PLAY / COUNTERPLAY: THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF DIGITAL GAME MODIFICATION

ALBERT BRADY CURLEW

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JOINT GRADUATE PROGRAMME IN COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE YORK UNIVERSITY AND RYERSON UNIVERSITY, TORONTO, ONTARIO

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1+1 Canada Abstract

The modification of pop culture by its users happens with such frequency that the output of these practices, as well as the emerging cultural politics attached to them, should not be ignored. This dissertation explores the cultural politics of the modification

(or "modding") of digital games by their users in applying a contextual triangulation of cultural studies, political economy and critical information studies to several relevant case examples that identify, analyze and interrogate how user modification of digital games is affecting and being affected by interactions and confrontations between media users, corporate producers, and wider social and political forces.

The concept of modding offered here, broadened from existing conceptions by emphasizing not only the structural alteration of game code but also the potential alterations of conceptual influence (via the borrowing and re-expressing of ideas, themes and subject matter from existing sources), is tied to user creativity as expressed in the concept of participatory culture, itself theorized here as animated by play and playful experimentation within spaces of possibility. Framed in this way, modding is positioned not as a recent gaming phenomenon, but one bound to the entire history of video games as technological forms and to a wider socio-cultural history of playing with cultural forms in general. As such, attempts to contain, regulate or commercially exploit user behaviour (by erecting boundaries of play) are challenged by modification's links to play and playful experimentation that appear both cultural and natural, manifesting in what I call counterplay, the oppositional or disruptive practices of some creative users.

iv From the nuanced perspective offered by disciplinary triangulation, modding is rendered as a multi-dimensional cultural practice, bound both to forces of user empowerment offered by socio-technical change and to forces of user exploitation present in existing socio-economic structural realities. Ultimately, what becomes clear is that how modders negotiate this contested terrain works to persistently redefine the role of media users and expected user behaviour in the popular cultural environments they play in, play with and play against.

v Acknowledgements

This project has come to fruition only because of the patience, support and guidance of my supervisory committee; thus, I am forever indebted to Greg Elmer,

Barbara Crow and Steve Bailey. I thank them for their attentive criticisms, thoughtful comments and continued encouragement, even as my quirks challenged their thresholds for tolerance.

I am thankful to have had the privilege of working with the faculty, staff and associates of the Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture at York and

Ryerson Universities, especially Kevin Dowler, Myles Ruggles, David Skinner, Fred

Fletcher, Darren Wershler-Henry, Andrew Herman and Mary-Louise Craven. Rosemary

Coombe deserves special gratitude for her support during my comprehensive exams and feedback on the early drafts of this project. For their participation in my dissertation defence, I thank Bart Simon, Markus Reisenleitner and Peter Cumming. Many thanks are due to Diane Jenner for always having the answers to my questions and for picking me up when I was at my worst. For reasons too numerous to list here, thank you also to

Ken Werbin, Jen Jenson, Imre Szeman, Dennis Desroches and Andrew Mactavish.

I am grateful for the support, friendship and collaboration of my fellow spelunkers through the depths of graduate school, especially Zach Deveraux, Fenwick

McKelvey, Ganaele Langlois, Peter Ryan, Yukari Seko, James Cairns, Alison Harvey,

Danielle Deveau, Michelle Coyne, Marcos Moldes, David Meurer, Aleks Kaminska,

Lauren Cruikshank, Megan Humphrey, Nis Bojin, Ryan Bigge and Ren Bucholz.

vi For my sanity, I thank Cathy Boyd-Withers, Karen Solomon, Karen Hardtke,

Sean Coleman, Dr. Frank Cashman and Dr. Robin Rosen. For my inspiration, I thank

Professor Hershel Layton, Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, Dr. Gordon Freeman, Huang Lee,

Kyle Hyde, Ashley Mizuki Robbins, Henry Hatsworth, Maxwell the Scribblenaut,

George Stobbart, Nico Collard, Uriel Septim, Guybrush Threepwood, Larry Laffer,

Roger Wilco, Jade, Pey'j and Double H.

For a strong support base, I thank my wonderful family and friends, including

Albert and Lorraine Curlew, Crystal Curlew, Chris Baker, Rhonda Kirkpatrick, Charles

Barone, Tanya Humphrey, Meghan Muldoon, Scott Stoneman, Kathryn Allan, and Ryan

Ardelian.

Finally, for my happiness, I extend a heartfelt thanks to Heather Colpitts.

Without her lasting love, patience and support, none of my endeavours, let alone this one, would be as complete, rewarding and meaningful.

On the Roots of this Project

To frame the motivations behind this project, a visual allusion is useful. York

University's homepage features a rotation of five or six images, each supplemented with a number of observations drawn from different disciplinary foci, all in an attempt to emphasize York as an interdisciplinary institution. For example, the image of a human brain is accompanied by observations that suggest that in the image a philosopher sees

"Descartes," whereas a neuroscientist might see "synaptic misfire" and an educator simply sees "a sponge." Another image in this rotation is that of a video game

vii controller, accompanied by observations that suggest a psychologist sees "disappearing interpersonal skills," a health scientist sees "rising obesity rates" and an educator sees a

"teaching aid." But what do we who study communication and culture see? I'm not represented in this graphic, nor are many of my colleagues that study games from the standpoints of cultural studies or political economy. Thus, this project is an attempt to concretize what someone from these disciplinary backgrounds might see when presented an image related to digital games.

From the same image, as a cultural analyst, I see the practice of play intersecting with technology, and I see that such intersections are rarely without their politics. What

I have provided in this dissertation is an examination of the cultural politics that surround one extreme example of play intersecting with technology: digital game modification or

"modding," in which playing games takes a back seat to "playing with" games.

Furthermore, a culturally-focused perspective sees modding not simply as a practice on the leading edge of "new" media engagement, but one that is bound up in very old cultural realities (that people modify the world around them) and specific political realities (that "change" is frequently an exercise of power). So modding will not be treated here as brand new, nor will it be treated as limited to digital media or computer technologies, despite the accelerations and enhancements offered by these inventions.

Instead, modding is treated here as an expression of participatory culture, the cousin of do-it-yourself creation, friend of collage and sibling of the remix. As such, it is a cultural reality, as well as a practical reality in the everyday lives of many people,

viii including me, hence my interest in this subject. Explaining this demands that I share some of my personal history with modification.

My younger years were spent in a small, isolated community with limited access to the affordances of the city and it was modification that frequently filled a practical need, particularly for things like replacement parts for vehicles and appliances. My father can be accurately described as a "tinkerer," an amateur inventor and modder of all things mechanical. If a required part was unavailable, he built what was needed from what was already on hand. Some of my earliest attempts at cultural modification came from this world of mechanical tinkering. But the generational differences between my father and I mark differences in our modding experiences as well. Whereas my father's modifications were predominantly physical, mine became predominantly non-physical, stretching into digital spaces by way of mass-consumer computer products in the 1990s.

Via the personal computer, I started experimenting with the structural manipulation of digitally-stored content like photos, music and eventually video games.

We can add to this personal history a more generalized cultural history of conceptual modification. Despite that getting into digital game modding is somewhat demanding in terms of the technical knowledge needed, it is very easy in terms of the universal familiarity we have with game modification in general. It is not hyperbolic to suggest that we have all been game modders at the conceptual level. The experience of creating unique "house" rules for board games or sports that sidestep the formal, prescribed rules is quite common. I recall, as a child, the shock of playing Monopoly

ix with a friend's family because the rules they used differed so much from those used in my family. Years later, I remember being further shocked to learn that neither rule set

conformed to the official instructions offered by Parker Brothers in the game's box.

These histories of cultural modification - being both personal and general,

structural and conceptual - have motivated me to develop and refine the understanding

of game modding (and the cultural politics involved with it) present in this dissertation.

This is an understanding that sees an extraordinary potential in the ways that people can

change, for better or worse, the cultural objects that surround that. It is an understanding that has come to reverberate in a favourite quote of mine by British games researcher

James Newman (2004): that "meaning is not embedded within a game, but rather is revealed through its use" (2). I would like to think the same is true for culture in general.

Finally, a Few Words of Administration

Borrowed quotes appear as they did in the sources from which they were poached. Therefore, some of the norms of punctuation and the regionally specific

spelling of words in quoted passages may differ from what appears in my writing (which

generally conforms to Canadian/British standards). This is the case even though presenting "labour" and "colour" as "labor" and "color" is clearly ludicrous. Referenced material that does not include page numbers, especially from online sources, features

"np" to represent "no page" is available.

Images herein come courtesy of the internet and have their copyright owners

identified when such information is available. However, they are presented here without

x permission but in accordance with the exceptions to copyright infringement afforded to research under "fair dealing" in Canadian copyright law. Section 29 of Canada's

Copyright Act asserts that "Fair dealing for the purpose of research or private study does not infringe copyright." This assertion has been clarified by the Supreme Court of

Canada's 2004 decision CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada with the

statement that "the fair dealing exception, like other exceptions in the Copyright Act, is a

user's right. In order to maintain the proper balance between the rights of a copyright

owner and users' interests, it must not be interpreted restrictively" (II. 48). For the research project that follows, I invoke my user's right of fair dealing in regard to the

images borrowed.

XI Table of Contents

Abstract iv

Acknowledgements vi

Table of Contents xii

Quotes xiii

Introduction: How I Committed Murder on the Mean Streets of Springfield 1 Chapter 1: From Playing to Playing With: A Critical History of Digital Game Modification 52

Chapter 2: To Play With Fire: Participatory Culture, User-Generated Content and New Patterns of Cultural Production in the Digital Age 79

Chapter 3: User Mods as Free Labour: The Political Economy of Games Modification 120

Chapter 4: Play Out of Bounds: The Cultural Politics of Digital Game Modification 139

Chapter 5: Case Analyses: From "Foxed" Mods to Fixed Deals, Keeping Play In Bounds .... 165

Chapter 6: CounterPlays: Disruptive Opposition and Negotiation in the Contemporary Modding Mediascape 194

Chapter 7: CounterPlay as Counterculture: Modding Against the Grain 231

Conclusion: Poachers, Puppets and Property Rights: Redefining the Role of the User of Digital New Media 257

Bibliography 271

xn This is no time for play / This is no time for fun This is no time for games / There is work to be done modified from Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat Comes Back

A playful disposition need not imply a forgetfulness or abandonment of politics. - modified from Angela McRobbie (1994: 3)

Xlll Introduction:

How I Committed Murder on the Mean Streets of Springfield

Video games: the reason this generation... is the best ever.

- Homer, from The Simpsons episode "Dangerous Curves" (2008)

Homer Simpson is a lousy shot. After easily dodging bursts of his incoming machine gun fire, a teammate and I corner him in a familiar-looking kitchen, its purple coloured walls and corn-cobbed curtains peppered with bullet holes. My partner, skinny centenarian

Charles Montgomery Burns, takes aim at our target with his lightning gun, fires a bolt of electricity across the room, and the body of Homer Simpson falls dead to the checkered floor in front of a tacky green refrigerator. Mr. Burns and I (belching drunk, Barney Gumble) are victorious in yet another team deathmatch. Excellent.

Most everyone with some familiarity with popular culture will recognize the names mentioned above as characters from the long-running television show The Simpsons, and that the actions described take place within the distinctly decorated Simpsons' home. Many reading this will also understand that the actions themselves describe a multiplayer video game - a first-person shooter, played with others over a network in a "deathmatch" mode, in which the goal is to be the first to "frag" or kill your opponents a set number of times.

What might not be immediately clear to the reader is that the video game described above is not a Simpsons game - at least not officially. To clarify, the makers of the game did not acquire permission to reproduce the likenesses of the characters mentioned or pay for a licence from the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, the corporate owners of The

Simpsons and all its intellectual property. The example above is a modified version of a

1 computer game called Quake III Arena (1999) - a version of the game in which the dark science fiction elements of the Quake series are replaced by user-generated visuals that replicate the colourful cartoon style of The Simpsons}

Such a process is an example of participatory cultural production known as modding or the modification of digital game content by its users (Au 2002; Sotamaa 2004; Postigo

2007; 2008). Most definitions of modding refer specifically to the accessing and altering a game's underlying digital code, but the conception used here is broader and more inclusive.

Here modding is the practice of two related processes, each ingrained in how human creativity is exercised. First, as in the previous definitions, it is an act of structural alteration - the appropriating of the actual form of a source object and the altering of it.

Second, it is also frequently an act of conceptual influence - the borrowing of ideas, themes and subject matter from existing sources and the re-expressing of them. Under existing definitions, the products of game modding practices are generally referred to as mods, or player-developed alterations or additions that get "layered onto" existing digital code that can change a game's content and aesthetics, as well as its gameplay (Postigo 2008: 61). In this project I extend the use of mods to include products of conceptual influence as well, given its centrality alongside structural alteration in the practices that are described below.2

The modification of digital games is part of a wider trend in media content appropriation and manipulation by non-professional creators that has proliferated in the age

1 At the time of this writing, a video demonstration of The Simpsons mod of Quake III Arena could be found on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34LtrnnXQTc 2 This is due to the influence of scholarship that identifies the multiplicity of the concept of "code," one incarnation of which posits intellectual property as a kind of code (Lessig 1999). Therefore, playing with intellectual property, which might only occur on the conceptual level, is still a kind of modding of code.

2 of ubiquitous computing and the internet, at least in the "developed" world. The same technological affordances and human creative drive that put Homer Simpson on the losing

end of a lightning bolt in my Quake III deathmatch also accounts for YouTube videos edited

together from select bits and pieces of Tom Hanks films to make a faux trailer that suggests

the actor will be playing the famous title role in the next James Bond movie. The same

affordances are at work in the world of music when a DJ mashes together "Bootylicious" by

Destiny's Child with Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" to create "Smells Like Teen

Booty."4 Indeed, beyond the influence of digital technology, the forces that drive these

cultural modifications are at work when a little-known author takes a classic piece of English

literature and injects into its narrative a healthy dose of undead mayhem, as Seth Grahame-

Smith has done with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), credited to Jane Austen and

Grahame-Smith. Significantly, consuming audiences are paying attention: that book has

become an international bestseller, and the YouTube mash-ups described have received

millions of views.

But these products and practices are not merely alterations to existing work by users.

Modding, beyond its technical definitions, is indicative of a set of wider social processes that

intersect with culture, law, politics, economics and technological change. As such, it is

imbued with all the complexities that come along with cultural production and participation

in the contemporary mediascape.

3 See "Tom Hanks is James Bond" at http://www.vourube.com/watch?v=9wOcOr-2-pE 4 Hear "Smells Like Teen Booty" at http://www.voutube.com/watch?v= 14RkAYM640

3 The project that follows aims to address these complexities by identifying, analyzing and interrogating the cultural politics attached to the practices of modding, where cultural politics refers to identifiable relationships between culture and power as they intersect in contemporary societies (Giroux 2000; Nash 2001). Since it is very often corporately-owned media content that is being modified by users, this project assumes a lopsided expression of cultural power relations, weighted in favour of corporate producers by state rule-frameworks or cultural policies (like copyright law) and manufacturer terms-of-use contracts (like end-user license agreements) that attempt to codify just what users can and cannot do. However, given the gravity of the reactions to modding detailed herein, this project also assumes that modding practices have the potential to disrupt dominant notions about the ownership and "proper" use of corporate products that circulate as part of our popular media cultures. Consequently, my research aims to explore possible disruptions through the cultural politics emerging from ever- important intersections, conflicts and negotiations between media users (who have gained extraordinary productive powers), traditional corporate media producers (who have been forced to react to new user powers), and the wider social and political forces that govern both industry and user activity.

Specifically, it asks (1) what politics emerge from the accelerated ability of digital game users to appropriate and modify the properties they consume, and what politics emerge when the owners of those properties react to user modification? In turn, this project also asks (2) how do the cultural politics attached to modding practices affect

4 the role of the user of new media culture, as well as the expectations placed on user behaviour? Answering these questions includes testing a hypothesis developed throughout the project: that the concept of play, which I theorize as a motivating factor for the participatory cultural practices that include modding, can be used to explain how and why users modify the popular media spaces they play in, play with and play against, even as some reactions to modding render user actions illicit, illegal or targets of potential exploitation, making play the new metric against which cultural modification should be studied. Each of these areas of concern can be successfully addressed through a close critical analysis of the phenomenon of digital game modding, which has only recently started to be explored in an academic setting (Schleiner 2005; Sotamaa 2007b;

Postigo 2007; 2008).

Tackling these questions is, of course, the chief purpose of this project, but not its sole utility. What follows here also functions as a critical history of digital game modding and the growing body of academic and popular discourse about it, concentrated in one text.

It also develops and refines a conceptual vocabulary for talking about modding - one that positions it as part of broader cultural phenomena not offered in existing scholarship and ties the history of modification of digital games to the history of the medium itself. Finally, it provides an interdisciplinary synthesis of research methods for the study of participatory culture.

5 On Digital Games

For my purposes here, "digital games" will be used to refer to all types of video games (usually played on a TV-linked console, arcade unit, cell phone or portable gaming device) and computer games (played on a personal computer, sometimes over networks or on the internet).5 I have chosen to work with digital games for several reasons, not the least of which being their increasingly frequent identification as "the emergent cultural form of our time" (Wark 2007: 022), despite being despised as junk culture in many circles and still underexplored in academic settings. Working against the idea of critics who suggest that digital games "offer no opportunity for creativity and present no raw materials for creativity, imagination and productivity to be developed" (Newman 2008: 7), this project points to instances that highlight the creative potential of gamers who modify the game properties they encounter. My focus on the medium is chiefly based on the increasing malleability of many games, particularly those released for play on PCs (it should be noted that the majority of game modification, in terms of structural alteration, happens with computer-based games). Galloway (2006) argues that games "lend themselves to the practice of modding in ways not seen in other media like film or literature" because a game's technical capacities are not necessarily tied to any particular gameplay genre: "A single game engine may facilitate a wide variety of individual games," thus maximizing creative potentialities

(Galloway 2006: 112). Indeed, these mods vary from those that simply incorporate new visuals into an existing game (like The Simpsons / Quake III example above) to those that

5 See Kerr (2006) for a detailed discussion on contested series of names used to describe what she and I refer to as digital games.

6 eliminate all gamic and interactive functions and become examples of abstract digital art

(Schleiner 2005; Galloway 2006).

Digital games are also important media for the study of content appropriation and manipulation by users because of the online communities and cultures that have proliferated around their modification. Websites that cater to video game fan communities and mod sharing have been around since the beginning of the web in the mid-90s, with Usenet discussion groups and FTP download clients existing pre-web, and, of course, print-based fan journalism and hard-copy code trading existing before that. However, with the advent of games that rely heavily on creative player input, such as The Sims (2000), came an explosion of websites dedicated to the discussion and sharing of player-made game objects (Curlew

2004) - thus allowing the games industry (not to mention scholars) to keep track of how consumers are using the games they play. It is possible to trace out the past and present of the modding phenomenon from the web footprints left by modder communities, particularly since many of the highest profile mods are the products of collective efforts by creative people from all over the world and the web is the only practical medium for community connection.

The number of varied reactions by the games industry to the modding phenomenon is also very important. At a time when many media-producing corporations are more stringent than ever about protecting their intellectual property - to the point where the trade association of the American music industry has successfully sued individuals who share

.mp3 files for hundreds of thousands of dollars (Krauskopf & Haycock 2007) - the games

7 industry has, to a certain degree, accepted and even embraced having their properties modded by users (Au 2002; Positigo 2003; Sotamaa 2007b). However, as I outline below, many contentions still exist.

Furthermore, a significant degree of justification for studying anything related to digital games can always be derived by spouting the latest figures about how the multibillion-dollar games industry has, in the last three decades, come to rival Hollywood in both economics and influence, produce tens of thousands of creative jobs, and occupy the leisure time of millions around the world. Business analysts estimate that 2009's worldwide industry revenue was over $60 billion, and that figure could surpass $70 billion by 2015

(Takahashi 2010). The economic strength and continued growth of the industry is often

cited as a result of the mainstreaming of gaming outside of traditional target markets in recent years. Indeed, a 2007 Ipsos Reid survey notes that, despite lingering misconceptions that digital games are only the domain of young males, women and girls make up 42% of

Canadian gamers, and an increasing percentage of players are over 50 years old (Hickling

Arthurs Low 2007: 4). Such information should not discount the prevalence of gaming

among young people - a 2008 Pew study found that 97% of American teens play digital

games with some degree of regularity (Lenhart et al. 2008: 8) - but should emphasize an

expanding user base. Along with the demographic reach of digital games comes their socio-

cultural impact on the pop culture experience of contemporary industrially-developed populations, suggesting that the most popular gaming franchises like Super Mario Bros., The

Sims, Guitar Hero and Grand Theft Auto are well ingrained in the cultural knowledge of

8 millions. How that knowledge is interpreted, expressed and returned into the pop cultural mediascape is ripe for analysis.

