased has increased.
A primary reason for this is because more game developers have begun to realise the benefits of people modifying their games, the strongest pointer (and what causes a bunch of other benefits for the game developers) being the possibility of a strong/large community building around the modding of their game. The benefits of having this supporting community (which are almost constantly churning out more and more additions to the game - in ideal situations) is that with these additions there also come more people interested in the game (certain mods attract certain groups of people - just how certain music attracts certain people, etc, etc.)
-For example how cat women attract cat men... lol
Image from a 'TES: Oblivion' mod called 'Divine Avenger's CM Partners Compilation [1]
Anyway, while most modders (people who mod) primarily work on 'partial conversions' to games, there are some (usually groups of people in one large project)who try to tackle the huge task of completely overhauling a game and morphing it into something completely different and independent of the original game (called a 'Total Conversion' as stated above). While mods like these are rarely succesful/completed there are rare cases which do achieve this, an example being 'Day of Defeat' (a mod for half-life which was very succesful) these sorts of mods can encourage people to buy a game (that they might hate) but absolutely love a certain total conversion mod of the game.
An example of this might be someone who dislikes any sort of fantasy-futuristic settings (half-life) but really enjoys the history associated with WW2 based games, or mods (eg, Day of Defeat). This is a perfect example of what I meant when I said earlier; "more game developers have begun to realise the benefits of people modifying their games".
That being said, on average the benefits from the mass of 'partial conversion' mods is still, generally, a greater benefit to the game developers because, as previously stated, 'total conversions' are rarely completed, and even rarer than that are they completed to a high standard of quality. The great part about these smaller additions/conversions to games are that they provide incentive to keep playing a certain game and advance further within the game world than what was previously possible. For example; the addition of more 'quests, higher levels, more weapons, more characters to chose from, more people to interact with etc etc.
In conclusion, possibilities for games with extensive support and idiot-proof tools are endless - anything can be done within the constraints of the game engines capabilities (which are also increasing at a very rapid rate).
The All Too Frequent Birth and Death of Game Mods
Unfortunately, the majority of mods which are started never leave the drawing board, or fail not too far down the track.
Timmy the Tyranical Ten Year Old
An increasing reason for this is that as modding tools become more user friendly the number of potential modders increases, simultaneously the experience required to make mods also decreases, which is seen as a good thing by the game producers and generally is a good thing, but it can be a nightmare to the select few serious modders. The reason for this potential nightmare is that the decrease in required experience opens up the door to younger, inexperienced 'modders'/'game developers' and with a younger age also, generally, comes a shorter attention span and limited experience.
Due to the sly nature of the internet it allows for said, young people, or 'kids' to claim something they are not. For example: "Hi my name is Robert Jones, I'm 28 and have been modding since I was 10 and can dedicate at least 20 hours a week to modding and I'm looking for some people to help me on this mod" when in actuallity he should be saying; "Hi, my name is Timmy, I'm 10 and I want to start an over ambitious project that I'll make a logo for and then let the fairies do all the hard stuff". This usually leads to ruin for the mod and thus wastes the time of the serious modders who were sucked in by Timmy's play as a 28 year old. Though, when the Timmy figure disappears, his perhaps great idea might be continued by the other members of the modding team, which isnt really much of a setback.
Game Mod Team Pitfalls
Other common reasons for mod failure are over ambitious mods, inexperience ,work loads increasing (school/uni and real world jobs) and another major reason is people going 'mia' (missing in action) or in other words found something that they find more interesting.
The last one of these reasons is usually a major problem with modding teams (2 or more modders working on one or more unified projects), as, for example, some of the team members might not like the direction in which the 'lead' modder is directing the project and thus leave the mod team, or just lose interest in the mod project. Such inactivity or resignation from even one of the modders can spark a chain reaction among the other members of the modding team causing an uproar, alot of 'bitching' among the modders and in most cases more members leaving the project.
People leaving a modding team can cause yet another major problem which can be fatal to a computer game mod. The following is a common scenario of such a situation:
'After 10 months of hard work the lead 3d modeler, Jimmy, of a total conversion mod that converts 'Half-Life 2' into a game where men with big guns ride pink ponys starts to lose interest in the mod. He decides to leave the team because X new game just came out and he wants to play it until his brain melts.
Two weeks later the other 5 members of the modding team are scratching their heads and wondering 'what happened to Jimmy?'. Another week passes, and still no Jimmy, so the lead modder who is in charge of organising the whole team and synchronising everyones work posts a new topic on their forum asking if anyone has any of the 100 3d models Jimmy made over the last 10 months. The next day, all the members of the team have posted a reply, he counts all the models that they found on their computers, thats 5 plus my 10 he thinks, 15, then posts that total on the forum.
Confused and stunned he decides to sleep on it, the next day, he logs onto the forum and reads the 20 new replies to the topic, ranging from "Ok, lets hope that Jimmy shows up soon" to, "We're ******! **** this I'm leaving this stupid project". So the lead modder doesnt have much choice and decides to post "lets keep working on the mod for another one or two weeks and hope Jimmy shows up". Unfortunately, 1 week later, theres no Jimmy and theres only 1 person left on the modding team.'
There are lots of possible situations that can ensue from a member leaving a modding team, the above is just one to do with content management. Though not uncommon to modding teams with little experience, something like in the example wouldnt happen to an experienced group of modders as they would ensure that most of the members have the content backed up on multiple computers.
Another thing that modding teams use to keep their members in check are 'non-disclosure agreeements' which are signed by each mod team member to make sure that the members abide by certain set rules. For example, all the content X modders create can not be used for any use outside the mod apart from inclusion in a portfolio. Though again, this is hard to enforce over the internet, and not many mod team leaders would go so far as to file a lawsuit.
Reasons to Mod
Wanting to get a job within the gaming industry is one of the main reasons why people mod games. Modding is a very good way to prove your skills, dedication and ability to mod a game to potential employers and probably (depending on how good your mod is) succeed and get a job out of it.
But, the only way to achieve this goal is to follow through with your mod and make it the best it can possibly be, as the rewards are judged by the popularity of your mod among the gaming community.
Even if you don't get a job out of your mod, you can always add it to your portfolio.
'Hackers'
Some mods are used by gamers to grant themselves unfair advantages in multiplayer games (in other words, cheat) and the users of which are usually called 'hackers' by the gaming community. An example of such a mod would be an auto-targeting mod where no manual aiming would be required by the player. Some other examples include, faster movement speeds and increased starting credits etc, etc. These mods are considered as cheating, and are frowned on within the gaming community, especially when a match is ranked and the outcome will affect the involved players' statistics.
In recent years some third party programs have been developed (and come shipped with select games) to detect such 'hack' mods and remove them from the offender's computer. Some game developers restrict playing multiplayer entirely if you do not have such software installed on your computer. An example of this software which has become quite succesful in recent years is 'PunkBuster' which "was the first system proven effective against cheating in online games."
- Quote from http://www.evenbalance.com/index.php?page=info.php
Conclusion
I hope this article (or rant, whatever you want to call it :P ) was useful to you, and if you ever decide to mod a game, hopefully you'll be wary of some of the problems which you're likely to encounter and prevent them before they happen. Also, it's important to note that alot of what I have mentioned here also applies to pretty much every online community out there, watch out for those Timmy's :P
RESOURCES:
The majority of this was written from my own experience within the computer game modding community in previous years, but I also used a few references for some of the facts, quotes and images, they are listed below.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mod_(computer_gaming)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game
http://www.evenbalance.com/index.php?page=info.php
http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?id=3099&view=OblivionMods.Detail&comment_page=3
