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Page 1: Textual Looters

textual looting: modding as a popular cultural practice julian r. kücklichuniversity of ulster

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overview

• what is modding?• a brief history of modding• modding and popular culture• modding and new media

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overview

• what is modding?• a brief history of modding• modding and popular culture• modding and new media

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what is modding?

• modification of digital games on the representational or gameplay level

• ranges from subtle changes (torch in doom 3) to total conversions (counterstrike)

• modding can also be used for political purposes (escape from woomera)

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doom 3 duct tape mod

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counterstrike

half-life

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counterstrike

counterstrike

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escape from woomera

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overview

• what is modding?• a brief history of modding• modding and popular culture• modding and new media

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a brief history of modding

• castle smurfenstein (1983)• doom (1993) – 10,000 wads

created from 1994 to present• half-life (1998) – hundreds of

mods listed on moddb.com• games such as the sims (2000),

gta3 (2001), halo (2001), and morrowind (2002) also have sizable modding communities

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castle smurfenstein

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doom mods 1994 - 2003

• aliens tc• batman doom• goldeneye tc• sin city• 2002: a doom

odyssey• doom raider• ...

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half-life mods

moddb.com

dragonball: break the limit

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the sims 2 mods

modthesims2.com

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overview

• what is modding?• a brief history of modding• modding and popular culture• modding and new media

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modding and popular culture

• modding tools are often used to inscribe popular cultural texts into digital games

• this can be seen as similar to henry jenkins‘ concept of textual poaching – however, it de-stabilizes game texts to a much greater degree (‘textual looting’)

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• modding thus emerges as a practice that fluidifies game texts and blurs the boundaries between games and other popular cultural texts

• this allows us to regard games and mods as ‘intertextual commodities’ (marshall 2002)

modding and popular culturecontinued

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overview

• what is modding?• a brief history of modding• modding and popular culture• modding and new media

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modding and new media

• modding thus draws attention to games‘ new media aspects– fluid rather than fixed texts– multiplicity of authorship– distribution more important than

production– convergence of different media forms– innovation from the margins

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questions?

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