Additionally, the global success, cultural impact and technological character of digital games have inspired Kline et al. (2003) to position games as the "ideal commodity" of a post-industrial economy (291). Kerr (2006) expands on this thesis by suggesting that:

Digital games appear to epitomize an ideal type of global post- industrial neo-liberal cultural product. As products they are based on the innovative fusion of digital technologies and cultural creativity; as a media industry they exploit global networks of production and distribution with little to no regulation; and as a cultural practice they embody the liberal ideals of individual choice and agency. (1)

Thus, as sites of intersection between conflicting politics, contested cultural attention, creativity and technological innovation (both from their users and producers) digital games and the cultures of leisure and work that have emerged around them - and increasingly, within them, in the form of online massively-multiplayer games (Taylor 2006) - are important sites of study and impossible to ignore in twenty-first century media and cultural studies.

"Playing With " Digital Games

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, my focus is on digital games because they are objects of play. Play's umbilical connection to both nature and culture makes it a versatile rhetorical tool through which to analyze human behaviour. Sutton-Smith

(1997) relays that "communication theorists tell us that / play is a form of metacommunication far preceding language in evolution because it is also found in

9 animals" while "sociologists say that play is an imperial social system that is typically manipulated by those with power for their own benefit" (6/7). This volatility makes the negotiations between players and producers explored here all the more interesting: play is at once innate and natural, yet susceptible to socially-constructed power relations.

Also, the concept of play, as game theorists Salen and Zimmerman (2004) remind us, "implies interactivity: to play with a game, a toy, a person, an idea, is to interact with it" (58). As interactive play forms, it is often assumed that games involve active engagement from their users in ways that mass media forms like television, more traditionally regarded as passive, do not. This quality of games, however, is often bound up in the complication that exists in defining just what "interactivity" is and how it relates to the rhetorical value of digital media. For example, the mainstream popularity of digital games, while accompanied by discourses debasing the medium as mindless and violent, is also accompanied by suggestions from digital Utopians about the extraordinary potential of active participation in the unfolding of on-screen events. "Interactive media," suggest Kline et al. (2003), are "celebrated for creating a new caste of media audience: an active subject parting with the tyranny of mass media for the freedom of joysticks" (16). Critics have rightly lampooned this notion of interactivity for falsely implying that playing digital games is more democratic than other forms of media

consumption. Even in games with high levels of character customization and multiple paths to completion, players are still at the mercy of parameters programmed into a game by its makers. As Kline et al. (2003) suggest, players do not make choices per se, but

10 instead make selections from a set of possibilities offered by programmers. Certainly, being able to customize your route through a game, or choose which abilities or tools your character employs, can be fascinating - but it is "hardly a matter of radical openness or deep decision about the content of play" (19).

However, this complication of play and interactivity assumes that there is only one level of interaction possible between users and play objects (or media texts in general). This is not true of the concept of play, which, as this project will emphasize, defies attempts to contain it by being fostered in containment. To be clear, in Salen and

Zimmerman's (2004) definition of interactivity, they mention a possibility for "beyond- the-object" interactive engagement (60).6 This different category of interactivity does not merely involve playing digital games (in the sense of actively directing the action of playable characters on screen), but instead involves real audience participation with a game as a cultural object. Here, one is not merely playing a game, but playing with it.

It is at this meta-level of interactive engagement where gaming's most enthusiastic followers move "beyond the objects" of their play towards a group of cultural activities to which game modification belongs.

The most adamant gamers - those who make digital games their primary leisure activity - do much more than simply play games (Newman 2008). These gamers engage each other online (on gaming dedicated forums such as NeoGAF) or in person (sometimes at

6 They classify several modes of interactivity, from the cognitive conversation between users and systems that precedes user engagement, such as thinking about chess moves based on your computer opponent's last move, to explicit participation within the interactive system, such as "using the joystick to maneuver Ms. Pac-Man" (60).

11 huge annual conventions like Penny Arcade Expo) to celebrate, discuss and debate the technological, economic, political and narrative elements at play in the exercise of their hobby. These people, suggests Bogost (2008), form communities of practice, or social groupings "around which people collaborate to develop ideas... values, strategies, and approaches to the practice of play itself (119).

Much of the negative discourse surrounding the use of digital games, especially the sensationalized media-effects rhetoric and moral panic that is distributed via the news media, fails to recognize that a significant portion of gamer community attention and focus occurs outside and beyond the games themselves. To paraphrase Bogost, communities of practice are founded on the social practices of playing, sharing and talking about games and not simply the practices represented in games (119). As part of a community of practice, a player is very rarely just a player - he or she may be a game reviewer, critic, and unofficial spokesperson. He may be a tournament promoter, game spoiler or cheater; a game curator, software archivist and pirate game distributor. She may be a fan author extending game narratives, a "cosplayer" (costume player) who recreates game character costumes, or a modder who alters the code of the game. To play with a passage from Newman (2008), "no longer do we necessarily offer primacy to the player" but also to "the array of activities that take place within the broader cultures of gaming" including "differing engagements and interactions by individuals and groups acting sometimes as players, sometimes as readers of games as texts, and sometimes executing technical and technological intervention and modification" (17).

12 Thus, any research that aims to elucidate the cultural politics of game modification demands an expansion of focus to include not only rituals of playing digital games, but also and more specifically/?laying with digital games. Within this "shift in analytical focus away from the game as something to be played to something to be played with," the digital game remains the focus of research, but "we are no longer dealing with a singular means of engaging with it" (Newman 2008: 17).7

Having noted the affordances of focusing on digital games, this project seeks to join an ever-growing, interdisciplinary body of work in the academic study of games and gaming cultures (Kline et al. 2003; Wolf & Perron 2003; Newman 2004; Newman 2008; McAllister

2004; Raessens & Goldstein 2005; Dovey & Kennedy 2006; Kerr 2006; Galloway 2006;

Taylor 2006; Wark 2007; Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter 2009). However, associating my work with such company should not be seen as an attempt to limit its scope. Although my analysis focuses on playing with digital games, I believe my findings spotlight a phenomenon that can be adequately extrapolated to work with other media forms and ways of popular culture consumption. The world of gaming represents the most thematically cohesive links to the kinds of "playing with" involved in modification, along with some of the most fruitful examples, but there are obvious intersections with music remixing, fan fiction writing, and user-edited videos, to name just a few, that analysts of such things may find useful.

7 The rhetoric of "playing with" digital games to refer to creative production by users is not unique to my work - Newman (2005) and more prominently Newman (2008) develop a similar concept using this phrase. Much of the writing here about the concept was started independently before my research led me to Newman's work.

13 Theoretical Perspective and Methodology: Contexts in Triangulation

I will be conducting theoretically-informed case studies that identify, analyze and interrogate how user modification of digital games is affecting and being affected by interactions and confrontations among new media users, corporate producers, and wider social and political institutions. The majority of cases analyzed in later chapters point to instances of modding that reflect the cultural politics of the practice that mostly occurred over a four-year period from 2005 to 2009. These instances were tracked via the scouring of daily feeds from internet-based gaming news sites, most notably Joystiq.com,

Kotaku.com, Wired.com's GameLife blog, GamePolitics.com, Gamasutra.com,

Destructoid.com, and GiantBomb.com, scraping news postings of stories featuring modding or mod-related content. Across these sites there were no less than 320 relevant stories featured during the tracking period. Examples that best reflected, refuted or intersected with the cultural politics under study here were focused on, analyzed and turned into the larger case studies featured.

This case research demands an interdisciplinary approach; thus, I borrow from tenets of cultural studies, theories of participatory fandom, digital game and play research, policy studies concerning intellectual property, and the political economy of new media. The theories of production and consumption that ground my research are predominantly informed by the disciplinary approaches of British cultural studies and the political economy of communication, as well as the criticisms and compliments proponents of either have for

14 the other (du Gay et al. 1997; Mosco 1996; Maxwell 2001). I am working under the hypothesis that any complete analysis of media objects (and their producers and production, their users and uses, their social influences and effects, etc.) must involve the application of both disciplines and a reasoned negotiation of the differences between them (Meehan 2000).

Given its attention to user re-creations of popular media content, my research contributes chiefly to the subsection of cultural studies referred to by Henry Jenkins as the study of participatory culture (Jenkins 1992; Deuze 2006a; Schaefer 2008), or (more recently) as convergence culture (Jenkins 2006a; 2006b). However, given its attention to how post-industrial economic strategies by corporate producers shape (often exploitative) reactions to user behaviour, my work can also be read as a contribution to the neo-Marxian political economy of new media (Dyer-Witheford 1999; Kline et al. 2003; Postigo 2003;

Terranova 2004). Finally, much of my work also addresses regulatory practices affecting information and cultural products, particularly within the realm of intellectual property, and therefore can be read as contributing to critical information studies (Coombe 1998; Lessig

2004; Vaidhyanathan 2004). Ultimately, then, I am combining the qualitative methodological approaches of cultural studies, political economy and critical information studies in triangulation, identifying and articulating the contextual realities raised by each approach in the analysis of modding.

British cultural studies here refers to the disciplinary and analytical tactics developed primarily at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) starting in the 1950s (see During 1999; Storey 2001). However, some of the most influential figures associated with the CCCS, such as Stuart Hall, avoid institutionalizing the Birmingham School as genesis for cultural studies, instead preferring to call it a "discursive formation" with "no simple origin" (Hall 1999a: 98).

15 More specifically, the research methods employed here offer contextualized interpretations of user interactions with and manipulations of digital game texts, conforming to the participatory culture perspective that "meaning is not embedded within the game, but rather is revealed through its use" (Newman 2004: 2). Since different disciplinary approaches treat and value the meaning revealed through user activity differently, I triangulate approaches by acknowledging their incongruent features as tied to specific contexts. Context is derived by identifying the situation-dependent conditions in which connections between social forces and social realities are formed.

Thus, objects of study "may acquire different meanings and get articulated to different politics in different places, getting intertwined with a host of political agendas" where

"ideologies are produced out of possibly contradictory elements" (Saukko 2003: 50-51).

Assuming what is initially observed in each case is not indicative of necessarily final truths, my use of contextual triangulation will show how varying-but-related disciplinary perspectives differently interpret these observations, then weigh the results against each other to offer a best possible reading of the phenomena under study.

To better conceptualize my triangulating of multiple disciplinary approaches, it is valuable to think not in two dimensions, but in three. For example, maintaining the allusion to geometric shapes, this analysis is less about tying together cultural studies, political economy and critical information studies in a triangular pattern, and more about how they intersect within a three-dimensional solid, like a triangular prism. All light shone through a prism is slowed down, bent and divided into spectral colours, but when

16 the angle at which light hits the prism is changed, the direction and intensity of its refractive output also changes. There is no single, correct path for light to travel through a prism, it is instead contextually dependent. Thinking in terms of prisms "highlights the fact that reality changes when we change the methodological perspective from which we look at it" (Saukko 2003: 34). This example provides a functional analogue for my approach in what follows here, as well as the philosophy that drives it.

Developing and refining this methodology is a key part of my work. Such a dialectical approach will be useful not simply for the study of cultural politics of game modding, but for all sorts of areas where intersections and negotiations between users, producers and regulators of cultural products exist. Thus, even when the subject matter explored herein is rendered out of date, the methodology developed for it will render the project itself valuable.

Modification, Culture and the Digital

Before tackling the concerns laid out above, however, I must take the time to define some terms and concepts I will be employing. Chief among them is the concept of modification. A romanticized reduction of modification to its expected meanings reveals as primary the concepts of alteration, fluctuation and deviation from original form. Modification in this sense celebrates the impermanence of all objects and the malleability of all things. It marks the power of people to amend the world around them, be it naturally occurring or human built. It can be the practice of tearing something apart and putting it back together in a different form - being potentially destructive and

17 creative at the same time - or it can be an act of simple manipulation of fluid variables.

It is the practice of change working against fixity, and, as this project theorizes, it is bound up in human behaviour and culture, for better or for worse. We mod so frequently we take for granted its ubiquity in our cultural lives. There is no shortage of examples of things we transform through conscious modification as societies, institutions, communities and individuals: our bodies, our landscapes, our tools, toys and vehicles, our stories, songs, cultural texts, laws, languages, values and religions. It should be no surprise then to include games in this list. "Modifying games" writes Alex Galloway, "is almost as natural as playing them" (2006: 112) - a sentiment shared by both game historians (Schmittberger 1992) and play theorists (Caillois 1961; DeKoven 2005).

However, it is possible to articulate modification away from this romanticized conception and attach it to a set of necessary complications, at least in terms of the cultural politics at play in the digital game modification. To best understand how modification will be deployed in this project, a brief history lesson is required.

Forty-two hundred lines into book seven of John Gower's Confessio Amantis, or

Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, a mammoth, late-fourteenth century morality poem and contemporary of The Canterbury Tales for Middle English literates, appears one of the oldest uses of the verb "to modify" in English, as identified by the OED (1978: 576):

18 ...so as it is Set of the reule of Policie, Wherof a king schal modefie The fleisschly lustes of nature.. .9 (Gower 2004 [original 1390]: VII, 4208-4211)

The OED (1978) suggests this now-obsolete understanding of "modify" means "to limit, restrain, keep within bounds'" (576, my emphasis), with the act of modification being "a limitation, restriction or qualification" (575). This definition, more akin to the current conception of moderation, obviously differs from our more commonplace understanding of the modification: "To make partial changes in; to change (an object) in respect to some of its qualities; to alter or vary without radical transformation" (576). But what is perhaps most extraordinary is that the contemporary state of digital game modification explored here embodies both of these definitions, despite that the actors involved seem to be at odds in respect to which conception of modification they subscribe. Those doing the modding are attached to the contemporary definition based on change and alteration; those who make the products, objects and ideas being changed or altered have, as this project will suggest, unilaterally resurrected the dead definition of modification based on restriction and limitation. Thus, modification here should not simply be understood as a simple process of change, but also a potential process of control, as well as a structuring concept for the remainder of this work. Indeed, the intersections, conflicts and negotiations between producers and consumers emerging out of practices of digital game modification all embody elements of modification's etymological contradictions. Accordingly, the intersections,

9 My blind translation of what Gower's 620 year old passage means: sex is bad and state regulation is needed to restrain it.

19 conflicts and negotiations related to this duality of modification play out on the battlefield of culture - itself the manifestation of the contest that occurs when change meets freedom and control.

A central position in contemporary cultural studies holds popular culture to be a terrain on which prevailing ideologies are distributed, but also challenged (Storey 2001;

Williams 2006). Culture is "neither an autonomous nor an externally determined field, but a site of social differences and struggles" (Richard Johnson, quoted in Coombe 1998: 17). In this conception, culture is formed and challenged through "instances in which identity is asserted and difference claimed through expressive activities that deploy meaningful forms," in opposition or because of disconnectedness, presumably (Coombe 1998: 23). Culture emerges here as places, objects, expressions and consequences of conflicting power relations in the social sphere of everyday existence - positioned as "locus both of domination and transformation" (25), with commercial popular culture and its cultural products never fully determined by their producers because of their users.

By "cultural products" I mean the artifacts, texts, images and sounds that "have an influence on our understanding of the world" as containers and communicators of

social meaning, artistic expression, and entertainment value (Hesmondhalgh 2002: 3).

Examples include informational, aesthetic, and leisure-consumed media like books, movies, television shows, paintings, magazines, video games, software programs, websites, and so on. "Cultural production" refers to the action and process of creating

such artifacts, either by cultural industries who aim to sell them, or user-generators

20 whose goals may not be profit oriented. By "producers" I mean the centralized cultural industries involved in manufacturing and circulating cultural products, such as the film and television production industries, broadcast corporations, book publishers, software developers, game makers and advertising companies (Hesmondhalgh 2002: 12). For my purposes here, the term "users" will refer to those people who, on various levels, interact with the cultural products described. A user is not simply an analogue subject to the audience member of a television show, the reader of books and the player of games.

While a user shares the role of consumer and interpreter with these other subjects, his or her actions are far from limited to consumption and interpretation. For example, if TV viewers, readers, players perform expected actions of reception on the level of the text involved (TV show, book, game), users are those who may engage with such products beyond the text itself.

Just what constitutes a game modification by users? Mods are broadly defined, even among those who study digital games, so answering this question comes with a set of necessary complications. Within the cultures surrounding digital games, there are mods of hardware and mods of software. The former includes practices like case modding, where individual users customize the outer shells of gaming units (most often

PCs) to suit their aesthetic tastes, often including elaborate design offshoots and ambient case lighting (Simon 2007). There are also console mods where inventive users transform or reconfigure the guts of a gaming machine to make a wildly different but functional version of the system. For example, console modder "Vomitsaw" has turned a

21 toaster into a working Super Nintendo, or rather, a "Super Nintoaster" (G. McElroy

2009), and others have re-engineered Sony PlayStations (normally played via connection with a television) into self-contained, handheld devices, complete with mini-visual display (Heckendorn 2001). More contentious is console hacking, which involves

invasive interaction with games hardware to allow bootlegged or pirated games to

function on the system - such as soldering a "mod chip" onto a console circuit board to bypass copy protection measures. While these forms of hardware modding are interesting and loaded with their own sets of cultural politics (Simon 2007; Schaefer

2008), this type of modding is not my focus here. My work explores software modding

of digital games - mods of the games themselves (and their conceptual influences), not the platform on which they are played.

To accurately understand software modding, one must first understand new patterns

of cultural production in the digital age and the role of user-creators within it. There is no

doubt that our plunge into networked digitalization has significantly altered the way certain

cultural industries and certain cultural consumers operate. Patterns of cultural production

and consumption that were comfortably codified to benefit those who hold the means of production are changing (Levy 1997; Lister et al. 2003). New media, and especially the

digital computer, which reduces all information to numerical representation (binary code), have the ability to "remediate" or refashion and emulate old media forms, utilities and

content within in a new functional dynamic (Bolter & Grusin 1999). As cultural forms become digital, their means of production and dissemination become more easily accessible

22 to people who were predominantly categorized as consumers under industrial capitalism.

Distinctions between producer and consumers are being reorganized and barriers are collapsing, much to the chagrin of established commercial producers who, in the past decade, have suddenly found their business methods undermined and threatened by people using computer applications like BitTorrent and Adobe Photoshop to illegally distribute or alter their products. In digital form, existing cultural products are often made malleable.

This is significant because the formerly fixed and "non-conversational" output of media - like a TV broadcast, Hollywood film, or piece of recorded music - when digitally emulated, can take on a more participatory form. For example, users can isolate, edit (including eliminating or extending certain features) and remix a digitized movie, song or video game using various computer software editing programs, resulting in a kind of creative consumption of those media texts (Jenkins 2003). Users can also distribute the rearticulated product via the internet with relative ease. Thus, creative consumers of digital media are given enhanced access to two potentially empowering productive opportunities:

1. Generative opportunities: they have the ability to make and circulate cultural products of varying degrees of quality reasonably cheaply (at least when compared to standard industrial production budgets) via desktop publishing, software programs like Adobe Flash, PC music- recording and mixing software, digital cameras, display venues like YouTube, file sharing networks, etc.

2. Manipulative opportunities: they have the ability to capture, isolate, modify, and redistribute existing creative work (sometimes with but mostly without permission) on a

23 mass scale via programs like Photoshop, iMovie, sound editing programs, and "mod" tools provided by video game companies, etc.

These trends of digital culture allow what Nicholas Mirzoeff (2002) calls an

"empowered amateurism" - an ethos of interacting with cultural objects that destabilizes long-standing beliefs in professional authority (6). "User-Generated Content" (UGC) and "User-Created Content" (UCC) are the current buzz phrases most associated with the objects and practices that result from the online contributions of the "empowered amateur" public, namely, content produced or shared by those who traditionally have been only consumers or users of professionally produced materials. However, the labels

UGC and UCC are imperfect. They suggest that the resulting content has its genesis with users alone, potentially excluding existing work which is simply redistributed by users, or existing work from which something is subtracted, added or changed by users

(Wunsch-Vincent & Vickery 2007). This ignores the user activity and involvement in generating possibilities of pop cultural participation that takes place in the redistribution and alteration of existing goods. To my estimation, an accurate understanding of user interaction with and modification of popular media content includes some conception of the above excluded practices, so I prefer and will be using the more inclusive categories of "participatory culture" and "participatory cultural content" - as employed in

Jenkinsian cultural studies - throughout this project.

