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Writer's pictureNi'Gere Epps

The Extent & Limits of Mods

This week we focused on meta-gaming and mods in games. During lecture, we discussed the different ways that games are meta games (often times they're games within games or games about other games). We also went over some of the mod types: Form, Narrative, Identification, and Challenge. One of the mods that caught my eye the most was Breaksout, in particular the Bleak House mod. At first glance, it didn't seem like a mod at all, or even a game, it's just the a copy & paste of the novel "Bleak House" by Charles Dickens. There's no objective, player interaction, characters, etc. It (Bleak House) uses Breakout as a module but does it still count as a game? Does a story within a game still count as a mod of the game? Or is just using the form of the game to add something (seemingly) unrelated?

This made me wonder: Can a mod go too far, to the point where it’s no longer a mod but an entirely different game? By changing multiple elements of a game, how far does one have to go before it’s no longer considered a mod, or is there no limit? One game that comes to mind is Dota Underlords (or Auto Chess or Team Fight Tactics). This new genre of auto chess stemmed from a mod of Dota 2, which is a multiplayer online battle arena (in which two teams of five players compete to collectively destroy a large structure defended by the opposing team). However Dota also stemmed from Warcraft 3, a real-time strategy game in which players collect resources, train individual units and heroes, and build bases.In this case, the auto chess series (turn-based tactical strategy game that pits you against seven other players in round after round of resource-management action) is a mod based on another mod, but has become a completely different game with different mechanics and affordances than the original Warcraft 3. Do we / can we consider Auto Chess as a mod of Warcraft, and if so, are there any aspects (i.e. different characters, narrative, lore, etc) that would make it no longer considered a mod. In discussion we mentioned how Radiator barely feels like a mod and more just the use of the Half-Life 2 engine.


Lastly, if we consider a mod to be a game within, or around a game, how does one differentiate between mod and reference / influence? To sum up my questions, what is the extent / limits of a mod?

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jdw23
Nov 11, 2019

I've always thought we need to reconsider how we think about mods, from not only an artistic perspective but a legal one as well. To me mods are inherently their own game. It's weird that we can entirely change the rules of a game, to the extreme of something like autochess, and still refer to it by its original game. And there's very little to protect its intellectual property. Even simple mods can drastically change the gameplay. I think it's very important that everyone starts reading mods as their own games.

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Brooke Werdlow
Brooke Werdlow
Nov 10, 2019

I was wondering a similar thing when playing Breaksout, both because of "Bleak House" and because of some of the other versions, like "Unfair Breakout" where the platform is so long that there is no risk of the ball falling and therefore there aren't really any stakes to the game. I wondered if it could even be considered a game around a game, or a game within a game, etc, if the actual "game" is just a screen that you watch and can't interact with. That definitely made me think about the limits of mods, mainly because "Unfair Breakout" takes away pretty much the only mechanic from Breakout. It's clearly still a mod of the game, but it almost doesn't…

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Lawrence Coldon
Lawrence Coldon
Nov 10, 2019

To answer your question, I think a mod can go too far, but at that point it is no longer just a mod. I think the limit of a mod is determined by how much of the source material is integral to its story or functioning. If the mod can exist without having a basis in its referent then at that point you have something that is more than just a modification, at that point it's its own entity. After a mod has gone too far, I feel like you have created something more like a spin-off where you may want to play the original game to understand how you got here, but you don't necessarily need it to play…

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LuisSierra
Nov 09, 2019

I was grappling with this very same question about how a mod differentiates itself from the source material when exploring one of my favorite sandbox games from high school, Gary's Mod. As a mod of Half life 2 that utilized the engine to give complete control to the player in a similar way to Forge in Halo, Gary's Mod changed the goal of the game, tying itself to half life through player models, sandbox setting, and game mechanics but giving the player the tools and ability to control these different aspects to create their own gaming experience. At times I think about how the games title is also a reference to the mysterious G-Man, the character responsible for pulling the…

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