Slashdot.Org linked to a Popular Science story about people who mod computer games. Frankly, the article itself is rather boring if you already know about modding, but what did strike me as interesting was the questions that were left unasked and unanswered in the closing paragraph of the article,
Not all game companies are open-minded about mods. Console manufacturers like Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, which rely on game-disc sales and fear knockoffs, have yet to create a means for gamers to get under the hood of their titles, though that doesn’t stop them from trying. Microsoft’s PC-code-based Xbox, in particular, has the hackers salivating.
In fact there are also PC computer games who actively work to prevent people from modding their software. Roller Coaster Tycoon is the best example I can think of off the top of my head, where patches to that game were intentionally designed to prevent modding. Somebody would write a nice utility or mod and a new patch would be released that would break the mod.
Modding exemplifies the ongoing and ever-intensifying clash over who will control popular culture. What (most) game companies have discovered is that people who buy computer games do not simply want to play those games, but they also want to use games as a platform for their own self-expression.
In the past, companies have used intellectual property laws to keep people from telling their own sorts of tales this way. Fox and Paramount, for example, have both been activity involved in threatening and occasionally suing people who created web sites based on intellectual property they owned such as Star Trek or The Simpsons. For awhile, TSR — the original publishers of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game — tried actively to prevent the publication of third party material on the Internet.
From there it is just a short jump to some of the media reaction to the Internet. Surprisingly, “deep linking” (a completely redundant term) is still controversial. Organizations from National Public Radio to The Dallas Morning News and others have used both technical and legal means to try to assert control over how, when and by whom their content is viewed and/or commented on.
One of the interesting things that Popular Science misses in its almost-exclusive focus on mods for first person shooters such as Quake and Half-Life is that many people use computer mods as a sort of high-tech fan fiction.
My favorite computer game of the moment, for example, is Freedom Force — a squad-level superhero game that is highly moddable. The actual game featured a set of completely new superheroes, but user-created mods have tended to focus on well-known characters. There is, for example, an excellent 6-mission mod featuring the Fantastic Four and another featuring the Justice League of America. And, inevitably, somebody even created a Buffy mod.
The same thing goes for The Sims where not a few people used skins and other add-ons freely available on the Internet to simply use the game as a backdrop for telling stories they posted on the Internet.
The problem for companies that are in the popular culture business and want to stop this sort of thing is that it is becoming easier every day for computer users to create original content that is derivative of copyrighted material.
On the computer game mod front, for example, many companies are devoting a significant amount of the game development time to making it easy to create mods (so easy, in fact, that even I can do it). But across the board, it is becoming easier every year for someone to buy a CD or DVD or book and to use that as a starting point for new and unauthorized tales.
The response from companies, of course, is to try to slap a lid on that either legally or through technological changes to computers that would make try to make them locked boxes when it comes to copyrighted materials.
I don’t think any of that will work because I those companies underestimate just how powerful a pull this sort of thing is. I have a friend who is a very successful newspaper columnist who has a couple books under her belt a gig at a national newspaper. Several months ago she sent me a link to her new web site, and lo and behold next to links to all of her serious writings was a section devoted to story after story of Xena fan fiction.
It is just human nature to both want to listen to stories and tell, re-tell, and rewrite stories. In fact some of the greatest works of art involve such copying and adding, except if it happened today I get the feeling that Boccaccio and Petrarch would have hired lawyers to send cease and desist letters to Chaucer. Our culture would have certainly been the worse had they had to deal with the sort of rigid intellectual property laws that are now commonplace. Hopefully we will yet prevent companies from eviscerating that sort of borrowing and experimentation.