The notions of participatory culture and empowered amateurism are, of course, not exclusively original features of digital new media. Despite that the means of cultural

24 production and dissemination for media industries like film, publishing and television are centralized into relatively small yet powerful communities, access to these channels of communication was never wholly forbidden for traditional consumers in the days before digitalization and the internet. Community cable and radio stations, photocopiers, and video cameras could turn ordinary citizens into media producers, however these exceptions to the norm often suffered from low budgets, poor quality content, and very limited distribution

(see Jenkins 1992). Nevertheless, with the accelerations in quality, affordability, ease-of-use and instant global circulation afforded by digital networking, the labels of "producer" and

"consumer" are growing increasingly ambiguous. If the traditional consumer of cultural commodities can now use emerging digital technologies to produce products that can be consumed on a mass scale, and work to redefine and redistribute existing industry products, how can we continue to refer to him or her as a simple consumer? It is evident, as many have argued, that digital media complicate the categories of cultural consumer and producer, in part empowering emergent communities of "prosumers" - producer-consumer hybrids, first labeled as such by Alvin Toffler (1980) - but do so in a way that is not necessarily disadvantageous to the traditional cultural industry producers (Jenkins 2003; 2006a; Cover

2004). The complex category of the prosumer is a key figure within what Henry Jenkins calls our contemporary "convergence culture" - a label which represents a cultural shift in the work and play of users in and across a new mediascape that prompts the redistribution of power differentiations between traditional producers and consumers (Jenkins 2006a: 3).

25 To my estimation, as stated above, understanding this era of cultural production requires bringing together three distinct but not unrelated streams of existing new media theory: (1) the subsection of cultural studies concerned with digital participatory culture; (2) the subsection of the political economy of communication concerned with the post-industrial capitalist structure of the new media industry; and (3) the varied field of critical information studies concerned with social, legal and political implications of the regulation of information and culture, popularized in contemporary criticism of global intellectual property regimes and by proponents of the free or open culture movements (Vaidhyanathan

2006). Each of these key theoretical perspectives can speak to modding, but offer a more complete picture if synthesized in triangulation.

1. Cultural Studies: Digital Participatory Culture

In order to address the user modification of new media forms (and corporate properties) like digital games, and how such practices may impact these users, I will be using the subsection of cultural studies concerned with digital participatory culture.

Approaches to participatory culture extend from the (pre-digital) early British cultural studies perspectives which emphasize that valid forms of culture are actively produced by ordinary people - that average folk can be participants in cultural production, not simply the passive targets of it (Williams 1989). Such perspectives are supplemented by ideas that suggest the culturally creative capabilities of ordinary citizens can also be re-creative - for example, Dick Hebdige famously identified how youth subcultures often appropriate and

26 refashion commercially-provided commodities for their own (often oppositional) purposes

(Hebdige 1979).

Concerning media content, participatory culture is thematically indebted to poststructural theory that decentralizes the location of meaning and authority in cultural texts and advocates notions of textual openness (Eco 1989) and the deflation of textual authority (Barthes 1977; de Certeau 1984). These theories have inspired and have been complemented by important cultural studies addenda such as Hall's theory of encoding and decoding, which offered a model of communication exchange wherein a message's meaning is not purely determined by its sender (encoder) during production, and the message's receiver (decoder) is not simply an inactive recipient of encoded meaning, but a participant in its subjective creation (Hall 1999b). Emboldened by such theory, some cultural studies researchers have worked to reframe the practices of media fans as culturally significant moments of pleasure, creativity and even resistance. Media fans, often derided as obsessed with triviality, socially backwards and enslaved to commercial ends of corporatized media producers, were granted reprieve in early active audience studies that suggested that all cultural objects have a certain degree of flexibility and can be manipulated by their users, albeit in predominantly symbolic ways (Radway 1985;

Fiske 1987). Such modes of thought led to active audience scholars developing models of user cultural production.

For example, Fiske (1992) develops three categories of media fan productivity: semiotic productivity, enunciative productivity and textual productivity. Semiotic

27 productivity "consists of the making of meanings of social identity and of social experience from the semiotic resources of the cultural commodity" (37). It is basically an internalized interpretative process, in which individual meanings are developed by fans to personalize, extend or counter those prepackaged in the media consumed. Next, enunciative productivity externalizes personal fan engagement in the forms of expression with which people share their fandom with others. This includes what Fiske calls "fan talk" within common social circles, perhaps best embodied today by the enthusiast internet chat forum, but also includes other non-verbal forms of enunciation, as in using clothes or style accessories as a declaration of membership into a specific fan community

(38).

Finally, there is the category of textual productivity, encompassing the material production of media content and associated goods by fans. Importantly, this category extends the earlier theoretical model into the material world. Beyond media users simply being symbolically productive via their freedom of interpretation, Henry Jenkins (1992;

2003) has identified materially productive media users, such as fan fiction writers, whose output acts as the material embodiment of the poststructural cultural theory mentioned above. Within this conception of textual productivity, creative consumption of existing content becomes a kind of production, or, according to de Certeau (1984), a "secondary production" that often contains elements "poached" from the resources provided in the

source material (like characters, plot situations, narrative environments, etc.). Thus, it is

28 within this category that we also find fan art, fan films, and arguably, fan digital game making and modification.

Of course, there are significant limitations to the "active audience" model, but it is a direct precursor to scholarship on modding in a new media environment.10 In the digital era, participatory cultural practices are accelerated; in digital form, media content is

"dematerialized," freed of the fixed rigidity of physical forms, and can be more easily manipulated and redistributed by users than previous generations' analogue content (Lister et al. 2003: 16). In turn, the "consumer-who-produces" becomes a key figure in articulating what is available for further consumption in the pop culture mediascape. Indeed, new media theorists like Manovich (2001) suggest the hip hop DJ who mixes and mashes up existing music to create new compositions out of old is the primary example of digital culture in practice. Similarly, Deuze (2006b) argues (using Levi-Strauss' notion of "bricolage") that borrowing, modification, remediation and redistribution - authorized or not - make up principal components of our contemporary online experience. Such practices have been theorized as having politically-charged potential since they bring with them the ability to disrupt the traditional one-way flow of popular media culture, allowing users to speak back to media industries via the internet (Howard-Spink 2004; McLeod 2005).

Specifically concerning participatory culture and digital games, Roig et al. (2009) position the usages of digital games as new forms of media practice made new by an

10 While notions of the "semiotic democracy" of active audiences and users developed in the 1980s form a base to build off of, they must be supplemented with significant criticism and theoretical refinements offered more recently (Morley 1993; Condit 1994; Garnham 1999; Mosco and Kaye 2000).

29 injection of play into more traditional forms of media spectatorship and audio-visual experiences. Joining game playing in this "new" media practice are a "heterogeneous set" of "playful" endeavours such as fan production, user-generated content, file sharing and partaking in open source initiatives, made playful through collaborative, recombinant and intertextual engagements with digital cultural artifacts (92). Rob Cover

(2004) has positioned digital games within a model of audience-activity, given their interactive qualities, but does not directly address modding by name. He does, however, attribute the popularity of gaming to "a strongly held and culturally based desire to participate in the creation and transformation of the text that has been denied by previous technologies of recorded media production and distribution" (174). The work of James

Newman (2005; 2008) shows how games are "played with" above and beyond their gamic functions via the extension of game mythology by online fan communities through fan fiction that expands on game narratives, tribute art, review and hint sharing.

He maintains that digital games "provide a complex and varied suite of materials for gamers that encourage flexible and creative play, talk, discussion and the production of supporting texts" (2008: 15), highlighting an "inherent creativity, productivity and sociality" of gaming cultures (14). The creative output of those who "play with" digital games in the sense Newman (2008: 13) discusses - player-produced art, fiction, tribute websites, walkthroughs, cosplay and mods - forms a far-reaching "shadow economy" of derivative goods, borrowing a concept introduced by Fiske (1992). The profit imperatives that motivate the games industry forces a light to be shone on this shadow

30 economy, to illuminate that which can be taken up and sold in a traditional economy, and eliminate that which plays outside of their prescribed boundaries (un-exploitable IP infringement, critical or offensive work - see Chapters Four and Five). Newman (2005), strangely, does not address the modification of actual game code, but does develop ideas about how the culture surrounding the digital game allows it to be "refigured as a living, dynamic, malleable entity" when it is "played in new ways" and "placed in new critical and ludic contexts" (65).

When game modding is addressed by name, scholars frequently position modder activity within the sphere of Jenkins' concept of participatory culture. In terms of structural alterations of code, Sotamaa (2004) provides a good overview of modification of digital games within the scope of Jenkinsian participatory culture, positioning player modified content as "radically intermedial" where intermediality denotes a "contemporary form of intertextuality that transgresses media borders" (np). He notes possible points of resistance against dominant ideologies that embody popular media in the ability for average users to change key elements of gameplay. Similarly, Nieborg (2004) delves into FPS modding using Jenkins' (2002) theory of interactive audiences, which itself relies on theoretical contributions of Pierre Levy (1997) regarding collective intelligence, to explore the limits of user agency in modding and how some mod collectives alter game code not to enhance gameplay but to import politically contentious material, such as representations of the

Israeli/Palestinian conflict, into game spaces, sometimes in racist or hateful ways.

31 Concerning mods of conceptual influence, such as user-created narratives and artwork based on the intellectual properties of digital game franchises, Burn (2006) frames this content within the rhetoric of participatory culture and its history with fan fiction.

Beyond these scholarly examples, there have been a few good journalistic treatments of the participatory practices of modding (Au 2002; Kushner 2003; Lasica 2005), but nothing I have found has employed the multi-perspectival approach I plan to use, particularly when addressing the cultural politics of user participation and the gaming industry reaction to it.

See also Schleiner (2005); Sotamaa (2007a; 2007b); Postigo (2007; 2008); Raessens (2005).

2. Political Economy: Post-Industrial Information Capital

Jenkins' convergence culture thesis suggests the response to participatory user practices from industries is contradictory: they sometimes encourage new consumer behaviour or sometimes resist it as "renegade behavior" (2006a: 19). In order to understand the varied and sometimes inconsistent reactions by owners of the corporate properties being modified by users, we can recontextualize participatory culture using the subsection of the political economy of communication concerned with the post-industrial capitalist structure of the new media industry.'l

A political economic approach suggests phenomena like modding cannot be separated from the economic forces that accompany their emergence as cultural practices,

11 According to Vincent Mosco (1996), political economy is a critical discipline that prioritizes realist epistemology (how material forces affect real life situations in the real lives of people), mutually constituted on theoretical and practical/empirical considerations Broadly, it aims to critically examine social relations, especially power relations, which constitute economic production, circulation and consumption of resources, and how these processes affect social control and survival

32 nor can the output of modding be divorced from its conditions of production. Thus, any

analysis of participatory culture (with a focus on digital games) within political economy demands taking into account the global logic that Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and

Greig de Peuter (2003) call information capital, the workings of which are a result of the

"dynamic interplay" between digital technology, neoliberal marketing philosophy and post- industrial economic reality which prioritizes information-based goods construed as intellectual properties. Kline et al. (2003) write that this formation fosters "the cultivation of

an increasingly symbiotic relation between production and consumption" (279) where the work of productive users (and, I would argue, modders) is harnessed by corporate producers to ensure continued product development and marketing without financial compensation.

Such practices have also been theorized by Marxian political economists as leading to the exploitation of free labour by mainstream new media producers in the works of

Terranova (2000; 2004), Scholz (2008), Postigo (2003) and Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter

(2009). Tiziana Terranova, taking a cue from autonomist Marxist labour theory as applied to the world of digital technology (Dyer-Witheford 1999), suggests that the unpaid work that

creates most of the internet's content indicates how labour practices have shifted "from the

factory to society" in the post-industrial economy (Terranova 2000: 33). Postigo (2003)

expands this theory to include "programmer hobbyists" and game modders who provide mountains of content for game industries without compensation (594). At the heart of this perspective is what Trebor Scholz (2008) calls the "dialectics of exploitation" present in our

current embrace of digital culture, one that combines new user abilities with existing

33 structures of power. Such dialectics, Scholz suggests, make possible "on the one hand, the gained ability of people with computer and net access to become speakers... [o]n the other hand, and in no way different to all of capitalism, the labor of the very very many creates massive wealth for the very few" (np, emphasis in original).

These political economic analyses of free labour relate, if tangentially, to at least two existing theories of late-capitalist labour relations that the cultural politics of game modding should be contextualized against: Dallas Smythe's famous "audience commodity" thesis, and new concepts of labour casualization. Concerning the former, Smythe (2006) feels that the presence and attention of potential consumers watching television commercials, collectively sold as a commodity to advertisers by broadcast networks, constituted a kind of

"audience labour" - that "audience members are actively working while [they] watch and are an essential component of the contemporary economy and its structure of value" (Burnett

& Marshall 2003: 120). Concerning casualization, social critics have identified a recent shift in the terms of employment across all sorts of labour markets. In the cultural industries, as

Graham Murdock (2003) writes, "corporations have sought to cut costs by shifting workers from secure employment to freelance contracts and making more use of part-time and casualized labour" (22). The work of modding digital games can be read as an extreme example of casualization - so casual, in fact, that no financial compensation is deemed necessary in many cases. Thus, the political economic angle identifies and critiques practices of industry incorporation and co-optation of user-modified content, and the

34 possible exploitation of user labour produced during increasingly commodified leisure activities.

The political economy of digital games is still an underdeveloped area of study, but there are a bourgeoning number of scholars approaching the culture surrounding and industry behind games from this perspective. Beyond the contributions of Postigo (2003) and Kline et al. (2003) mentioned above, other treatments of digital games within a political economy framework include Garite (2003), Kerr (2006), Coleman and Dyer-Witheford

(2007), Sotamaa (2007b) and the collaborations of Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2005;

2009). Garite (2003) situates interactive play within a model of the Taylorization of leisure activity. While modding is not specifically addressed, Garite's writing provides a theoretical diving board for talking about digital game play as commodified work - something I think can be reasonably be extended beyond the playing of games to the "playing with" games that modding entails. Sotamaa (2007b), seminal to my work, examines how certain game producers have reacted to the rise of modding by initiating and nurturing the development of fan communities focused on their product, and have done so in such a way that keeps fan participation comfortably under their watchful eyes. Sotamaa suggests that producers may host or sponsor fan websites, release modification tools and encourage mod sharing and trading, and hold competitions to award the most innovative modders working with their product, all the while selectively embracing "proper" uses of their product while decrying or preventing other uses (Sotamaa 2007b).

35 Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2005; 2009), building off the base laid out in Digital

Play with Stephen Kline (2003), frame digital games, the industry that produces them and the consumers who play them within of worldviews of "Empire" and "Multitude," notably theorized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000). From this perspective, Empire, conceptualized as the enveloping structure of power fostered by the global synergy of hypercapitalist markets and militarism, holds digital games as its "paradigmatic media," birthed in military-academic-industrial complexes and thematically indebted to the values of such spaces while being produced and sold along unbalanced, sometimes unjust, globalized market networks, dependent on immaterial labour and the melding of leisure with work

(Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009: xv). Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter do position games as technologies that may, used strategically, contribute to the challenges to Empire posed by the (somewhat vague) concept of Multitude, a collective set of revolutionary resistances spurred into action by the injustices of Empire.

As detailed as these political economic treatments of games and modding are, they still do not offer as broad a picture as I am hoping to provide by identifying intersections of participatory cultural activity and industry reaction with regulatory institutions, methods and structures.

3. Critical Information Studies: Contemporary Regulation of Information and Culture

Introducing the influence of political economy does not simply problematize a basic participatory culture approach but instead produces the fullest realization of Jenkins'

36 convergence culture thesis in the articulation of two perspectives. But since a close analysis of digital game modding involves not only users and producers, but also demands acknowledgement of regulatory practices and structures that affect and are affected by both, my research demands another articulation to the varied but not unrelated field of critical information studies or CIS. Siva Vaidhyanathan (2006) defines CIS as constituting "an inchoate field that considers the ways in which culture and information are regulated, and thus the relationships among regulation and commerce, creativity, science, technology, politics and other human affairs" (293). I am interpreting CIS as the perfect third node in a triangulation with cultural studies and political economy, enhancing the other two perspectives' concern with relations of power by examining and critiquing the regulatory structures and rule frameworks that frequently speak with authority to the creation (or modification) of culture.

The "particular historical matrix" in which our institutionalized media and culture systems have been shaped include not only social interests, technological imperatives and market forces, but also policy objectives (Ruggles 1994: 52). As such, a great deal of CIS literature examines how relations of power are bound up in regulatory structures and rule frameworks from global intellectual property (IP) policies to industry terms-of-use stipulations. Critics who have contributed to critical information studies, including Coombe and Herman (2001) and Vaidhyanathan (2004), argue that IP laws used by corporate entities attempt to "structure a field of semiotic possession" or have solitary "control over a sign" and its potential meanings within popular culture (Coombe & Herman 2001: 920). Tarleton

37 Gillespie (2006) argues that copyright reforms and digital rights management policies have been "designed to effectively frustrate" and hinder the agency of users (653). Lawrence

Lessig (1999; 2004) frames regulatory restrictions on popular media goods as something that interferes with the inherent freedom of information and commonism of culture.

Reducing regulatory restrictions to their basest properties, Edward Tenner (2003) details two structural methodologies that function to punish and prevent misuse of IP by consumers: accountability and incapacitation (62). Accountability focuses on using existing social structures of law and order - like the legal system - to punish deviation after it occurs (which Tenner likens to photo radar used to address highway speeding violations). Alternatively, incapacitation uses technological means to prevent or nullify deviations before or as they occur (which Tenner likens to a speed bump). The transition from accountability to incapacitation in the wake of American Digital Millennium

Copyright Act reform of the late 1990s is marked by Tenner, along with other scholars of critical information studies like Lessig (2004), Vaidhyanathan (2004) and Gillespie

(2007).

Other related nodes of CIS stem from the discourse and criticism of the IP policies introduced and bolstered by governments and industries in the digital era. Of particular import is the activist scholarship and consumer advocacy that supports the open source and free software movements (Stallman 2003; Wershler-Henry 2002). In relation to game modification, Schleiner (2005) links the factors that fostered the open source software

38 movement, namely internet connectivity, code sharing and the ethos that software should be customizable, with factors that fostered early modding culture for PC games (405).

Additionally, it is possible to frame user modification of existing cultural artifacts within the critical work that supports the maintaining of folk cultural traditions (particularly in music) where creative borrowing and modifying of existing content is normalized

(McLeod 2003). There is even work in this field that supports the outright abolition of intellectual property policy all together (Smiers 2000). While increasingly popular, such CIS calls to create or help maintain a commons of (digital) cultural goods must be taken alongside criticisms that treat notions of a freely-accessible, common stock of cultural

artifacts or public domain as somewhat romantic (Chander & Sunder 2004).

Some scholarship has started to interrogate the regulatory regimes governing intellectual property in digital games at a time when the media involved allow for more user- generated and modified content to circulate online. Grimes (2006) has conducted discourse analyses of end-user license agreements that must be accepted before access to several

online gaming worlds is given, identifying the unwavering willingness of most producers claim ownership and use rights over anything and everything created in or used in their games, including derivative content of modders. Herman, Coombe and Kaye (2006) show how the one exception to the rule, the online world of Second Life, which allows users to maintain the IP rights to their in-game creations, is still bound up in the politics of goodwill

and consumer satisfaction, and the limits they afford outside of a regulatory legal framework. While both these sources influence my own analyses of user behaviour within

39 regulatory regimes and structures, they deal exclusively with massively multiplayer online game worlds and my work is more concerned with beyond-the-object interactivity and meta- game modding experiences in mostly offline games.

The Importance of Triangulation

All of the above disciplinary approaches can be made to intersect within the prism of game modding, where culture (play, creativity, technology) meets power structures (economics, law and regulation). Such intersections are made unique here because they are animated by the double meaning of modification as both change and restraint. Thus, triangulation of approaches allows for contextual reality of each perspective to be identified, opens the door for dialogue between them, reasonable judgments of cultural politics most deserving of interrogation when users play with popular culture, and some indication of the expected and actual role of users in contemporary media environments.

Triangulation also allows for balanced and reasonable articulation of digital media, something which is often lost in polarized debates. It would be premature to deny that "computer and related digital technologies are at least candidates for inclusion in a list of cultural technologies (including the printing press and the book, photography, telephony, cinema and television) which, in however complex and indirect ways, have played a major part in social and cultural change" (Lister et al. 2003: 3). Accepting this, however, does not limit such change to technological causes alone (technological

40 determinism) but allows multiple nodes for influence grounded in intersections between new technology and existing social forces, including those of structural power.12

Beyond theoretical musings which can oftentimes be construed as romantic or idealistic, we have to acknowledge the critical analyses of digital media that suggest that any hfe-bettenng "newness" of the technologies involved is an ideologically-loaded myth that simply denies the significant influence that structures of social, political, and economic authority have over our lives (Barney 2000). The alienation from the means of production that existed in industnal society has not been remedied by our newly acquired access to Photoshop and YouTube, yet whenever new media forms like the technologies of user-modification emerge, there is usually a mythos of social progress attached.

