Modding Means Metafiction

During class, we discussed the fact that Save The Date and Doki Doki Literature Club both allow or even encourage players to interact with the files and behind-the-scenes software elements of the games. This got me thinking about a type of metagaming we haven’t discussed much: modding.

Modding is a very broad term, and covers a whole range of productions, from stylish new outfits to help my Sims better appear as starving Dark Ages peasants to what amounts to entirely new games built on the platform of another release (check out the Oblivion mod Nehrim for a very cool example). Many mods fall somewhere between these two poles, adding new areas, stories, characters, and experiences to the original game without radically changing the entire game. This strikes me as a fascinating and radical form of metafiction, wherein the player becomes a co-author of the game by injecting their creation into not only their own copy of the game’s text, but also those belonging to everyone else who acquires and uses the mod.

While many metafictional and postmodern literary works gesture towards interaction with the reader, and perhaps even engage the reader directly by inviting them to draw or write within the pages, these kinds of interactions are discrete and limited to the one reader and one copy of the book. Even fanfiction, likely the closest analogue to modding in literature, remains forever in the realm of paratext, read after or next to a work. A reader is never invited to, nor likely would think to, rip out pages and passages of text and staple their favorite fanfiction into the original book’s binding instead (at least outside of wishful fantasy and headcanon).

But that is exactly what modding allows. The text of a game is not fixed-feeling in the manner of a novel or film, and gamers can mutate and alter their own copies of a game until it is unrecognizable compared to the original release. In this way, I think games are ultra-metafictional, in that much of their pleasure actually comes from their constructedness and our access to that internal scaffolding. Every game that can be modded can then also play host to an infinite number of versions of itself, which develop not from its original creators, but from the interactions and inspirations unearthed and expanded within the game by its players, an infinite variation expanded even further by the infinite combinations created by mod-sharing platforms and fan communities.