Why gaming ‘modders’ should be celebrated
The most frightening thing in Capcom’s new horror game Resident Evil Village is not the mutilated hand of protagonist Ethan Winters, nor the 9ft-tall Lady Dimitrescu with her razor-sharp fingers: it is Thomas the Tank Engine. Just days after the game’s official release, members of the online modder community, who hack games to alter graphics and gameplay, have already offered a raft of ludicrous additions to the game, including replacing the face of a baby with that of a grizzled soldier and swapping every monster in the game with Barney the Dinosaur.
Thomas is special for gamers, though. Since a modder first swapped the dragons of Skyrim for the cheery blue locomotive in 2013 (prompting legal threats from IP holder Mattel), he has been incongruously shoehorned into all manner of games. Most memorable was the mod that replaced Mr X, the mutant villain of Resident Evil 2, with a huge Thomas who stalks you with dead eyes, his theme tune jangling eerily in the background.
A mod is like the gaming form of a remix, a fan-made alteration which can range from small graphical tweaks to huge overhauls in gameplay. Modders edit games as a form of creative expression and an exercise in fandom. Some projects that start life as mods go on to become games in their own right, including some of the most influential titles in gaming history.
The practice of modding is most common not on consoles but in computer gaming, where it is easier to edit a game’s code and files. Construction sets — programmes that facilitate tinkering with a game’s internal organs — first became commercially available in the late 1980s, and by the 1990s many developers were releasing modding tools alongside their games, realising that these could extend shelf life by allowing fans constantly to create new content.
The first large modding community formed around the influential shooter Doom, released in 1993, thanks to developer ID Software’s openness to community creation and the new possibilities for sharing afforded by the internet. Maxis released modding tools for the first Sims game before its release, and companies such as Bethesda create robust modding programmes which contribute to the endurance of its Elder Scrolls series. Even when developers don’t provide purpose-built modding tools, the strong communities around websites such as Nexus Mods and Mod DB are always able to find a back door to reshape a game by editing its code.
There is a dizzying range of mods available, with more than 100,000 available just for Skyrim on Nexus Mods. These might be graphical enhancements that make weather effects more realistic, tools to randomise dungeon layouts and refresh the challenge for hardcore players, or unofficial patches to fix bugs that the game developers missed.
Most mods are just for laughs, though. In Skyrim you can play as Sonic the Hedgehog, transform every guard into a gruff chicken, engage a musical bear who follows you around singing “We Will Rock You”, or enlist an avatar version of beloved YouTuber Shirley Curry, aka “the Skyrim grandma”, as an in-game companion.
In some cases mods also enhance representation for diverse players. One mod for GTA V adds an LGBT pride parade to the fictional city of Los Santos, while a forum called The Black Simmer helps black Sims players find clothing, skin tone and hairstyle mods that enable them to create characters who feel more authentic.
Some of the most innovative ideas in gaming started life as mods, perhaps because modders are able to take risks due to the small scale of their projects and the fact that they are motivated by passion rather than profit. So Half-Life’s Source engine was used to create mods that went on to become influential games, including narrative ghost story Dear Esther and mind-bending office drama The Stanley Parable. Numerous online multiplayer games that started life as mods, such as Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, PUBG, DOTA and DayZ, are credited with spearheading entirely new game genres that continue to dominate today.
Despite support for modding in some corners of the industry, developers today are less keen on releasing modding tools and sometimes make their games deliberately difficult to edit. This is partly because mods cause copyright disputes and can facilitate cheating in online play, but modders suspect another reason: the rising revenue potential of microtransactions and downloadable content means developers want to sell extra game content themselves rather than let players create and share it for free.
Such efforts to block modding are unnecessary and shortsighted. Mods not only keep fan communities engaged and extend a game’s replay value but also boost sales: when the DayZ mod was released for ARMA 2 in 2012, it caused a huge surge in sales for what was then a three-year-old game.
While inserting Thomas the Tank Engine into a horror game may seem frivolous, the modding community symbolises all the best facets of gaming culture. Mods demonstrate the ingenuity and passion of gamers. Modders argue that games belong to the fans that love them. They stress that gaming is an art form built on hacking and subversion, that the act of play can be extended into experimenting with a game’s internal code. Modding should be celebrated, for when players spend countless hours rewriting a game’s base elements and share the results freely with their community, it is not an act of vandalism — it is an act of love.