While change can certainly occur m the wake of the emergence of such technologies, I do not want to fall into the trap that necessarily equates change with progress. Our plunge into networked digitization certainly has not produced the "sublimely transcendent" possibilities and egalitarian Utopias predicted by information revolution gurus like Nicholas Negroponte, Richard Barbrook and Bill Gates. Such a technologically deterministic ethos, as Jody Berland (2000) suggests, is wrapped up m a

Modernist notion of progress that tries to conflate technological evolution with its

12 Technological determinism basically argues that technology drives history and is in the main factor that shapes social and cultural change Proponents of this often-utopic philosophy tend to show little regard to other factors at work in structuring our social lives, like economics, class concerns, race and gender codes, hegemonic formulations and exercises of power, etc (see Lister et al 2003 391, Bimber 1994)

41 biological counterpart - working towards the natural betterment of the species.13 Critics like Berland and Manuel Castells (1996) point out how hyperbolic assumptions about the positive nature of the new "information society" may be paradoxical: alongside the adoption of digital technology came promises of more free time, but we work more now than forty years ago. Others think we never really stop working because of the labour of consumption and commodification of leisure time (Terranova 2004; Adorno 1991).

However, while it is clear that digital technologies have not (and will not) set all their users free from the forces of cultural hegemony or structural power, they are not simply and automatically tools of unbridled and exploitive capitalism. While power relations between industrial media producers and consumers are not equalized - unequal positions of influence still exist since corporate producers have far greater access to influential resources (money, lawyers, lobbying power, etc.) than the average user/consumer - it cannot be denied that recent gains in productive capacity work to shift the balance of power on the playing field of cultural production in ways that benefit creative users and audiences, if only slightly. Nor can it be denied that wikis, file torrents and digital piracy have been empowering for users and damaging to certain media industries while providing a significant challenge to regulatory regimes. New avenues for social criticism, political engagement and opposition to dominant cultural ideology have opened up (as the later chapters of this project attest).

13 See Lister et al. (2003: 53), which also outlines how the concept of social progress is deeply embedded within the cultural ethos of modernism, while the proliferation of digitalization is embedded within the contested ethos of postmodernism.

42 Therefore, the issue is much more complex than any black or white binary suggests, making it imperative to recognize the importance and contextual realities of multiple critical views. Such an approach adheres to this project's theoretical basis in the situation-dependent contexts that note a myriad of possible cultural politics when analyzing something like game modification. Classifying, prioritizing and interrogating these politics, as they manifest in and affect the relationships between users, producers and regulators, is, of course, one of the goals of this project. It is therefore important to proceed by introducing them before moving on.

Classifying Possible Relationships between Users and Producers

Schaefer (2004) briefly sketches out what he calls "possible scenarios of relations between companies and user communities" as a result of increased productive and manipulative powers of technology's consumers or users (71). He allows for five possibilities or "strategies" for producer/consumer relationships: ignorance, acceptance,

confrontation, collaboration and exploitation. Strangely, Schaefer only defines and

qualifies the first three possibilities. Though incomplete, Schaefer's model provides a

good template against which to analyze similar phenomena in digital game modding;

thus, I use it here, while filling in the blanks left by the source, as a starting point to

define possible producer/modder relationships, each imbued with the cultural politics present in game modding. Note, the text within the chart below is Schaefer's (2004: 72) unless it appears in square brackets, in which case it is mine:

43 Possible Description Relationship Ignorance In most cases companies ignore the fact that users are modifying their products. [It is also possible that they do not know modification is happening.] Acceptance In several cases [producers] appreciate the fact that users are contributing and supporting the development of the product [as in tinkering hobbyists who modify technological products, like those who modify and reprogram Sony's AIBO robots]. There is no collaboration between Sony and AIBO users, Sony is just profiting from their activities and delivering nothing in return except not threatening their cultural freedom... Confrontation In several cases... lawsuits are successful in stopping the retailing of modified products or products which allow modifying. [This relationship includes corporate producers targeting mod communities via cease and desist orders to protect their IP, as well as producer attempts to stamp out piracy.]

Schaefer also includes the following two categories with little or no explanation. The distinction between these two categories is perhaps more blurry than distinctions between the aforementioned others.

Collaboration [Collaboration is embodied in user beta testing and bug hunting, as well as The Sims model of content creation, where producers provide tools for game content creation while users provide the vast majority of game content (Curlew 2004). The relationship between some game modders and corporate producers is frequently collaborative, though benefits for each party involved may be unbalanced.] Exploitation [Most controversially, this possibility exists in situations where benefits of producer/user collaborations are so significantly unbalanced that user labour is unrewarded or when the compensation received is minimal compared to value created.]

44 In the following chapters, cases that reflect each of these possible relationships will be analyzed in an attempt to understand modding, the cultural politics attached to it, as well as how those possible relationships and contextual linkages may be re-articulated by appealing to play.

Chapter Breakdown

Working with and against the ideas presented in the above literature review, including the articulation of perspectives from the study of participatory digital culture, post- industrial information capital, and the contemporary regulation of information and digital cultural products, the remainder of this project will assume the following structure.

The first chapter, From Playing to Playing With: A Critical History of Digital Game

Modification, provides a detailed history of the practice of modding, as related to the history of the digital games themselves. This history will show how new technology and participatory cultural practice intersect to make the creative or productive consumption of digital games an increasingly fundamental part of the gaming experience. This chapter also works to provide a functional vocabulary for categorizing game mods that extends beyond those offered in previous popular and scholarly sources.

Chapter Two, To Play With Fire: Participatory Culture, User-Generated Content and New Patterns of Cultural Production in the Digital Age, delves into the larger socio- cultural practices and processes to which modding as a form of user-generated productivity is linked, namely participatory culture and the social practice of play. This chapter will use some key theories and historical case analyses of cultural studies and

45 participatory culture to root the phenomena under study in practices of cultural modification occurring long before the invention of digital games - such as collage making, fan fiction writing, subcultural appropriation and tinkering with mechanical and electrical objects. It is here where I will speak to the objective of exploring how (and marginally, why) users modify the corporate properties they consume.

The third chapter, User Mods as Free Labour: The Political Economy of Games

Modification, changes disciplinary perspectives, reaching beyond cultural studies and theories of participatory culture to address critical political economy concerns of game modification. To fully understand modding, as well as the redefinition of the role of the new media user, we must focus not simply upon what modders are doing, but also upon how the industry that produces the games being modded is reacting to what modders are doing. This requires an understanding of how socio-economic forces work to shape relationships between modders and the industries in question and how these forces influence further user modifications and industry reaction; thus, this chapter employs the critical perspectives of the political economy of communication, concerned with the economic driving forces of communication systems (production and labour in the media industries, ownership concerns, etc.) to interrogate the most contentious of such industry reactions and the cultural politics emerging therein. We must remember the economic imperative of corporate producers, and how relations of power - including power of access to cultural production - is bound up with logics of capitalism in a post-industrial economy. Thus, Chapter Three explores modding from a neo-Marxian approach critical

46 of free labour exploitation, commodification of play and leisure and the political

economic mainstay of the saleable audience commodity.

Chapter Four, Play Out of Bounds: The Cultural Politics of Digital Game

Modification, complements the previous chapter's emphasis on political economy with

CIS concerns. Here I identify and interrogate the "boundaries of play" erected by or

lobbied for by corporate game producers that appear to direct and police user modding of their products and function to govern how popular culture is experienced by its users. I

offer a theoretical contribution to the study of modding via an extended analysis of how

the use of new media objects like digital games has been structured in such a way that works to ensure compliance and cooperation from users. I theorize a structure of use for

digital games as a hierarchically arranged series of locks (such as intellectual property

legislation, end-user licensing agreements, terms of service contracts, software locks, and

norms-of-use guidelines) that prevent users from playing out of bounds, particularly

when modding. These locks, of course, are not impenetrable, and innovative users can

and often do find ways to crack them. They are, however, solid enough to keep the

majority of users from out-of-bounds play. This chapter ultimately will speak to the

objective of exploring how corporate owners of modified game content react to user

actions, significantly emphasizing the differences between how game companies and

other media industries react to how users "play with" their IP.

Chapter Five, From "Foxed" Mods to Fixed Deals: Keeping Play In Bounds, will

analyze several cases against the "boundaries of play" theories developed in the fourth

47 chapter. In particular, several mod communities who have tracked their experiences of being "Foxed" (served with cease-and-desist orders regarding the unauthorized use or misuse of IP from large media corporations like Twentieth Century Fox) will be discussed.

One focus will be a group of modders known as Phoenix Online, who are attempting to make a freeware sequel to a popular game series from the 1980s called King's Quest, and their at- times turbulent relationship with the owner of the series' intellectual property,

Vivendi, and later, Activision. Another focus will examine a case dealing with machinima, an extreme form of mod that uses the graphics-rendering capability of digital games to make animated movies (Lowood 2005; Jones 2006), that traces the movement of corporate IP owners from attempts to prevent modding outright to the co-optation and financially- beneficial containment of modded output. Particularly, I will be looking at Microsoft's dealings with the developers of the Red vs. Blue web series, a popular machinima series made from modified games in the mega-selling Halo franchise. Both cases involve negotiated agreements in which users are permitted to keep modifying the intellectual property of others under strict guidelines and within certain boundaries that appear to ensure benefit to corporate franchises is derived from users' derivative work. Using a political economic set of analyses, I suspect these cases will be illustrative of recent trends in the gaming industry (unlike many other industries reliant on IP protections) that work to position content access away from a system of prevention via punishment through governmental rule frameworks and toward a system that enables the generation of value from the exploitation of user activity via private contractual agreements and licences.

48 To emphasize that much of this project deals with articulation of different tropes from different disciplinary analyses, Chapter Six, CounterPlays: Opposition and Negotiation in the Contemporary Modding Mediascape, will feature identification and interrogation of moments of opposition and negotiation between users and corporate producers within the cultural politics attached to digital game modding. While recognizing that within a political economy perspective, post-industrial capital quickly contains and removes the political potential of much modding activity through the boundaries described above, I want to use this chapter to acknowledge that this does not necessarily mean that a cultural studies / participatory culture approach that positions popular culture as site of hegemonic struggle is rendered mute. Here I will develop my theory of "counterplay" - briefly, how users react to how corporate media producers and governments are reacting to users' abilities of modification. My theory takes cues from Galloway's (2006) notion of "countergaming"

(109) and Hall's (1999b) notion of oppositional interpretation. Countergaming, which

Galloway connects thematically to the disruptive elements of Godardian "countercinema," where avant-garde film has disruptive political potential by breaking with standard narrative form and being too abstract to commodity, suggests that abstract, artist-made mods redefine both visual and ludic game qualities in their disruption of industry expectations of modding.

However, my focus moves away from artist mods or aesthetic politics and toward the disruptive practices of everyday users. Examples of counterplay include not only the straightforward making of modifications that challenge the ideological norms of the digital games, such as anti-war and feminist mods (Schleiner 2005), but also the indirectly (and

49 often unintentionally) disruptive mods that poach and mash together intellectual property from all over the pop culture spectrum without permission from IP owners, as well as mods that change the ratings of certain games, particularly through the addition of profane or

"adult" content - something that has the potential to disrupt a game's saleability as some major vendors will not carry games with the harshest ratings.

Chapter Seven, CounterPlay as Counterculture: Modding Against the Grain, expands the concept of counterplay to include more explicit politically charged modifications, mods of resistance not to social expectations of good taste or specific business operations, but to wider cultural ideologies. Over the course of this chapter, I examine the moments of contact between resistant or counter-hegemonic activity as it materializes in relation to modding: first, the countercultural activity within digital environments (electronic civil disobedience and hacktivism); second, political expressions of opposition and resistance in (and with) popular culture (oppositional de/re-coding and culture jamming); and third, oppositional or subversive incarnations found in play and playing (symbolic inversion and anti-authoritarian play). Several cases that challenge (and therefore may cause the continued evolution of) the "boundaries" thesis presented earlier are identified as countercultural counterplays. These cases include politically charged mods built by individuals, like the French Democracy, a machinima film which was created as a response to clashes between immigrant youth and police in France in 2005, but also political mods developed by activist groups like Greenpeace, PETA and the Critical Art Ensemble

50 that aim to repurpose digital game forms according to their specific goals, and disrupt boundaries of play imposed by corporate producers in the process.

Finally, in the project's conclusion, I will synthesize and reiterate my findings, with particular regard given to how the role of the user of digital new media products is being redefined by the contemporary cultural politics involved in the ability to modify those products and by the plays and counterplays of producers, users and policy makers. I will also introduce possibilities for future research, noting recent digital-game related developments that did not fit into the scope of this project or the snapshot in time to which it applies.

Lastly, this conclusion will also point to further uses of the theories and methods developed within this project in territories of new media culture separate but similar to digital game modding.

51 Chapter 1

From Playing to Playing With: A Critical History of Digital Game Modification

People are becoming increasingly accustomed to playing with their culture, and seeing it played with... - Sam Howard-Spink, "Grey Tuesday" (2004)

Cultural objects like digital games are not just played (in terms of having a user participate in on-screen activity with the goal of winning the game); they increasingly embody the capacity to be played with, conceptually and materially (Newman 2008).

Digital games, in particular, are noteworthy in this capacity because of the history of their invention and their constitution as digital artifacts, making them incredibly malleable and ripe for playing with. They recurrently have been and continue to be objects of accumulation, with new games often built from or out of the bits and pieces of what came before them. However, they also exist (in their mainstream commercial form) as intellectual properties, rigorously protected or controlled by their owners. With these conditions in mind, this chapter aims to critically trace out the history of digital game modding by users, as well as the history of reactions to the practice by the commercial games industry.

In order to understand the history of game modification, it is imperative to revisit

and expand its existing definitions. The majority of scholarship that addresses modding focuses solely on software code modification. Mods are generally described as player- developed and determined alterations that can change gameplay, as well as the content,

52 rules and goals of games (Au 2002; Sotamaa 2004). As games researcher Olli Sotamaa

(2004) suggests, manipulating [a game's] library of media files can result

in new player characters and audiovisual layouts for objects and environments. Whole levels can be altered and new ones created by changing the content of the maps files that... dictate the spatial architecture of the game world. Modifying game engines that control how graphics are displayed can have a significant effect on the basic physics of the game. (5)

There are different degrees to which game software is said to be modded. Wikipedia's entry on "Computer Game Modding" divides mods into three categories: total conversions, partial conversions and unofficial patches. I plan to expand on these, but will first give a brief overview of each.

Total conversions are game modifications that remove and replace the source game's visuals, narratives and gameplay goals with user-determined content. A frequently noted example is Desert Combat, a 2003 mod of Electronic Arts' Second

World War first-person shooter Battlefield 1942 (2002). The digital games industry produced a glut of high-profile World War Two themed action games over the past decade, spurred on by the critical and commercial successes of films like Saving Private

Ryan and The Thin Red Line in the late 1990s. By the mid-2000s, the first-person shooter market was saturated with multiple iterations of franchises like Medal of Honor

(1999), Battlefield (2002), Call of Duty (2003) and Brothers in Arms (2005).

Unsurprisingly, players modified the best of such games to explore scenarios that were under-emphasized by mainstream developers at the time. A group of modders calling

53 themselves Trauma Studios used Battlefield''s code to build Desert Combat, set during the First Persian Gulf war in Iraq and Kuwait, featuring period-accurate weapons, vehicles and locations. Gone were Battlefield 1942's missions to secure Allied control

over South Pacific islands from Axis Japanese forces. They were replaced with scenarios that pitted UN coalition forces against Saddam Hussein's Iraqi National Guard. Visual

assets, scenario details and game rules were all altered. What remained unchanged was

Battlefield''s underlying software code configuration - its "game engine" - which is necessary for the game to play out since it renders graphics, processes artificial intelligence, and determines physics of the game space, among other things (Adams

2003).

Mods are frequently not total conversions, however, since the time and work one must invest in the total replacement of source assets is akin to the commitments of the

original, professional producers. More common are partial conversion mods, which retain game genres, core visuals and narratives, but might alter rule sets, goals, in-game

locations and characters' skins. Popular partial conversions include modifications of

Doom (1993) that replace enemy character models with H.R Giger-designed bug monsters from the Alien film franchise, or replace Left 4 Dead's (2008) zombie hoards with rampaging legions of Teletubbies. These types of mods are also accompanied by

unofficial patches, amendments to a game's code created by users that might fix bugs or glitches present in the official product, bypass copyright protection measures, or allow

54 functionality with computer operating systems different from those for which the game was designed.

While they offer a decent starting point for identifying and analyzing different kinds of modding, the categories of total conversions, partial conversions or unofficial patches do not adequately reflect the varied number of ways that people modify digital

games, nor do they address forces that stimulate or regulate such modifications.

I have already suggested that modding involves two processes: structural

alteration and conceptual influence. However, most treatments of modding focus only

on user manipulation of game code, or its structural alteration. I extend the definition to include the larger field of playing with video game properties in general because we

dismiss opportunities to generate cultural understanding when the forces that make possible modded code are not connected to those that motivate game remakes, game- related fan fiction, or other borrowings of conceptual influence.

What emerges from this redefinition are three categories of mods created by users,

better reflective of wider practices ofplaying with digital games than the previously mentioned conversions or patches and more applicable to modifications of cultural texts

outside of digital games. The first of these categories covers what I'm calling off-medium

mods of concept. These include user-made texts of one medium (like writing) that take

conceptual influence from another medium (like film or digital games), modifying the

content and style of the source texts. Examples include fan fiction, fan art or costume-

55 making based on the source material. This first category of modding has been explored in detail by several scholars, including Jenkins in his book Textual Poachers (1992).

The second category of mods is made up of on-medium mods of concept. These include user modifications of subject matter in the medium that matches that of the source material. Examples would be something like Star Wars or Star Trek fan films that incorporate characters and themes from the official films, or fan-designed video games that continue a popular game's narrative arc (Jenkins 2003). Important to note, however, is that these mods are completely original productions except for borrowed conceptual influence, and they do not directly use parts of their sources in their creation (for example, a Star Wars fan film that does not use George Lucas' official film footage).

Finally, there is the intriguing and controversial third category of mods, what I'm calling on-medium mods of actual form. These mods are structural alterations and include capturing actual parts of the source material, along with thematic content and style, and manipulating them into something new. Examples include remixed music that samples bits and pieces of an existing recording, re-edits or "mash-ups" of digitized film clips, and the modification of digital games where game code is manipulated. Mods of actual form usually match the medium of the source material (film mash-ups remain viewable movies, etc.); however, there are some instances in which the mod appears to shift functional possibilities. An example of this would be the extreme form of digital- game modding known as machinima, which excises the play functions of games and

56 turns them into animation tools for the creation of short films (Marino 2004; Lowood

2005; Jones 2006).

These categories identify within them multiple productive subjects: "those that expand on the text of the game and those that use the code of the game to expand the text of some other cultural product, be that a movie, a board game, or a television cartoon" (Postigo

2008: 70). While such a perspective allows for lots of different ways to play with digital games outside of simple code manipulation, the variation in definitions complicates any attempt to measure the extent and scope of modding practices. Furthermore, Poremba

(2003) notes the lack of statistical data or hard evidence that attempts to quantify just how many digital game players actually make, distribute and/or use mods, dealt with only in terms of structural alteration.

Despite the impossibility of knowing exactly how pervasive modding is, the practice does have an identifiable history, bound to the history of people playing with technology and bound to the history of digital games themselves. This history shows, if nothing else, that digital games modification has developed with enough frequency and competency to invoke a multiplicity of possible relationships between users and producers and stimulate a set of cultural politics that speak to users' roles in a contemporary media environment.

Born in Modification

Examinations of the history of digital game modification tend to put heavy emphasis on the practice's links to the first-person shooter (FPS) genre given that the

FPS classic Doom (1993) was the first digital game to foster a widespread and long-

57 lasting mod culture (Sotamaa 2007b; Nieborg 2004; Morris 2003). However, I am proposing that the history of game modding is as old as the media on which it is practiced. The history of digital games themselves - like many computer-based technologies - is bound up with the two processes that define modding: the borrowing and remixing of conceptual influences as well as the alteration of structural elements of the materials being modified (Ceruzzi 1998; Campbell-Kelly 2004). It is a history of hacking ideas as well as hacking code. It is also a history made up of the politics of technological development intersecting with multiple social and economic contexts, meaning it necessarily extends beyond the succinct "dates and names" chronicle of digital games and modding that appears here (see Pacey 1990; Ceruzzi 1998).

Coleman and Dyer-Witheford (2007) remind us that despite the business successes of digital games, they were, like many consumer electronics, not invented by business. Digital games are instead the result of playing with technology, testing its capacities and transforming its expected uses. In short, digital games are the result of the playful hacking of early computers (where hacking should be understood in its original sense, as fixated tinkering with technology, and not as the contemporary criminal sense of digital break-and-entering). Evidence of this is apparent in the results of extracurricular experimentation at Cold War era American research facilities from which video games were born (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009).

