The Three Types of Mods and Why Radiator 1 Isn't A Mod

I think whenever one is making a conceptual or discursive intervention, one ought to first take a positive account of the way in which the term is deployed before determining how the scope of the term should be expanded or contracted as well as how additional categories can be elaborated within the existing or modified scope. One widespread modding practice is the changing of game graphics and textures to improve the quality of the game. Another frequent modding practice is to fix glitches or remove annoying/unsatisfying mechanics to allow for or increase a game’s playability. This class of mods notably has significant overlap between modifications by the actual developers of a game and by the independent modding community. Fixing bugs and improving graphics is something done both in canonical game updates and non-canonical game modifications. As such, I think, using the model of prepositions that Boluk and LeMieux expand on in their discussion of metagames, such mods should regarded as modding with the game. This sense of modding with should be understood as directional, that is, there exists a true game to be wrought from a series of initial errors and that the game can be revealed or produced by a series of mods towards this ideal. This type of modding is with the developers’ intentions, either directly in that the modification comes from the developers or indirectly in that players are taking steps to create mods that are consonant with the developers’ intentions.

Naturally, if there is modding with, there must be modding against. The most frequent form of modding against is the removing of violence or adding of peaceful resolutions to games in which violence is required to proceed. Such mods includes a Fallout 4 mod that adds the option to pursue non-violent resolutions at all junctures or a GTA V mod that removes all weapons and makes NPCs invincible (Family Friendly Free Roaming). Modding against and modding with should not be thought of as a distinct binary but a spectrum by which mods relate to developer intentions and players’ changing understandings of the form of the canonical game (what a game is conceived of as initially and later dominant conceptions of the game need not be and frequently are not the same).

In Alexander Galloway’s essay “Love of the Middle”, he describes the three classically understood modes of mediation as exegetical, hermeneutical, and symptomatic, or put prepositionally with, against, and on, and as such, since modding is a type of mediation, I think the third and final form of modification should be modding on. This category I think is the most expansive and comprises a majority of modifications. Almost all of the Breaksout mods fall under this category. They take the base game and use it as a surface on which to do something primarily creative or additive. Modding on need not take such a drastic form and can consist in merely the adding of a character or weapon or mechanic into a game to allow one do more or differently without any relation to the canonical game. To take an example that Alvin mentioned in discussion session, the mod of Dark Souls where all of the textures were replaced by pizza is neither with or against developer intentions but rather uses the game as a surface on which to innovate, with the unparalleled innovation being pizza hell.

What about a game like Radiator 1? I contend not that people do not consider Radiator 1 to be a mod, but rather it would be to our advantage discursively not to consider Radiation 1 a mod. The principle idea of modding is that the thing that is produced is a modification of another thing, with, in the context of videogames, that other being a videogame. What is occurring with a so-called mod like Radiator 1 is not a modification of the game Half-Life 2 but a creation with the engine in which Half-Life 2 is created. As such, I think it is more useful to regard Half-Life 2 and Radiator 1 not as existing in direct relation to each other via the idea of modding, but of existing as separate constructions of the same video game engine, in identical relation as Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life 2. They are both separate elaborations on a set of constraints, but unless you consider a video game engine to be a game unto itself, I think the term mod is not usefully applied to Radiator 1.