A lot of what we read this week had me thinking about modding games and how game mods can be critical making. At what point do these mods critically engage with their media, rather than just making the game more readily usable by changing some game mechanics? Considering this vague question, I wanted to look at mods specifically and generally for Civilization V. While there are countless mods that add new mechanics to and tweak existing mechanics in Civilization V, I'd argue that the player's ability to extensively change the original game transforms modding into claiming the game.
In my experience, playing the same game for more than ten hours tends to make the game feel stale, and a lot of mods exist to "spice" up the gameplay. More than just sprinkling salt and pepper on some stale Civilization V, some mods render the game unrecognizable. Specifically, there is a collection of mods under the name "Vox Populi" that change not only the user-interface, but change aspects of AI behavior (AI being the other civilizations and city-states you play/fight with in game), complicate diplomacy, and overall change how the game can be played. Moreover, the name of the mod set "Vox Populi" speaks to how players want to be able to interact more in depth with their games. I see modding for popular AAA titles as a reclaiming of the game. Because these games are so popular and cannot keep up with players' suggestions and complaints, modding allows players to customize their gaming experience and mold it into their own unique gameplay.
I'd also like to mention another set of mods that add and modify playable civilizations. Civilization as an entire series has been criticized for the nations not included in the playable roster, and also for the ahistorical and often problematic representations of lesser known civilizations. By "lesser known civilizations" I really mean non-white societies and peoples that we are often not taught about in public education or accurately portrayed in media. Civilization has arguably been improving on this, by adding more colored options in the game (if I can crudely put it as such, which maybe I can't), but there still is a disparity. To address and correct this, there two main mod creators that either historically correct existing civilizations available for play or add lesser known ones. There are many mods, made by creators Tomatekh and JFD on the steam workshop, that add Native American, Pacific Islander, South Asian, and African nations into the game. They also diversify available religions in the game to make them more historical, such as adding Greco-Roman, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian denominations. These mods specifically critique the often lack of accuracy in Civilization V, while also educating the player on histories and cultures they likely have not heard of. I find these mods to be a type of critical making, in the sense that they are addressing structural failures of Civilization V.
Compelling interpretations "may most accurately describe both our everyday engagements with technologies and the physical reality of our materials: not made from scratch but in media res; not transparent platforms but patchworks of memory and practice. From third-party dependencies and plug-ins to emulations and repurposed hardware, starting in the middle is not some abstract idea… […] Negotiation and maintenance constitute the conceptual matter that makes up making" (Sayers 4)
I'm on the fence about the extent of critique these mods can achieve, as they will always implicitly adding value to the game without the mod creators receiving much financial benefit. I do, however, think that the mods I've discussed are transforming how players interact with games by introducing extreme customizability and making the game more historically accurate. I feel that the sheer amount and accessibility of mods makes games far more visible as a patchwork of "memory and practice" as Sayers uses to describe critical making and its conceptual matter. Increasingly, developers are able to release AAA title games without fully testing the game for bugs or glitches, and the initial release date of games is becoming more of a beta-testing period, despite developers not claiming it as such. In this sense, we are able to see more visibly just how games are products still in production, how they are still in the middle even after their official release.
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Sayers, Jentery. "I Don’t Know All the Circuitry.” Making Things and Drawing Boundaries.