The most frequently recognized contender for the title of first video game ever is called Tennis for Two, designed and built by physicist Willy Higinbotham and engineer

58 Robert Dvorak at a New York atomic energy research lab in 1958. In order to alleviate

anxiety about the kinds of nuclear research they were conducting, the lab opened its

doors to the public for an annual visitor's day throughout the 1950s. Higinbotham,

reportedly disappointed by the lack of engaging displays at previous years' events,

decided to make "some minor programming modifications" (Nowak 2008a) to one of the

lab's analog computer applications normally used to calculate ballistic missile

trajectories, and from it "hacked together a rudimentary two-player tennis game" (Poole

2000: 29-30). The game, displayed on a small oscilloscope (a device that visually

represents electric voltages), simulated a tennis match from a side-on view and allowed players to hit a flashing blip back and forth using two crudely constructed input

controllers. Tennis for Two was shown again for a second and final time at the 1959

visitor's day, after which its components were disassembled for use in other lab research

(Nowak 2008a; Poole 2000). While there is still some debate whether Tennis for Two

qualifies as a video game, given its non-digital components, and whether its existence

specifically influenced development of subsequent games - its public showings were

isolated events and there is no evidence that it was the catalyst for the invention of digital

games as we know them today - it is clearly the product of an ethos of technological

14 Ahl (2008) details several non-visual but nonetheless electronic and mainframe computer-based games that were created before Tennis for Two, albeit with abstracted interactivity since input relied on punch cards and output was communicated via print outs. Crude tic-tac-toe, checkers and blackjack programs, as well as business management and military simulations were developed throughout the 1950s in Cold War research labs and universities. While these examples might not qualify as video games, they are still products of modification. The Management Game, a simulation of market competition first programmed in 1959, has been "modified and updated" as computer systems have advanced, but is still in use today, potentially giving it "the longest life of any computer game ever written" (Ahl 2008: 32).

59 experimentation to which all digital games that followed, as well as the practices of contemporary modding, can be tied.

From similar cultures of technological experimentation emerged the first explicitly digital games as well as first modifications of them. In the spring of 1962,

MIT graduate students Steve Russell and J. Martin Graetz invented what is generally accepted as the actual catalyst for today's digital games - a simple looking but painstakingly designed sci-fi combat game called Spacewar, in which players controlled dueling spaceships while avoiding the deadly gravitational pull of a star centred on screen (Herz 1997; Poole 2000; Kent 2001; Wolf 2008a).15 Spacewar was programmed on the Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) state-of-the-art PDP-1 mainframe computer — the first computer to use a typewriter keyboard (in place of punch cards) for data entry (Herz 1997), and a modified oscilloscope visual display that rendered line- based vector graphics (Gardner 2004). Russell, Graetz and their colleagues, enticed by these new features, began creatively experimenting (playing with) the hulking computer's capacities while taking conceptual influence from the post-war fascination with space travel and popular space-opera, science fiction narratives (Wolf 2008b;

Gardner 2004). Spacewar started with Russell modifying a co-worker's software application that (crudely) simulated the experience of being at a planetarium - basically a program that displayed a star map on the screen. Using this as a backdrop, Russell and

15 Spacewar can still be played online through a Java enabled internet browser, using code only slightly modified from the 1962 original and executed in a Java application that emulates the PDP-1 mainframe computer on which the game was designed: http://spacewar.oversigma.com/

60 Graetz programmed two spaceships whose movements and actions could be controlled in real-time by physical input via PDP-1 switches and subjected them to simulated physics of space, meaning they would experience inertia in a frictionless environment as well as the gravity effects of the one large star on-screen. When completed, Russell and Graetz had developed the first entertainment-based use of computer technology, and something that would keep grad students in the basement labs of MIT locked in interstellar combat with each other for years.

Not recognizing the commercial potential of his creation, Russell shared the game with other mainframe computer researchers, some of whom tinkered with its original code, adapting it to their own interests. J.C. Herz (1997) estimates that "by the mid-sixties, there was a copy of Spacewar on every research computer in America, as well as hundreds of personal variations on the source code and millions of dollars of lost- time cost to academia and the military-industrial complex" (7). The game proved so popular it was eventually included with the sale of new PDP-1 computers (Gardner

2004).

As the 1960s came to a close, programmers developed, shared and modified a handful of other influential games. MIT engineers developed a computerized version of mathematician John Conway's cellular automata simulation Life, also known as the

Game of Life (not to be confused with the Milton Bradley board game). Like Spacewar,

Life's code was shared among enthusiasts at MIT and other institutions, and was frequently adapted to individual user's desires - indeed, some suspect Life to be the most

61 programmed software in history, though there is no concrete evidence to confirm this

(Callahan 2004). The creators of both Life and Spacewar never believed the programs they had developed were commercially viable - they were simply regarded as software toys for early computer aficionados, albeit ones that not only revealed the potential of computer technologies outside of their roles as room-sized calculators and "Cold War armaments," but also revealed the power of an emergent hacker culture to create, modify and share digital code (Coleman and Dyer-Witheford 2007: 936).

Such revelations continued with games like Lunar, also known as Lunar Lander or Rocket, a text-based game in which players input data to safely land a space pod on the surface of the moon. Firing your pod's booster rockets for too long may cause you to ascend above the moon's gravitation pull and float off into endless space, or run out of fuel, which, like not using your rockets at all, will make you plummet to the moon's surface and crash. The number of user-made variations of the game - said to be in the high hundreds - has led Lunar to be described by David Ahl in 1978 as "far and away the single most popular computer game" (106) of the era. Conceptually, the game spawned several real-time graphical predecessors, most notably a vector line version by

DEC in 1973 entitled Moonlander, and the commercial, arcade version by Atari in 1979 released under the title Lunar Lander.

Similarly, The Sumer Game (1969), a text-only title programmed by DEC as educational software in an effort to sell shrinking computers to high schools, has a particularly interesting history with user modification (Ahl 2008). Also referred to as

62 King or Hammurabi, it was a feudal empire management simulation where players must collect taxes, buy land, grow crops and defend their virtual empire from potential invaders. Conceptually, Sumer/King/Hammurabi laid the foundation for later empire management games like Civilization (1991), Master of Orion (1993) and countless others. Structurally, however, Sumer's original code formed the base of dozens of user variations, hence the multiplicity of names applied to what are ostensibly just modifications of the same core game. With this bug-free base (the mathematical equations that made the program work), the arbitrary specifics of the code (details of the game) became like a "blank canvas" just waiting to be "molded by teenage imaginations," suggests new media journalist Scott Rosenberg (2007: np). Rosenberg recalls modding one version of the game as a teenager in the 1970s:

Within a couple of days of play I'd exhausted the game's possibilities. But unlike most of the games that captivate teenagers today, Sumer invited tinkering. Anyone could inspect its insides... Modifying it was almost as easy as playing it if you took the couple of hours required to learn simple BASIC: You just loaded... instructions into the computer and started adding lines to the program... My friends and I took its simple structure and began building additions. Let's have players choose different religions! What if we throw in an occasional bubonic plague? Barbarian invaders would be cool. Hey, what about catapults? (np)

While Rosenberg's assumption that today's games do not "invite tinkering" is unfounded, his account is otherwise a prime example of early game modification using a pro-base and user-structure model - something which is still a significant part of partial conversion mods. Of course, Rosenberg and his friends were not alone in their tinkering:

63 Sumer/King/Hammurabi was significantly expanded upon as Kingdom (1974) and

Dukedom (1976), with further multiple variations produced under these names by countless users into the 1980s (Ahl 1984).

Code tinkering remained quite common when personal computing emerged as something in which the public could partake. In the late seventies and early eighties, several hobbyist magazines and books published game source code algorithms which amateur programmers could execute and manipulate in early PC programming languages such as BASIC. The same, however, was not true for TV-attached gaming consoles.

Since consoles have only recently come equipped with operating systems with graphical interfaces with which users can interact, the structural alteration of game code on consoles like the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was not an easy or frequent practice. This is not to say that it did not occur in some forms. In the late

1980s, British game developer Codemasters marketed a NES cartridge add-on device called the Game Genie which allowed users to temporarily alter a game's code (only while the device was attached to the game), to make the game do things its programmers had not intended: usually to enhance player abilities by providing things like infinite lives, invincibility, or the possibility to skip ahead to later game stages.16 Yet it was PCs, which did have interactive operating systems that provided ways to access game files

(and if you knew what you were doing, the code buried in those files), that remained the

16 Nintendo sued Galoob, North American distributer of the Game Genie, claiming the modified game scenarios made possible by the device constituted derivative works that infringed upon copyright laws. Nintendo lost the court case in 1992, but would theoretically be in the right today under current American DMCA copyright law, which makes merely accessing protected code - apart from copying or modifying it - a criminal act.

64 primary sites of game modification after the rise of consoles in the 1980s and to the present.

An Industry Emerges

While structural alteration of early digital games laid the foundation for contemporary modding from within an ethos of technological experimentation, it was conceptual modification and remixing of game ideas that laid the framework for the modern digital games industry. In 1971, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, founders of

Atari, emulated the concept and look of Spacewar, which Bushnell had played as an engineering student at the University of Utah, to create Computer Space, the world's first coin-operated arcade game, as well as the first digital game sold commercially (Poole

2000). Whereas Spacewar was a niche hit with computer scientists, its commercial knockoff Computer Space was a miserable failure with the general public. However, despite being unsuccessful, Bushnell and Dabney followed up Computer Space with

1972's Pong, itself a conceptual borrowing of a table tennis game developed for play on the Magnavox Odyssey - the first home gaming console designed to be connected to television sets. Bushnell is said to have seen the Odyssey demonstrated at a Magnavox trade event just a few months before Pong's debut (Nowak 2008b). Of course, the success ushered in by the bleeps and bloops of Pong changed everything; the title, an immediate consumer hit, is now generally recognized as "the springboard for today's vast computer entertainment industry" (Campbell-Kelly 2004: 272) and spawned no less than two dozen arcade "copies or variations" in 1973 alone (Wolf 2008c: 36). In 1977,

65 well after Pong fostered the market for arcade games, full circle was achieved when software company Cinematronics developed another clone of Spacewar, aptly titled

Space Wars, which finally turned Russell and Graetz' original game into a commercially successful product (Gardner 2004).

The extent to which mods (of both structure and concept) shaped the early gaming and personal computing industries cannot be overemphasized. Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, has stated that the design for his company's first successful product, the Apple II personal computer, was predicated upon and modified around his ability to play a self-coded version of Atari's block-breaker arcade game Breakout

(1976) at home (Wozniak 1984). Yars' Revenge (1981), one of the best selling games released for the Atari 2600, was a conceptual mod of an existing arcade game named

Star Castle (1980), programmed after it was determined that a direct port of the latter game was impossible with the 2600's meager technology (Montfort and Bogost 2009:

81-82). Yars' catalyzed for the industry that console games need not copy arcade hits, that adaptation, the essence of modification, could trump simple "re-doing."

Perhaps what is most significant for the last three decades of the gaming industry: from a modification came its messiah. After Japanese company Nintendo failed to generate a hit in North America with its early arcade game efforts, executives tasked budding game designer Shigeru Miyamoto with modifying one lackluster title, Radar

Scope (1980), into a new game that would appeal to Western audiences. From Radar

Scope, chosen because of the high volume of unsold arcade units available in Nintendo's

66 North American warehouses, was built Donkey Kong (1981). In its first twelve months on sale, Donkey Kong sold 60 000 units and grossed $180 million US (Arsenault 2008:

113). A resounding success, Miyamoto's modification not only established Nintendo in the West and helped finance development of their Nintendo Entertainment System

(NES) console, but also introduced Donkey Kong's protagonist, Mario, into the pop culture mediascape. Nearly thirty years later, Nintendo's plumber has been featured in scores of games that have sold millions of copies and grossed billions of dollars (Kent

2001). While these high-profile examples of internal game modification, both conceptually and structurally, intersect with industry creation and evolution, the growth they helped foster would eventually come to constrain similar behaviour among players and consumers.

As software and digital gaming industries evolved into profitable ventures, the protection of game code as intellectual properties became the new norm and finding publicly available source code became increasingly rare. In the 1980s, Sherry Turkle identified how not allowing established gamers access to the code locked inside of commercial game cartridges or encrypted on diskettes left many feeling alienated by emergent industry heavyweights like Atari and Nintendo (Turkle 1984). Of course, as

Stephen Kent (2001) and others outline, digital games have since evolved into a multi- billion dollar a year industry - a level of success predicated on the protection of source code from consumers.

67 However, those who could hack emerging commercial games made it clear that a game's source code or conceptual themes (both of which were becoming available for protection under changing copyright laws around the world) were not the only intellectual properties with which modders like to play. The poaching and unauthorized re-expressing of commercial franchise IP was also fair game for those adamant about playing with digital games - hinted at as early as 1973, when Atari's failed Computer

Space was copied and rebranded as Star Trek (without permission or licensing from Star

Trek's corporate owners) in the wake of Pong's success (Wolf 2008c). This is also evident in terms of the structural alteration of personal computer games in a popular mod from the early 1980s called Castle Smurfenstein, a converted version of a WWII-themed action game called Castle Wolfenstein (1981), originally released for the Apple II (Au

2002). The Smurfenstein mod retained the source game's underlying engine and structure but replaced the original enemies, Nazi soldiers, with Smurfs, diminutive, blue and gnome-like cartoon characters popular at the time. Instead of an allied spy sent to infiltrate a Nazi stronghold, players now controlled Smurfbutcher Bob, an anti-smurf mercenary sent to "kill as many of the blue bastards as possible, and steal the plans to

operation Smurfkreig" (Johnson 1996). While certainly not the first example of players modifying digital games to suit their pleasures, it is one of the first structural mods to poach elements of commercial popular culture and re-imagine them in the context of

games - a practice that has continued (with significant controversy) to this day.

68 Industry Reaction

While unauthorized hacking and modifying software code was becoming less acceptable, at least in the eyes of the burgeoning software industry, better technology and new, more intuitive GUIs were paving the way for easier user participation in game- making and modification. Intersections and negotiations between the user's drive to play and the industry's drive to protect its product gave way to the emergence of "software toys" being sold by early game publishers. More a creative tool for making games than a definable game in and of itself, a software toy's function "is to provide either the parts or allow the creation of the parts to build a game" (Loguidice & Barton 2009: 2).

One of the earliest software toys was Pinball Construction Set (1982), a toolbox for building one's own pinball video games, programmed by Bill Budge for the Apple II personal computer system. No longer was intimate knowledge of how to access and write computer code essential to make or modify a digital game - Pinball Construction

Set prioritized creativity more than it did specialized knowledge, so much so that neophytes could create virtual pinball games that rivaled those designed by experienced programmers. When running Pinball Construction Set, one side of the screen was a blank workspace on which players of any skill could construct their pinball game using customizable parts and features that could be dragged over from the other side. The simulated physics that allowed each unique configuration of flippers and bumpers to function as it would in reality was preprogrammed into every workspace before construction began.

69 The success of Pinball Construction Set drew the attention of video game publishing company Electronic Arts (EA), who extended the software toy premise with

Music Construction Set (1984), a song creation toolbox, and Adventure Construction Set

(1985), with which players could make their own role-playing games. EA rival

Activision answered with Gary Kitchen's GameMaker (1985), which provided users with basic tools to build rudimentary versions of most computer game genres available at the time. Borrowing the "software toy" philosophy, contemporary games published on TV- attached consoles like Nintendo's Excitebike (1984) and Broderbund's Lode Runner

(1984) soon allowed levels to be edited by players.

Game historians Loguidice and Barton (2009) suggest that all such products

"faced technical limitations that restricted the sophistication of the users' creations, but they nonetheless provided a welcome avenue for creative individuals unwilling or unable to master traditional programming languages" (3). This "software toy" philosophy continues today with releases like Sony's LittleBigPlanet (2008) and ModNation Racers

(2010), which are as much user-friendly, game-creation toolboxes as they are discrete games themselves. However, these contemporary examples embody realities of game modification not viable before the emergence of the mass market internet: namely, the exploitation of the patterns of software toy games in the amplification of business models and marketing strategies that centralize the sharing or selling of user participatory content across networks by game producers. The complications of such amplifications, especially as tied to attempts to harness and guide how users play with

70 game content, are detailed in Chapters Five and Six. Here, understanding the patterns of

this kind of modding is more immediately crucial.

Algorithmic Games: Pro-Bases and User-Content

Such software toys and game-creation toolkits follow a pattern involved in the

majority of game modification - a pattern common to examples of user-generated mods

of any existing content. The fundamentals of this pattern suggest that professionally

produced content provides a base that ensures functionality of the object in question,

while user-generated or modified content provides specifics of experience (visuals, rules,

etc.). This pattern plays to the essence of digital games as artifacts of algorithmic

thinking (like all digital software). Games are algorithmic in that their "underlying

calculations or rules [their algorithms] determine the game's response to the players

input" and they react accordingly, unless pattern-breaking input is entered (Costikyan

2003: 26). When customizing a software toy or modifying a game in terms of structural

alteration, the professionally produced base includes the algorithmic code that ensures a

piece of software loads and performs in its expected manner, as well as the game engine

that controls the physics of the virtual spaces created and how the graphics are rendered

within them. In turn, the user-generated or modified additions include the specific

details of the visualized game space. Moving the pattern into the non-digital terrain, the

Mustang you purchase from the Ford dealership comes with necessary parts assembled

in such a way that ensures that vehicle's functionality - the base processes of the car are

provided for you within the professional product. However, those with the wherewithal

71 and knowledge to mod the Mustang can dramatically alter its appearance, its specific features and performance specifications while retaining its functionality as a car, its pro- base.

Id Software, the makers of Doom (1993), is said to have changed the "underlying architecture" of mainstream games (and not simply software toys) by formally solidifying the divide between the game-space rendering "engine" of a game and the content of that space (Rehak 2008: 192). For Doom, the engine was "split off conceptually from the rest of the game content," and not only turned into a separate software entity but made just "as much a product as the game itself (Rehak 2008: 192).

Given that it is significantly easier and cheaper to modify an existing functional system than to build one from scratch, developers frequently license a game engine to serve as the pro-base on which their own games can be built. Total conversion modders do the same, minus the need to pay a licensing fee, since mods are usually prohibited from being for-profit releases. This pro-base-plus-user-content pattern has, in the recent past, been accepted within the games industry, spurred on by granted access to engine code and the release of officially sanctioned editing tools, along with assumed authorization to edit, "based on the virtue of the developer giving the user the tools to do so" (Methenitis

2008a: np). But this acceptance and cautious authorization did not arise without conflict.

As personal computers became more user-friendly, and the technology and costs required to connect to the burgeoning internet became more affordable, the making and sharing of game mods, as well as unauthorized user-developed mod tools, became more

72 common. This, coupled with the separation of game engine from game content made early 3D games open to levels of customizability not seen in earlier games. User-made level editors for popular games like 1992's Wolfenstein 3D (an enhanced remake by Id

Software of the earlier mentioned Castle Wolfenstein game) circulated widely, despite that the game was not built with user modification in mind (Carmack 1999).

Increasingly proficient users were able to access the source code of several games, hacking into games' executable files, stimulating not only user modifications but also illegal software piracy. Commercial game developers began facing a paradox that frequently complicates business practices in a digitally-mediated information economy: the source code that constitutes their intellectual property, the lifeblood of their operations, was being threatened by dexterous users who could access, copy and manipulate it - however, at the same time, any legal action they took against mod communities drew ire from fans and alienated a core market of potential consumers.

Game companies soon realized that they needed both intellectual property protection and support from users who not only wanted to play but play with their games, something which led them to embrace online modding communities conditionally (see Au 2002;

Postigo 2003). This is significant because it implies, to some degree, that piracy and modding are not the same (even if, to this day, industry attempts to prevent the former can drastically affect the continued viability of the latter).

Games started being sold with producer-made modification tools, allowing a game's underlying source code to be manipulated with express permission, but

73 importantly, done in such a way that did not absolve corporate owners' rights of intellectual property in the majority of cases. Id Software spearheaded this new enthusiasm with fan modification by designing their next game, Doom, with user expandability in mind, and eventually releasing free access to its source code in the late

1990s, licensed under the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License

(Carmack 1999; Morris 2003). However, even before the legitimized source code access, creative Doom players took advantage of the game's expandable nature made possible by the separation of the game's engine (pro-base) from its "WAD" data files, which collected the audio, graphics, play scenarios and level designs.17 WAD modifications were shared between players in discussion forums and through bulletin board services, as well as distributed on CDs, sometimes for profit, by enterprising mod archivists. "How to Modify Doom" guides flourished in unofficial online incarnations, as well as published books.

While companies like Id were willing to extend limited agency to users, the same enthusiasm was not shared by many third party IP holders. By 1995, Doom WADs of all shapes and sizes were common - including those, like Castle Smurfenstein ten years prior, which poached intellectual property from existing popular culture sources and imported it into games without permission. Batman, Barney the Friendly Dinosaur and characters from Star Wars were all modded into Doom, sometimes with the seeming approval of its developers. Upon seeing a Star Wars-themed Doom WAD, Id lead

17 Doom's design documents suggest that "WAD" is short for "Where's all the data?" (Saul and Stuckey 2007: 12).

74 programmer John Carmack claimed to be "proud of what had been made possible" by users playing with their game and that "making games that could serve as a canvas for other people to work on was a valid direction" in game design (Carmack 1999: np).

However, successful Doom WADs based on other properties such as Twentieth Century

Fox's Alien film series drew negative attention from corporate IP owners, leading to the first of many claims of copyright infringement and legal action against modders when similar unauthorized IP use was attempted with subsequent games, as initiated by Fox's cease-and-desist order imposed on the makers of Aliens Quake in 1997 (something further addressed in the concept of "Foxing" in Chapter Five).

Despite the contentions from third-party IP holders, the potential for modding to provide economic and social capital kept game makers experimenting with how users play with their products. Modder communities (and their capabilities) continued to develop alongside the releases of Id's Quake (1996), Quake II (1997) and Epic games'

Unreal (1998). The culmination of the gaming industry's experimentation with allowing user modification in the 1990s is the case of Counter-Strike (1999), one of the most high- profile examples of the capabilities of game-modding communities, and game industry responses to them. Counter-Strike is a multiplayer-focused, reality-based counter- terrorism mod of a single-player, science fiction-themed FPS game called Half-Life

(1998), making it a "total conversion." Counter-Strike, like most computer game mods, was required to circulate online for free - meaning its creators could derive no financial

compensation from their derivative work. This is not to say that the mod created no

75 value: the success of the mod drove the continued success of the source. To play

Counter-Strike, one required a copy of the source game (which many gamers had - Half-

Life is one of the most critically acclaimed and bestselling PC games ever released). So popular was the mod that the developers of Half-Life hired the game's modders, university students Minh Le and Jess Cliffe, to create a retail version of Counter-Strike, which itself sold over a million units despite also being available as a free online download (Morris 2003).

The developers of Half-Life, Valve Corporation, have been extremely conscious of what users can and will do with their digital code and have positioned user modification of their games as an integral part of their business strategy. In 2003, Valve launched Steam, a legal digital games download service (the iTunes for computer games), originally conceived to make user mods part of its regular service (Au 2002).

This arrangement has proved fruitful for Valve, who have used it to commodify certain mods of their games. For example, Garry's Mod (2006), a popular modification of Half-

Life 2 (2004) and other games that use its source engine, which allows users to make and manipulate in-game objects and characters in accordance with the physics of the created virtual space, has been exceptionally successful. The mod is available for sale on Steam for ten dollars, and after two years on the digital download service its creator revealed that the mod had sold hundreds of thousands of copies, generating significant revenue for

Valve, the legal owner of all modifications of or derivative works from their games

(Miller 2008).

76 It is at the ends of these historical trajectories that we find today's vibrant culture of structural alteration game modding, especially for PC games, where mods are expected and modding communities are actively fostered by developers. At present, the hiring of the most talented code modders by official developers is no longer noteworthy anomaly, but standard practice, and an industry rite of passage for young programmers looking to break into game development. Despite this implicit investment in modding by traditional producers, the work of modders is not merely beneficial to source game owners but to any developer who capitalizes on modder innovations. The current state of the practice is one in which popular mods of popular games either become discretely marketable games themselves (as Counter-Strike and Garry's Mod did), or significantly influence the creation of new games. For example, an ultra-successful scenario mod of

Warcraft III (2002) known as Defense of the Ancients (2003) is noted as inspiring multiple independent commercial releases like Demigod (2009) and League of Legends

(2009), making the mod arguably more influential than its source game (Nguyen 2009).

At present, in gaming-related spaces online, mods are ubiquitously available, circulating along extremely distributed means via file torrent networks, sometimes in centralized hubs like ModDB.com (or Mod Data Base), sometimes sold on online stores like Steam.

From this history - from Spacewar to Defense of the Ancients - it should be clear that modification, both as conceptual influence and structural alteration, has been an integral part of the medium of digital games and the industry that materialized around it.

It should also be clear that movements of mod or (mod-like) practices to console gaming

77 spaces with the return of software toy titles like LittleBigPlanet and ModNation Racers mark, as Newman (2008) predicted, "the mainstreaming of some of this hitherto marginal fan activity" (viii). What is not immediately clear from this history is how we should understand the forces that motivate the practices described, the cultural politics attached to these practices, how these politics, and the boundaries of play they erect, may be played with and played against. The next chapter suggests that the "playing with" culture and technology that drove early modification of digital games can be reasonably understood via the perspectives provided by cultural studies, participatory culture and theories of play. In spite of this, framing the cultural politics and power relations at play in the nos\-Counter-Strike present may demand a shift in direction, and a new articulation of user behaviour in subsequent chapters.

78 Chapter 2

To Play With Fire: Participatory Culture, User-Generated Content and New Patterns of Cultural Production in the Digital Age

And now, though feeble and short-lived Mankind has flaming fire and therefrom Learns many crafts - from the myth of Prometheus attributed to Hesiod (Hamilton 1969: 69)

One strand of Ancient Greek mythology suggests that the supreme Olympian god, Zeus, sanctioned humankind to be created by the cunning Titan god Prometheus and his scatterbrained brother Epimetheus. As fate would have it, Epimetheus was foolish when creating humans: he doled out all the best qualities of survival to wilder animals, leaving people without the benefits of speed, instinct, strength or protective covering. To make up for his brother's oversight, Prometheus stole the knowledge and control of fire from the gods and gave it to humans. Our acquisition of fire - an innovative, god-worthy tool much more powerful than any of the qualities given to animals - infuriated Zeus, who felt access to fire prematurely empowered human beings with the same elements that empowered the gods.18 According to the myth, fire redefined the relationship non-divine beings have with the world, transforming what were sanctioned to be common ineffectual beings into empowered, creative demi-gods

(see Hamilton 1969; Sears 1999).

Certainly, other strands of the same mythology differ in terms of the details Some tales suggest human beings had experience with fire before Prometheus stole it from the gods. Other variations of the myth have Prometheus' theft of fire not the result of his brother's incompetence, but as retaliation of Zeus' ill treatment of humans after their creator humiliated him during an offering ceremony in which Prometheus tricked Zeus into choosing the lesser of two animal offerings. Finally, in some stories, the Olympian gods, and not Prometheus, are said to have created humankind

79 I employ this age-old allusion to better understand the concepts of access and participation within the context of cultural creativity and how they affect the structuring of what are often hierarchical social relations. Just as, in the myth above, access to fire configured human relationships to the gods and the world in unforeseen ways, it may be that access to digital technology has (re)configured the relationships contemporary individuals can have with their cultures and their cultures' power structures, particularly in terms of the ability to participate in the processes of production, consumption and distribution of cultural artifacts. Making such an allusion, however, is not without a muddy history or a set of complications.

Borrowing from the Prometheus myth in this context is nothing new. Barney

(2000) relays that the figure of Prometheus can be found in the dispatches regarding the

"technological spirit of the modern age" of thinkers as diverse as Francis Bacon, Mary

Shelley, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and historical economist David S. Landes (6).

Barney reminds us that Landes' preeminent overview of the Industrial Revolution in

Europe, which calls for the recognition and development of a secondary, more technical phase burgeoning within the primary, ongoing Industrial Revolution, was entitled The

Unbound Prometheus (6). John Perry Barlow, cyberlibertarian and champion of the post-industrial "information revolution," suggests that the rise of digital networking represents "the most profound technological shift since the capture of fire" (quoted in

Barney 2000: 4). The harnessing of fire, as it is used in Barlow's thesis, is a revolutionary force of technological control, that which makes possible the creation of

80 tools outside of those offered by nature - an empowering prospect to say the least.

Indeed, fuel for such sentiments can be found in some versions of the Prometheus myth in which the rebellious Titan thieves fire directly from the "forge of Hephaestus" -

Greek god of fire - the very "source of creativity" (Sears 1999: np). But the ideas of those like Barlow, whose linkages between digital technology and fire, it seems, only and automatically allow for social betterment, breakdown under closer inspection. Such views have rightly been criticized as Utopian and blind, not insignificantly because they ignore additional components of the Prometheus myth (Barney 2000).

Hesiod's version of the myth from his Works and Days suggests that as indirect punishment for Prometheus' theft of fire, Zeus had Pandora, the first non-divine woman, created and embellished by each of the gods, then presented as a gift to feeble-minded

Epimetheus, which he accepted despite being warned by his brother to reject all gifts from Zeus lest they bring about hardship to men. Pandora, the myth suggests, came programmed with a deceitful task. She bore ajar that, when opened, unleashed the plagues and evils of humanity into the world, save for hope (lines 60-105). Barney

(2000) builds upon Hesiod's base by using Aeschylus' play Prometheus Bound to

suggest that it was Prometheus who eventually releases hope as well: "Deprived of hope, human beings could make little use of the fire that had been restored to them. It was at that point that Prometheus... was moved to commit the crime that ultimately brought the wrath of Zeus upon him" (4). Barney uses a line from Aeschylus' play in which

Prometheus claims, "I caused blind hopes to dwell in their breasts" to suggest that

81 human beings, invested with fire and hope are relieved of their "spiritual limits" and enticed to "impose themselves, blindly, on the future" and such blindness permeates through our modern technological spirit (5). Barney suggests:

Hope thus seduces human beings into overestimating and overreaching themselves, with tragic consequences. Beings who recognize their limits can use instruments such as fire (or computer networks) in a healthy and responsible way; but instrumental, hopeful beings who believe themselves to be free of limits are dangerous to themselves... Nevertheless, it is hope that has consistently animated humanity's collective and public approach to the development of technology. (5)

In short, according to Barney, the "story of modern technology is the story of

Prometheus's people writ large: the story of humanity blindly wielding instruments to command and transcend that which is given, in the hope of creating its own future" (6).

In this formulation, the utopic visions of the digital futurists and those who see networked digitalization changing everything are rendered no more transcendent than those who espoused the supposed social progressions of all prior technologies.

However, I am not convinced that the metaphor of Prometheus' gift of fire, representing the concepts of access to and participation within fields of cultural production, made possible through the proliferation of digital technology, is invalid. Nor do I accept that it is solely blindness and empty hope that fuel conclusions that suggest our current technological affordances can reconfigure the relationships creative users of digital media have with their cultures and the power structures therein.

82 My aim for this chapter is to unpack and explore the intersections between access, participation, technology and cultural practice, while keeping in mind that potential reconfigurations are not automatically progressions or advancements - that is to say, I will be recognizing our limits and avoiding the seductions of overestimating the power of the gift of fire (here and throughout this project). But I will also be open to exploring forces at work above and beyond those mentioned in Barney's work, including forces at work in his writing, which itself involves a kind of cultural modification, as identified later in this chapter.

This foundation will help to explain what is happening when people play with culture that surrounds them, and ultimately, what is happening when people modify digital games. To start, I will briefly trace the lineage of cultural production from folk culture to digital culture.

Culture on Fire, Culture in Motion

"What is there about fire that's so lovely? No matter what age we are, what draws us to it?" Beatty blew out the flame and lit it again. "It"'s perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did." - from Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury 2003: 115, emphasis added)

Within a folk-cultural understanding of the history of human creativity, cultural products "evolved through a collective process of collaboration and elaboration.

Folktales, legends, myths, and ballads were built up over time as people added elements that made them more meaningful to their own contexts" (Jenkins 2003: 288). The

83 nineteenth- and early twentieth-century shift from local folk culture to urbanized, industrial mass culture, spurred on by the Industrial Revolution, brought with it a change

in how cultural products were manufactured and distributed. In folk culture

arrangements, forms of social meaning, artistic expression, and entertainment were often

created and consumed by the same population and distributed regionally among close- knit communities without defined standards for production. With creativity not limited by authorial controls, the cultural products produced were constantly being borrowed and

shared, appropriated and modified, edited and extended, broken and repaired - culture was always moving, its products rarely limited to one static form. Advances in production technology, new notions of property ownership, and the emergence of

capitalism as the chief method of economic organization created an industrial mass

culture which redefined community relationships and constructed a separation between producers and consumers (see Lister et al. 2003: 69-71; Jenkins 2002; Hesmondhalgh

2002).19 This shift from folk society to industrial society brought with it a transfer of

social life amenities to large scale (and increasingly trans-national) organizations and

corporations. Among other things, we have grown to rely on such entities for the

majority of our food cultivation and delivery (Monsanto, Kraft, Loblaws), financial

management (HSBC, CIBC, AIG), networks of mobility (Air Canada, Ford, Grey

19 Many scholars of cultural production and/or consumption believe that these processes are never distinct entities, but co-operative forces, or "different movements in a single process" (Hesmondhalgh 2002: 34; see also the "circuit of culture" model by du Gay et al. 1997).

84 Hound), and, significantly, cultural stimulation (Disney, Time Warner, Viacom,

Nintendo).

While never entirely absolute, this separation worked to structure patterns of production and consumption within industrial capitalism, comfortably organizing the mainstream production of cultural forms like music, books, movies, radio programming, and television shows into elevated, concentrated centres of power which could then communicate with the less influential, more scattered and peripheral consumers in unbalanced, one-way transmissions (Macdonald 1998: 23; Coombe & Herman 2001:

918; Lister et al. 2003: 13). Such a system bred generations of "read-only" consumers of culture, those "passive recipients of culture produced elsewhere" epitomized by the

"couch potato" (Lessig 2004: 37).

This privatized, centralized and profit-driven organization of culture has been famously critiqued by the "culture industry" critics of the Frankfurt School like Theodor

Adorno and Herbert Marcuse and other opponents of mass cultural trends. While the views of these thinkers have faced much criticism for being overly pessimistic, elitist, and ignorant of how audiences interpret and use of mass cultural products in a variety of ways (see O'Brien & Szeman 2004: 109-112; Storey 2001: 94), some of their core concerns about the centralized mass-cultural industry as deceptive, undemocratic, and exploitive are what popular technological Utopians are rallying against via their investment of hope in the societal transcendence purportedly made possible by digital technology. Indeed, cyborg-theorist and inventor Steven Mann writes:

85 One of the emerging problems of the twentieth century and its legacy of mass communication is that large percentages of the population are permitted little or no access to the media web. Too many of us are forced dwellers, passive, suppressed beings, living like the famous figures trapped in Plato's cave who spend their lives staring at the enticing glow - desperately clinging to their version of a reality that only serves to maintain their confinement. (Mann & Niedzviecki 2001: 177)

Like many thinkers in our contemporary digital era, Mann goes on to claim that new digital technologies can dissolve the culture industry's manacles by making the "media web" accessible to formerly passive audiences, reconfiguring some of the unbalanced power structures identified by the early mass culture critics. Mann (2001) frames this

access as a kind of "cultural reclamation where the individual is put back into the loop of information production and dispensation" (177).

It is out of such practices that the central feature of the concept of participatory culture, as developed within the academic field of cultural studies, is formulated:

consumer access to creative tools makes possible entry into and participation within "the

loop" of cultural production.20

Participatory Culture

What is participatory culture? According to Jenkins, widely credited for introducing the concept, it is a form of consumerism that "emerges" alongside cultural

consumption patterns that have been "altered by a succession of new media technologies

Participatory culture, as a concept, is often attributed to Henry Jenkins, whose work was inspired by the British cultural studies tradition, especially that which opened up academic acceptance and appreciation (albeit not uncritically) of youth subcultures (2006b: 1).

86 that enable average citizens to participate in the archiving, annotation, appropriation,

transformation, and recirculation of media content" (2003: 286). It might also, more

concretely, be considered the material expression of the freedoms of textual

interpretation discussed in the theory that has come to represent audience- or user-

focused cultural studies, notably the practices of popular reading theorized by Michel de

Certeau "as a type of cultural bricolage through which readers fragment texts and

reassemble the broken shards according to their own blueprints, salvaging bits and pieces

of the found material in making sense of their own social experience" (Jenkins 1992:

26). It is finally a set of methods and practices within which I am positioning the

modification of digital games.

Practitioners of participatory cultural production, suggests Jenkins (2003),

approach privatized corporate mass culture with folk cultural mentalities, "treating film

or television as if it offered them raw materials for telling their own stories and resources

for forging their own communities" (288). Indeed, Jenkins argues that the primary

distinction between emergent participatory fan culture and traditional folk culture is not what people are doing with the cultural artifacts around them - we have always played

with creativity - but instead with how the owners of contemporary culture are reacting.

He writes, "Robin Hood, Pecos Bill, John Henry, Coyote, and Br'er Rabbit belonged to

the folk. Kirk and Spock, Scully and Mulder, Han and Chewbacca, or Xena and

Gabrielle belong to corporations" (2003: 288). Of course, any access to and

87 participation in the cultural lives of folk characters becomes much more difficult for those looking to play with corporate characters (see Chapters Four and Five).

In Jenkins' initial formulation, participatory culture existed on the margins of media consumer behaviour. It was practiced by the most ardent fans of pop cultural texts

- those who might obsess about unspecified details of their favourite television show or book series by gathering to discuss such things at a fan conventions, circulate "zines" dedicated to their consumer passions, as well as share fan written stories that extend the narrative lives of their beloved characters, despite not having any legal right to do so.

Such people, Jenkins (2006b) would relay years later, were "ridiculed in the media, shrouded with social stigma, pushed underground by legal threats, and often depicted as brainless and inarticulate" (1).

Jenkins' Textual Poachers (1992) offered a thorough exploration of participatory cultural practices while extending and advancing active audience and critical consumption theories of the 1980s with its focus on material production by fans, not simply interpretive freedoms. However, for all their productive efforts and will, Jenkins' described participants were still only ever marginal to primary ways of consuming media. Mainstream, one-way broadcasts of corporate media reached tens of millions with a singular message. Most amateur video was only ever limited to family viewing circles (Zimmerman 1995), regional networks that facilitated bootleg tape sharing were prone to breakdown and supply/demand complications, and fan fiction zines, "mass" produced via photocopy machines and distributed by post or by physical exchange (pre-

88 digital peer-to-peer!) might reach only dozens and hundreds. Returning to the metaphor that opens this chapter, Jenkins' textual poachers were playing with wet matches, only ever producing the odd spark, while the gods of television, radio and popular fiction enjoyed the heat and comfort afforded by their fire.

However, in the period between Jenkins' development of the participatory culture model in the late 1980s and early 1990s and his reformulation of it in the early twenty- first century in the wake of networked digitization, the gift of fire had been bestowed upon the user of media texts (with both its benefits and dangers), its flames fanned not only by, well, fans, but also the gods of corporate media production. Indeed, if one thinks of examples of user practices like blogging, online fan fiction, desktop publishing, viral videos and peer-to-peer file sharing, the emergence of new digital media allows for some users to reclaim production roles by exploiting possibilities of access and participation, through the digitally-mediated "return to the folk tradition of participatory

storytelling" (Harmon 1997: D11).

For traditional consumers of culture, the core of any new participatory production made possible by digitalization is a result of the manipulable nature of digital forms.

Older analogue media fix input data into forms that are in some way analogous to their original source - a common example points to the analogous relationship between the grooves on a vinyl record and the actually sounds encoded in them (see Lister et al.

2003: 14). Digital media work differently. They emulate input data as binary numerical code, as "abstract symbols rather than analogous objects" (Lister et al. 2003: 15; see also

89 Hartley 2002: 69-70). Cultural texts like photography, writing, film, and audio can be emulated as digital code, as the bits and pieces of the language of computing. In short, such objects become information. Once in this form, cultural texts exist in a state of flux rather than in a fixed condition, thus making the input data incredibly malleable. This kind of text falls under the logic of what Vivian Sobchack (2000) calls the "meta- morph," that which is incoherent as a "fixed figure," and that which is seductive in its continual fluctuation and variation. Users with the know-how and proper software can therefore intervene in pre-existing digital texts and "morph" them, then have their contributions modified by someone else. Indeed, the products of information "are frequently made out of fragments of other information products; one person's information output is someone else's information input... [and all inputs] can function as raw material for future innovation" (Boyle 2005: 243). Lister et al. (2003) explain further:

Any part of a text can be given its own data address that renders it susceptible to interactive input and change via software. This state of permanent flux is further maintained if the text in question never has to exist as hard copy, if it is located only in computer memories and accessible via the Internet or the web. Texts of this kind... [are] freed from authorial and physical limitation, and any net user can interact with them, turning them into new texts, altering their circulation and distribution, editing them and sending them, and so on. (17)

Information presented as flexible digital code becomes akin to flame, perpetually in motion. It becomes, like Barthes' reading of plastic, the embodiment of "infinite

90 transformation" and "less a thing than the trace of movement" (1972: 97). The scope of such transformations, theorizes Barthes, "gives man the measure of his [sic] power" and

"the euphoria of a prestigious free-wheeling through Nature" (97/98). However, the plastic qualities of code allow for powers that extend beyond transformation to include creation.

Traditional consumers also gain the potential to use digital means of production to make their own cultural products such as music or video. Such means are usually significantly cheaper than their analogue counterparts and are generally adaptable to already-existing and widely-available PC technology. Of course, the quality of amateur work is as potentially flexible as the materials used - plastic, Barthes (1972) reminds us,

"can become buckets as well as jewels" (97). Nevertheless, devices like digital movie cameras and editing software like iMovie allow the most talented independent filmmakers to make professional quality films without the expense of film stock and processing. New distribution avenues on the web collapse time and space, making even the most modestly budgeted film viewable halfway around the world on any computer equipped with an internet connection and media viewing software such as QuickTime.

In the same vein, software applications like desktop publishing and electronic distribution can fuel the proliferation and professional look of independent web publications or zines, broadening their audiences and enhancing their credibility.

Programs like Adobe Flash allow amateur cartoon artists to animate their creations, something which has fostered a lush culture of online net-toons. The potential reach and

91 impact of the amateur net-toon is exemplified by Homestar Runner, an animation-based website launched in the winter of 2000. Unlike the cartoons of professional studios that utilize vast teams of animators, writers, and voice talent, the Homestar Runner universe is the brainchild of just two brothers and, at least initially, the product of only home computers and video game consoles. Nonetheless, Homestarrunner.com is visited by several million people per month ("Homestar Runner" 2008). These are all examples of what Lister et al. (2003) see as the traditional consumers of culture embracing "prosumer technologies," or "technologies that enable the user to be both consumer and producer"

(2003: 33). It is apparent from emergent cultures of digital game modding that games too are prosumer technologies, and "like all other digital objects, [are] but a vast clustering of variables, ready to be altered and modified" and facilitate the (sometimes conflictual) participatory capacities increasingly built into them (Galloway 2006: 112).

Homestarrunner.com, where the Flash animations of the site's creators turned an amateur hobby into a viable career. Image © 2008 The Brothers Chaps.

92 Thus, the conception of participatory cultural content that I am formalizing here is one that includes both original user creations and existing content that is modified by users. In his 2005 book Darknet, new media journalist J.D. Lasica details a similar conception of participatory cultural content which he calls "personal media" made possible by networked digitalization (12). Writes Lasica:

In ways large and small, individuals have begun bypassing the mass media to create or sample digital music, video diaries, film shorts, weblogs, visually arresting Web sites - in short, personal media. Sometimes these personal works will be an entirely original creation, borrowing techniques and ideas, perhaps, but no music, video, or photos created by others. At other times these creations will be a collage or hybrid, borrowing bits and pieces of traditional mass media mixed with material supplied by the user or remixed in interesting new ways and transformed into something new. (12)

In part, the practices of participatory culture by non-professionals have been granted facility, amplification and acceleration by access to digitization, computers and network technology. It is easier, louder and faster to "mod" the world around you now than it was twenty years ago. That said, exercising the potential of this access is not automatic or inclusive to all. Overstating the reach and impact of any participatory cultural practice is always a danger for research such as this. Recognizing that it is only a marginal population of gamers who "engage in these more 'radical' forms of participation" grounds the most reasoned positions on the overall impact of modding and participatory culture in general (Raessens 2005: 381). Participating still requires a specialized set of skills and knowledges, but they are skills and knowledges that are

93 increasingly commonplace within the cultural consciousness of people who have grown up with networked digitalization. Also, Newman (2008) reminds us that while a minority might produce participatory cultural output like mods, the output is used and experienced by much wider swath of cultural consumers, users and audiences.

Empowerment or Exploitation?

The future is the users. Understand that and get out of the way. - Second Life developer Cory Ondrejka, quoted in Lasica (2005: 249).

When presented alongside the metaphors of humankind's access to the tools of the gods, or the dominion over nature that Barthes sees in plastic, the processes of access to and participation in cultural production seem tied to user empowerment. Indeed, digital technologies that allow for content modification are often regarded as

empowering to traditional consumers and small-market producers, enough to both rile up critics of amateurism and bolster its supporters. The primary practitioners of digital participatory culture, according to popular journalistic observations, can be members of two emergent, empowered and oppositional subjectivities. First, some are members of the "cult of the amateur," to recall the title of Andrew Keen's (2007) recent book which

suggests purveyors of participatory cultural content are by and large part of an uncontrollable mass of untalented wannabes, hackers and pirates who take work away

from professional creators, take attention away from advertising-dependent 'legitimate media' and fill the web with low quality amateur schlock. Conversely, some are

94 members of the "Darknet," the grassroots media that exists "outside the limelight of big media" whose adherents exercise their creative potential through new digital technologies after decades of having the concept of creativity pinned down as something belonging only to media professionals and career artists. Members of the Darknet are the purveyors of "the hope and promise of the web," at least according to J.D. Lasica

(2005).

Of course, both views are problematic and polarizing, but both acknowledge user empowerment via digital networking for several legitimate reasons. First, they allow for independent productions to compete with corporate mindshare, as well as offer commodities that may match or beat professional creations in quantity, accessibility and sometimes quality. Next, they diminish barriers that keep untrained or inexperienced people from entering the field of cultural production and reduce the amount of monetary capital necessary to do so. The technologies involved also allow for interactivity with or

"talking back" to cultural producers: when prosumers can add to, delete, or reconfigure cultural commodities that have become integral to today's economy, producers must take notice. Concerning two-way communication between traditional consumers and producers, Coombe & Herman (2001) suggest that digital new media permit mass cultural producers to "become better consumers of alternative meanings and of customer opinion" (919).

Further broadening the argument that digital new media empower individuals, many critics have outlined how the use of new digital technologies (by prosumers or

95 otherwise) has reshaped social, political and economic landscapes. Howard Rheingold

(2002) has theorized how mobile information and communication technologies like internet-ready cell phones and text-messaging devices are reconfiguring social relations, privacy issues, and political control over communication. Siva Vaidhyanathan (2004) has outlined how peer-to-peer network connections and file sharing have shown the potential to spread "cultural anarchy," disrupting what he calls market and technological fundamentalism, a neoliberal ethos that treats information only as commodity (21).

Jenkins (2003; 1992) has written about new technologies and participatory cultural activities enhancing fan participation in the creation of new cultural mythologies - allowing for the active engagement with or "textual poaching" of copyrighted material.

While textual poaching is not unique to the digital era, its proliferation in digital new media is staggering (particularly, as the following chapters will show, in the modding of digital games). Jenkins sees the poaching of corporately-controlled subject matter for

fan appropriation as a way to "question the ideologies of mass culture" (2003: 288) and

"articulat[e] concerns which often go unvoiced within the dominant media" (1992: 23).

Thus, the rhetoric of empowerment accompanying digital culture functions to offset rhetoric of disempowerment resulting from the industrialization of cultural production.

The contemporary impetus behind this struggle for material control (not simply

ideological control) between the producer/author and audience/user has been theorized as

the result of a culturally-based desire to democratize the production of media texts that users have been left out of since industrialization (Cover 2004). Rob Cover (2004)

96 suggests that the popularity of interactive new media forms (particularly digital games) and the creative consumption of such forms is due to our cultural history of interacting in media production (and not out of the media technology itself, avoiding a deterministic view). He theorizes participatory culture in digital environments as the result of a drive toward democratization which will eventually reshape all media-making for the better.

All of these ideas are significant because each works to disrupt recent shifts in the chief economic ideologies that organize how our society operates. It is commonly believed that we now exist within a post-industrial society in which new methods and forms of economic production are prioritized and in which nothing exists outside the reach of commodification (Webster 2006). Many labels have been applied to this social phase - late capitalism, post-Fordism, information society, etc. - however, none truly speaks to all the complexities involved (see Lister et al. 2003: 193; Webster 2006).

What is generally agreed upon is that there has been an economic refocusing away "from the making of goods towards the commodity production of knowledge" (Ruggles 2005:

92). The production and consumption practices of such a phase "are no longer driven by large investments in fixed capital or mass consumption of invariant goods," but by bits of information construed as intellectual property and information-based goods like software and computers "whose production is driven by rapid and continuous innovation and short-market life" (Postigo 2003: 597-598; see also Hartley 2002: 114-115; Edgar &

Sedgwick 2002: 293; Poynder 2001a: 7; Burnett & Marshall 2003: 128). As digitization has allowed cultural texts to be emulated as information - and as barriers of access to

97 and participation in the production/manipulation of these cultural texts crumble and notions of ownership that corporate producers have over their creations is threatened - there has been a shift in most creative industries towards protecting intellectual properties (see Coombe 1998; Coombe & Herman 2001; Lessig 2002). File sharing, textual poaching, and participatory cultural production and distribution without the influence of corporate middle-men, all things mediated by access to digital new media, have put corporate cultural producers on the defensive. These traditional producers have lobbied governments to implement stronger intellectual property laws and curb the proliferation of file-sharing and software piracy, claiming their future success is at stake

(Poynder 2001a).

Nonetheless, these omens of doom from and defence mechanisms of the media content creation industries need to be acknowledged alongside changing dynamics in the relationship between producers and consumers. The spiritual sequel to Jenkins' Textual

Poachers, called Convergence Culture (2006a), describes a more nuanced set of results

occurring out of participatory culture in the digital era - a set of results reflected in a

"moment when fans are central to how culture operates" (Jenkins 2006b: 1). In this moment, new cultural trends, social networking and technologies allow (and in some cases, expect) media users to be active participants in content creation, annotation and

circulation. Jenkins (2006b) suggests:

98 Participatory culture is anything but fringe or underground today. Fan fiction can be accessed in astonishing quantities and diversities by anyone who knows how to Google. Media producers monitor Web forums such as "Television without Pity," planting trial balloons to test viewer response, measuring reaction to controversial plot twists. Game companies give the public access to their design tools, publicize the best results, and hire the top amateur programmers... (2)

The participatory culture practices "once found exclusively in fandom" are perhaps, in the wake of convergence culture moment, "becoming mainstreamed and associated with

empowerment through creative participation and technological know-how; on the cutting

edge of meaning-making" (Postigo 2008: 70).

Jenkins' Convergence Culture notes, and this project extends, that such a moment is wrought with intersecting interests and forces negotiating the future

conditions of user participation in new mediascapes - interests not solely

disadvantageous to traditional producers. Within convergence culture, the practices of participatory culture get taken up and marketed as legitimate content production -

allowing access to modes of production and regulated participation in cultural creation, but eliminating participation in the determination of how and where user-affected

content will circulate (see Chapters Three and Four).

However, the practices of amateur cultural production and user textual

appropriation, modification and redistribution of existing materials described above are not solely the result of digital technology and global computer networks, despite that they are frequently tied to the developments that allow their acceleration. This is where

99 my treatment of modding departs from that of others using a playful participatory culture approach. For instance, in terms of digital games, Roig et al. (2009) suggest

"videogames introduce a 'playful' subject position in our relation with media... transforming the established 'spectatorship' relation with audiovisual products to a more interactive engagement with media, which reflects the playfulness present in new media practices" (95). Similarly, Baldrica (2009) says game mods are "a serendipitous branch of the software tree, their genesis enabled by cheap computers, and their popularity a result of the internet's ability to bring together like-minded creative people" (142), and cements the technology-dependent theory of modding by juxtaposing it with music manipulation: "As opposed to the / primal origins of music, which our tree-dwelling ancestors could make by pounding on the nearest coconuts, the first home computers enabling videogame modding are only a little more than thirty years old" (142-143).

Such perspectives put too much emphasis on identifying the playfulness present in the engagement with new media via digital game or PC technology and ignore the history of user playfulness in pre-digital contexts, as well as prematurely denying histories of participatory engagement and playful cultural modification as a result of human creativity and curiosity. Such histories become apparent when identifying parallels between digital participatory culture and its pre-digital past.

Pre-Digital Participatory Cultural Production Ignoring the forces at play before our investment in the digital denies a rich history of participatory cultural practices that can speak to the current trends under study

100 here. In briefly visiting some pre-digital practices of participatory culture, I will not neglect what is unique about cultural modification of digital games or the actors who have vested interest in the practices of modding, but will provide an overview of activities that speak to assumptions about the nature of human culture and thus complicate attempts to stop, contain and exploit the way people play with cultural artifacts that surround them.

Joost Raessens (2005), borrowing from the concepts of Bolter & Grusin (1999), claims that digital games "are re-mediating the participatory culture that has formed around media such as film and television," then details examples of user participation from those media (as well as radio) to deemphasize the novelty of such practices, as expressed in Roig et al. (2009), in newer media like digital games (Raessens 2005: 373).

However, I am inclined to reach back even farther than radio, film or television and reach outside of a media focus to extract understanding from the forces behind the participatory culture of digital games (and participatory cultural practices on the whole).

The history of modding digital media is bound up in the history of participatory modification of artifacts in general - practices that obviously predate digitization. It is a history impossible to divorce from culture and creativity. Indeed, if suddenly compelled to list any essential characteristics of human creativity, would it be possible to effectively deny creativity's attachment to recreativity, and claim that any created artifact can be, always already is and always will be modified? Fully recognizing the fruitless journey of exploring essential characteristics of abstract concepts, the history of created things

101 tends to support this assumption. Certain cultural scholars suggest that culture is, by nature, associatively accumulative; its new parts attach themselves to older bits to form amalgams. They suggest that complete originality is a romantic ideal and that new creative forces are always in debt to established influences (Boyle 1996). Such accumulation and modification appears to be central to culture - demonstrated, however unscientifically, by the images chosen to grace the covers of two books that claim to provide an overview of the concept, Bennett's Culture: A Reformer's Science (1998) and

Jenks' Culture (2005). The images used are mods; Jenks' Culture features Marcel

Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q, a structural alteration of the Mona Lisa with the addition of thin moustache and goatee beard. Bennett's book uses a mod of conceptual influence - a reimagining of Picasso's Guernica with its suffering Spaniards replaced with Disney cartoon characters.

Folk cultural traditions of borrowing and reinterpreting the bits and pieces of a communal popular culture are documented in fields of music, dance, storytelling and theatre. Taking music as an example, folklorists suggest that the continuous re-use and modification of song lyrics within folk-music traditions is so ingrained and accepted as an archetypal practice of the craft that traditionalist musicians call those fluid lyrics

"instantly to mind and rearrange them constantly, and often unconsciously, to suit their personal and community aesthetics" (Lindahl 2004: 152). Scholars of intellectual property like McLeod (2001; 2003) have identified how shifts in cultural production have rendered folk music trends of continuously borrowing and reinterpreting music and

102 lyrics incongruous with contemporary intellectual property capitalism. Close examinations of history reveal that the notions of sole authorship and creative originality are very recent ideas, emerging alongside the concepts of private property and industrial capitalism (Smiers 2000). Before the development of protected intellectual properties, so the story goes, people had the ability to adopt, adapt, and reissue derivative works based on and built off of the creative works of the past. Well known examples of this creative borrowing (conceptual influence) include Roman poets making use of Greek mythology in their writing; for instance, Virgil's Aeneid (c. 29 BCE) is heavily indebted to Homer's Odyssey (c. 800 BCE). Similarly, artists from the Late Middle Ages borrowed heavily from Greco-Roman legends (think of Dante Alighieri's Divina

Commedia [1320], featuring previously mentioned Virgil as a character). Today, we still have unrestricted creative access to work in the public domain - think of Leonard

Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents' West Side Story (1957), which owes much to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1595), which itself borrows heavily from earlier Italian prose poems such as Masuccio Salernitano's Mariotto and Gianozza

(1476), and other tragic love myths dating back to the classical era like Ovid's Pyramus and Thisbe (c. 8 CE).21 Henry Jenkins (2003) and Lawrence Lessig (2004) point out that one of today's most influential media companies, Disney, built its empire by borrowing heavily from the creative works of the past, especially continental European fairy tales.

21 Gibbons (1980) provides a detailed rundown of Romeo andJuliefs probable history, noting the movements of the story's core elements through a series of Italian works in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, then into English via French translation in the mid-1500s.

103 Of course, fairy tales, folklore and mythological narratives of all sorts exist in variation.

Indeed, mutability and transformation, as plot devices as well as formal conditions of production, are at the "heart of myths" (mythologist Wendy Doniger [O'Flaherty], quoted in Sutton-Smith 1997: 55). Mosco's (2004) dissection of myth and power in the digital era suggests, "[0]ne of the primary sources of a myth's power is its elasticity, which allows the reader or the listener to draw many conclusions, from myth's inherent ambiguity" (10). Perhaps such mutability and elasticity, like that which exists in differing versions of the same story in different cultures, underscores my conception of modding - for what is modding if not specification of existing material to satisfy your

(or your culture's) own ends?

In his analysis of network technology, Barney (2000) categorizes several of the elements of pre-digital participatory culture, including "pastiche, play, and gaming; the demise of authority/authorship... [and] intersubjectivity/intertextuality" (15), under the

(politically) much-maligned rubric of postmodernism, which for him lacks credibility for being too close to the subject matter it wishes to speak about, thus lacking the "critical, theoretical distance" demanded in more traditional modes of analysis (17). But I want to suggest that his entire use of the Prometheus mythology that provides the metaphorical backbone of his arguments (not to mention providing the title of his book) conforms to my conception ofmodification of cultural artifacts.

Barney mashes together mythos from different sources (specifically, Hesiod and

Aeschylus) despite the fact that scholars of classical mythology suggest each author had

104 differing perceptions and evaluations of characters' actions and motivations - that is,

Hesiod is less sympathetic to Prometheus' punishment by Zeus, who is reinforced as a fair and judicious supreme god, while Aeschylus' Zeus is more the unjust antagonist and his Prometheus more the tortured hero (Verdenius 1985; Atsma 2008). Barney draws on both to support his allusions, despite that the differences mentioned throw his metaphor off its rails. However, I am less concerned with this and more concerned with pointing to the process Barney is employing: he is essentially making a mod, a mash-up of two existing cultural mythologies into one that supports his argument (which, inadvertently perhaps, rallies against the "po-mo" processes he uses to make it). He is playing with mythology, tinkering with it, to make a point.

Art

Similarly, the artistic genre of pastiche, or the novel combination and imitation of elements of erstwhile artistic and literary genres, frequently designed in homage to admired creative works of the past, is no doubt made up of acts of pre-digital modding.

Pastiche, as the "playful appropriation of cultural masterworks" (Payne 2008: 59), has been derided as a product of postmodern cultural logic, most notably by Fredric

Jameson. Jameson's critique of pastiche (as a consequence of the wider logic of postmodernity) suggests culture is left with only fragmentation and disjointed recombination of existing cultural forms (Jameson 1998). Newness is absent in reality while pop culture loots and ransacks prior works, thoughts and practices, becoming palimpsests to be further resurfaced with new meanings in a world of consistently

105 interchangeable and superficial surfaces. Though damned in some academic circles, the same characteristics that articulate pastiche underscored its legitimized acceptance within art circles during the pop art movement of the 1960s and 1970s (as embodied in the period works of Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns).

This history of modification in what are now canonized art forms breaks with some scholars' conceptions of where and when cultural modification can and should occur. Fiske (1992) distinguishes industrially-produced pop culture texts ("open" to

"productive reworking" because of their disposability and superficialities) from what he calls the "uniquely crafted art-object[s]" of "official" (or canonized) culture which are

"complete" and "satisfying" (47). Essentially, he claims user modification works better on pop culture's more open and provocative texts than on high culture's more valued and honoured ones.

This is now (if it was not when Fiske was writing) an empty distinction that, however residually, clings to the traditionally disproportionate esteem given to "high" or

"low" cultural products and their users. Claiming that pop cultural texts have

"producerly qualities" (gaps, inconsistencies, etc.) but art works do not ignores massive amounts of modification (by both amateurs and professionals) of classic art, particularly in the age of mechanical (and digital!) reproduction. The canonized art world is a particularly fruitful target for modification since much of the work within it exists in the public domain, so creative extensions and reworkings can be accomplished without the same degree of legal contention that accompanies the modding of many contemporary

106 texts. Notably, one just has to point to the ubiquity of modified Mona Lisas, wearing sun

glasses or throwing up gang-related hand signals, presented to the world in fridge magnet form. There is also Hollywood's past of making teen movies based on canonical public

domain narratives - O (2001) and Ten Things I Hate About You (1999) rifling from

Shakespeare's Othello and The Taming of the Shrew respectively, or Clueless's (1995) retelling of Jane Austen's Emma. Another modification of Austen, the previously mentioned structural alteration Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), proved so

successful that its publishers quickly commissioned another send off of her grand

contribution to canonized English literature - Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters

(2009).

Non-Media: Tinkering, Mechanical Modification and Technological Dialogue

These are all examples of participatory cultural production involving user modifications of conceptual influence. As has been reiterated in this project's

introduction, participatory cultural production in the digital age frequently (especially in terms of video game modding) deals with the modification of actual forms, or structural

alteration. Of course, access to and modification of conceptual or intellectual forms is

much easier than access to and modification of actual forms, but the latter is not without

a precedent of playful user-participation. The tradition of messing with the definite bits

and pieces of things themselves (not just their conceptual influences) has a rich pre-

digital history.

107 Within art history, modding of actual form exists most explicitly in collage making using existing materials, extending from the high-culture Modernist movement

(Picasso, Kurt Schwitters), to Surrealist experiments with photomontage, to the high school art classes where students are asked to cobble together remixed masterpieces using glue sticks and magazine images. Marcel Duchamp (playfully) explored structural alteration's ties to appropriation, unauthorized alteration, transformation of intended function and ideological symbolic inversion with his "readymade" installations - existing, everyday objects he signed, dated and presented as art, sometimes with minor modifications. Notable examples include his expropriation of a urinal from its lavatory setting and displaying of it in a gallery as "Fountain," modifying it from a receptacle for waste to an expressive object, or his accessorizing of the iconic image of the Mona Lisa with facial hair, accompanied by the play on words L.H.O.O.Q, meant to sound like

"Elle a chaud au cul," which loosely translates to "She has a hot bum/ass," when read aloud (Seekamp 2004). The brand of modification found in the latter example, which

Duchamp called "rectified," that which reveals what the source artist left ambiguous, playfully invokes insinuations of Da Vinci's homosexuality by giving Lisa masculine features and implying her restrained smile is indicative of strong sexual desire, perhaps for her portraitist (Jones 2001).22

22 While Duchamp is most well known for his artistic contributions and readymade modifications, he devoted the last half of his life not to art but to chess. He can arguably be seen as contributing to game modding by partaking in a performance-oriented chess match against composer John Cage in 1968 which employed a modified chess board, rigged to "activat[e] or cut off the sound coming live from several musicians" on stage as pieces were moved around in normal play, ostensibly modifying a chess match into a musical performance (Lotrmger 2000: np).

108 Duchamp's work shows that participatory practices expressed in the pre-digital structural alteration of art, or any form of mediated representation, not only flourished, but were not without their own cultural politics, and testing of the boundaries of acceptable "playing with" cultural forms. However, these conditions are not limited to expressive forms, meaning participatory culture as a site of academic analysis should be open to the inclusion of any cultural artifact, media-related or not, so long as they exhibit the conditions of non-professional production or user-modification. The forces that animate participatory cultural production in media texts are at play in the world of modding or structural alteration of non-media objects, especially in the electro­ mechanical concept of tinkering.

Of course, modding, hacking and the ethos of tinkering as technological experimentation have been foundational to the development of most digital technology.

Indeed, the "principle of tinkering with the stuff that you own was the principle on which the entire personal computer industry was founded" (Lohmann, quoted in Lasica 2005:

253). For example, the first incarnations of Microsoft's MS-DOS operating system, used by IBM in their early personal computers, were based on and borrowed significantly from 86-DOS or QDOS (short for "quick and dirty operating system") developed by another Seattle-based computer company - though MS paid a license to use QDOS

(Ceruzzi 1998: 270-271). QDOS itself borrowed elements from Digital Research's older

CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) operating system, including the concept of

109 BIOS and even some typed commands. This is equally true for digital games, as was outlined in the history of modding put forth in Chapter One.

Tinkering with purchased technology (computer hardware, software, etc.) is still frequently linked to the process of technological innovation, and just as frequently feared to be threatened or stifled by attempts to prevent user-access to and reverse engineering of technological forms, especially via digital rights management (Tenner 2003).

On a more mechanical level, user modifications like "hotrodding" and other forms of car customization are as old as the automobile itself. Mechanical modification provides the basis for much of the intrigue of shows like Mythbusters (2003) ox Junkyard

Wars (2001), where everything and anything that can be cobbled together will be. The practice of tinkering with "motorcycle engines, lawn mower engines, automobiles, radios," etc., is one of learning, discovery and creativity for (male?) children (John Seely

Brown, quoted in Lessig 2004: 45). But Brown's masculinist examples, reliant on tinkering with mechanical tools and toys frequently associated with boy-culture

(motorbikes, engines), as well as their congruent spaces (the male-prescribed domain of the garage), ignore that the same practices exist and flourish within the cultural routines and spaces that have been prescribed onto girls and women - sometimes, it is suspected, with greater frequency and intensity.

Indeed, the age-old creative modification and repair of things like clothing - or the process of patchwork quilting - associated most frequently with household work of wives and mothers, can be regarded as expressions of participatory cultural production,

110 albeit ones traditionally connected to necessity rather than leisure or stylistic endeavour.

However, more contemporary takes on the same processes do emphasize them as

creative choices rather than obligatory life work. The arts and crafts section of most bookstores feature handbooks, aimed at young female readers, about clothes alteration - turning old fashions into new ones. McRobbie (1994) identifies a "rag-market"

subculture in the UK, a female space where young girls scour second-hand clothing

shops in search of cheap materials to modify according to tastes of the day. In terms of media culture, within scholarship of fan fiction and fan art there is frequently the claim that such practices are exercised "mostly" by women (Jenkins 1992: 19). However, while proof of such claims is sparse, there is obviously a significant presence by girls

and women in these areas of fan productivity. While no studies exist that provide

statistical evidence about the role of female participants in the code modding of

computer software or digital games, the continued gender disparity concerning

enrollment in and acceptance within fields of computer programming suggests the processes and knowledges involved are dominated by boys and men.23 U.S. figures

suggest nearly 75% of those getting bachelor degrees in practical computer and

information related fields are men, despite the fact that nearly 60% of those awarded bachelor degrees in the U.S.A. are female (Yucel et al. 2006: 1). Similarly, according to

the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), as of 2005, only 11.5 % of jobs

23 Schleiner (2005) claims that "the majority of game patchers are male, ranging from teenage boys to thirty-five-year-old men" but offers no source for this information (408). She does note, however, that one of the most well-known modder-to-developer success stories involves female modder Stevie Case, whose abilities playing and playing with id Software's Quake led to a career in the games industry that has included everything from designing levels to production studio management (410).

Ill in the gaming industry are filled by women (np). However, it should be noted that some researchers suggest game modding should be recognized as a way to promote programming and IT skills in female populations (Yucel et al. 2006).

Historian Arnold Pacey opens his Technology in World Civilization by suggesting that the transfer of technology between societies often plays out like a

"dialogue or dialectic in which recipients of a new body of knowledge and technique

'interrogate' it on the basis of their own experience and knowledge of local conditions"

(1990: vii-viii). Pacey posits that the exchange is not complete upon first contact with new technology by its receivers, but is instead the initial step in a more significant process of adaptation, and that such acquisitions function as stimuli for local invention.

Not recognizing this dialogic nature of technological uptake leads to a skewed perception of what Pacey refers to as "the history of invention," as well as the failure of many development initiatives in the sparsely industrialized world (viii).

The imposition of the developed world's technology into such places has been fraught with difficulty since many initiatives - despite their goodwill - do not allow for what Pacey calls "responsive invention" to flourish, whereby foreign techniques and artifacts are adapted and expanded upon via local knowledge and custom. Writes Pacey,

".. .the experience is often that the technology does not function well and is ultimately abandoned. Efforts to introduce tractors, water-pumps, sewage works and factories have gone through this cycle in [the developing world]" (viii). The frustration and wasted

112 expenditures of such failed projects fuel continued hemispheric division and cement for many the "backwards" nature of the developing world.

However, Pacey argues that such negative outcomes can be evaded by introducing new technology in a manner that allows for "technological dialogue" (8), which he suggests opens the door "to modifications, possibly in equipment, but more especially in social arrangements affecting its use" (viii). I employ this illustration to suggest that parallels to Pacey's technological dialogue can be identified when examining the transfer of cultural artifacts between producers and consumers. The consumption of media goods takes on dialogic properties, frequently stimulating responsive invention, but the conditions of exchange for such goods just as frequently prevent or suppress the potential of this dialogue.

Participatory Culture as Play

All of the pre-digital, user-produced examples of variation and modification described above are the result of different cultural histories of sharing and adapting texts and objects. However, if we accept that the forces that motivate such modification are innate to human nature (be it via creativity, collective unconscious or otherwise), this is something every person (and every society of persons) is driven to do. It is also something that we did more readily (at least theoretically) during eras before the enclosure of authorial control that industrialized culture and intellectual property brings

(or attempts to bring) to contemporary culture. But enclosure stimulates resentment within its borders, and the fire of the digital provides opportunities for that resentment to

113 be reified. It is not, as Roig et al. (2009) suggest, that digital games introduce user playfulness into our relationship with media culture, thus reformulating receivers as interactive agents, but rather that the playfulness of interactive engagement with all cultural forms exists (and has forever), but is accelerated by convergence of enclosure and digitalization. Accepting this means participatory culture, in all its poaching, remixing, and redistribution of conceptual influences and structural forms, shares characteristics with the concept of play (natural, limited, creative, conflictual). Modding, or the playing with cultural objects, is participatory culture, is play. In short, I argue that modding is a kind of play within a system of constraints.

If culture, as Williams' Keywords (1976) suggests, is "one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language" (76) based on its indeterminate

contemporary character and mutability through history, then play, especially as it is culturally employed, is its neighbour in complication. Since no one is free of the

capacity for play, and it has been in some form a part of every person's history, we take

for granted that the concept of play is untenable and that: "when it comes to making theoretical statements about what play is, we fall into silliness. There is little agreement

among [its scholars], and much ambiguity" (Sutton-Smith 1997: 1). This ambiguity of play, according to Sutton-Smith (1997), has led to the concept being understood only through disciplinary rhetorics that graft play onto their discursive specifications (6-8),

not to mention popular conceptions of play that reduce it to a children's endeavour, and

often trivialize its rambunctious nature against its more clean-cut and respected cousin,

114 work. Chick and Hood (1998) note - playfully - that, in Western societies "work has been seen as the fountainhead of progress while play and leisure are, at best, diversions, and, at worst, potential settings for the handiwork of the devil" (5).

For my purposes here, play will be defined using the abstract model provided in

Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman's (2004) work and endorsed by games theorist Ian

Bogost (2008): "play is the free space of movement within a more rigid structure.

Understood in this sense, play refers to the 'possibility space' created by constraints of all kinds" (120). This sovereignty-within-boundaries theorization of play has its roots in the work of cultural scholars of play like Johan Huizinga (1955) and Roger Caillois

(1961), whose work has been actively taken up by digital game studies in recent years

(Kerr 2006).

Importantly, this understanding of play as an exercise of free movement within a space of possibility is not void of regulation. Writes Bogost (2008) "imposing rules does not suffocate play, but makes it possible in the first place" (120). Some constraints within the possibility space may be physically imposed, so removing the constraint means tearing down a physical barrier, like a wall. Others, such as rules or laws, are much easier to construct, but also easier to ignore, defy or change. Writes Bogost

(2008), "when children play, they constantly renegotiate their relationship with a possibility space" (121), changing the rules and regulations of play along the way.

Bogost calls these non-physical constraints, which are built into regulatory code, as the work of Lawrence Lessig (1999; 2004) suggests, and whose implementations result in

115 new possibility spaces "procedures (or processes)" that can be "explored through play"

(Bogost 2008: 122).

Extrapolating these theories of play to larger practices of participatory cultural

production is integral to the optimal understanding of the activities and motivations of

people like modders because, to paraphrase Raessens (2005) using the rhetorical tools I

have developed here, those who play are the ones, so long as they are not only playing

but also playing with (becoming "game programmers and thereby mov[ing] from game

to metagame") who best recognize that cultural reality is "open source" (383). There is

no better illustration of this than the mutability of play objects.

And it is about time we started talking about games...

Of course, play objects, like digital and pre-digital games of all sorts, are subject

to modification by their players and have always been so. While play theorist Caillois

(1961) suggests that games need sameness across generations (for ease of access and

familiarity of play), he acknowledges that their infinite adaptability destabilizes them:

"[Games] are innumerable and changeable... spreading and acclimating themselves with

disconcerting ease" (81). Personal examples of such alterations should come to mind

immediately. Games like Scrabble or Monopoly certainly come with explanations of

their official rules, or "ideal" rules, as labeled by Salen and Zimmerman (2005: 15), but

there is nothing stopping those playing them from defining their own house rules, or

what the above critics call "real" rules (15). No doubt each of us has had the experience

of playing a common board or card game with new people where the conditions of play

116 have been modified from those with which we are familiar. As Salen and Zimmerman

(2005) write, "It's clear that playing by the rules and playing with the rules of a game go hand in hand" (15). Indeed, some ideologies of play, such as those offered by game theorist Bernard DeKoven (2005) are predicated on the flexibility of play forms being central to players' determination of their own game experiences.

As unstable and innumerable entities, games can be a nice mix of conceptual mods (in fluid rules of play modified by players) and mods of structural form (artifacts of play being used in unintended ways). Austin (2007) suggests the history of 'table-top' war strategy games, popular since the nineteenth century, is rife with user-modified content and scenario customization. The development of table-top role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons was, according to Austin, framed within a culture of player

. customization modeled after the tradition of modification fostered by these earlier war strategies. Austin continues by categorizing two levels of engagement with a table-top game's possibility spaces: first, the level of inscribed content, which focuses on the in- game elements, leading to modifications of game rules or user-scenario creations; and second, the level of emergent creativity, which focuses on modifications and user- articulations outside of the game's play space - what he calls "meta-game experiences"

(np). Examples of meta-game creativity include the authoring of character histories by players, and the creation and mapping out of "worlds" in which a customized Dungeons and Dragons narrative could be set.

117 Digital games, however, complicate Austin's categories by making up a distinct kind of possibility space in which the "rules and objects that define characteristics of the

gameworld are bound to states of hardware and software" (Harpold 2008: 92). This list

of possibility space limitations needs to be augmented with questions of access (Who can play? Who can play with?). Also, if extrapolating the rhetoric of freedom-within-

constraints beyond games themselves, past the wires and switches, bleeps and bloops and

lines of digital code, to the participatory cultural phenomenon of playing with pop

culture, then interests of, reactions to, and institutional limitations imposed by actors

skeptical of users' playfulness in the possibility spaces surrounding games (and the properties attached to and within them) need to be addressed.

Conclusion

This chapter suggests that user participation in cultural production, amplified by

access to tools that make such production viable, affects relations of power between users and traditional producers, much as Prometheus' gift of fire affected relations of power between humankind and the Olympian gods. Access and participation facilitated by the gifts of networked digitalization provide amplification of folk cultural traditions

of decentralized cultural production, where culture's texts are not static, privately-owned properties but public goods always in motion, frequently played with and modified to

suit local tastes and values. This folk mentality has not been erased in the industrialization of culture as private commodity, surviving in the practices of

118 participatory culture identified by those who study what users and audiences do with and create from popular culture. But whereas participatory cultural practices were marginalized and limited by conditions of production and circulation in previous generations, they have been made mainstream, made accessible and made potentially powerful in the era of networked digitalization. Now, when cultural texts can exist as bits of information, infinitely copyable, flexible and sharable at a mouse click, they are easier to play with. But those who identify playfulness in digital participatory culture seem to deny how play already existed in pre-digital participatory culture and folk cultural texts.

This chapter concludes by theorizing that play may be the driving force behind the motion of folk culture, part of the nature of human culture that explains the persistence of participatory cultural production by suggesting that texts like digital games are never merely played and are always already played with, conceptually and materially. This, in turn, may complicate attempts to stop, contain or exploit the way people play with cultural artifacts, as the subsequent chapters attest.

The following chapter will both extend and complicate the ideas presented here by explicitly positioning the modding of digital games within the patterns of participatory cultural production with particular regard to how it has been subsumed into a corporate model of media production that pervades a capitalist post-industrial economy. From here on: no more classical mythology metaphors. I promise.

119 Chapter 3

User Mods as Free Labour: The Political Economy of Games Modification

Even in the commodity form, however, games have continued to depend for their vitality on a constant infusion of energies from a do-it-yourself player-producer culture that embodies the autonomous capacities of the new echelons of immaterial labor. - Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter (2009): 6

Working with the idea that modding is a form of participatory culture, that participatory cultural practices constitute a kind of play, and that this kind of play is inherent to creative interaction with any cultural texts demands the reconfiguration of how we look at digital games and their uses. The history of digital game modding laid out in Chapter One, along with the wider practice of participatory cultural creation by the expected consumers of commercial cultural content, certainly position user creativity within a tradition of cultural production championed by cultural studies. Simply, user- generated phenomena like modding are, from a cultural studies perspective, ordinary and justifiable, reconstitutive and potentially subversive. It should be no surprise to those familiar with the work of Raymond Williams that culture which qualifies as legitimate to

certain user communities cannot be determined by definitions limited to the canonized

arts and thoughts of elites retaining the residue of Victorian thinking that aims to "carry us towards sweetness and light," to quote Matthew Arnold's famous quip about the duty

of (high) culture. That the user modifications of existing artifacts of popular culture become significant cultural objects to enthusiast communities should be obvious to

120 scholars versed in Hebdige. That popular media culture can, despite its commercialized nature and standardized forms, become the site of politicized contestation with dominant ideologies should be customary to devotees of active audience theory.

Thus far, I have been using the cultural studies lens to explain what modders are able to do and have been doing with digital games, including to rethink outmoded theories of semiotic democracy and textual decoding of cultural artifacts by being able to more easily and productively "play with" texts themselves, rather than playing with textual interpretations. I have hypothesized that the increased regularity of such actions has redefined the role of the user of new media content in ways both beneficial and detrimental to users. Such redefinition is dependent not simply upon knowing what modders are doing, but also upon knowing how the industry that produces the games being modded is reacting to what modders are doing. This requires an understanding of how socio-economic forces work to shape relationships between modders and the industries in question and how these forces influence further user modifications and industry reaction; thus, this chapter employs the critical perspectives of the political economy of communication to interrogate the most contentious of such industry reactions and the cultural politics emerging therein.

The critical political economy of communication is concerned with the economic driving forces of communication systems (production and labour in the media industries, ownership concerns, etc.), but also with state policy and regulation of communication and the commodification of the communication systems' content. A critical political

121 economy approach to user participation in pop culture creation unfolds something like this: though a capacity for creative involvement and participatory construction of culture by users might seem like the shifting from a vertically integrated model of power in cultural production to a horizontal democratization of power dissemination, this is not necessarily the case. We must remember the economic imperative of corporate producers, and how relations of power - including power of access to cultural production

- is bound up with logics of capitalism in a post-industrial economy.

The political economy of new media identifies a convergence of the economic logics endemic to contemporary post-industrial society and sees them expressed on two fronts: one professional (producer-centric) and one amateur (consumer-centric). On the professional front, the result is labour casualization as creative work meets new technology and neoliberal economic organization. John Hartley (2005) details such casualization in the rise of "creative industries" and new "creative classes" of people employed by them. These creative classes include legions of creative consumers, whose former leisure activities (DJing, used-clothing alteration, software hacking or modification), become new sources of (often insecure) contract employment, and whose creative re-articulations of existing goods become the products of a new post-industrial model of economics. The games industry, perhaps the key embodiment of such logics, is no stranger to precarious labour (Deuze, Martin and Allen 2007).

On the amateur front (more my focus here), we see those logics manifest as the exploitation of value generated by users for commercial enterprises without

122 remuneration. This process has been framed as "immaterial labour" (Lazzarato 1996), free labour (Terranova 2000), and, in terms of the unpaid work of fans of digital games,

"playbour" (Kucklich 2005).

Analyses of recent trends in digital culture found in Dyer-Witheford (1999),

Terranova (2004), Postigo (2003) and Kline et al. (2003) offer a good starting point for political economic readings of the forces that animate practices such as the modding of digital games. Each source suspects that consumer creativity may be exploited in the post-industrial economy, whose production and consumption practices are driven by the exchange of intangible knowledges, or information construed as intellectual property, or perpetually-innovating, information-based products such computer software, instead of the more long-term, "hard" goods that drove the industrial economy (like cars, heavy appliances, homes, etc.). Since information-based products are generally easier to modify than hard goods - not to mention that they may be built on knowledges increasingly familiar to the consuming public (computer programming vocabularies, etc.) - they are ripe for consumer participation in their further development post-sale. As a result, producers of things like digital games have been accused of using new models of economic organization to take advantage of trends in consumer creativity that ultimately work to reinforce traditional power relations between producers and consumers by tapping into audience labour pools and lowering corporate dependency on a paid workforce for product research and development, or upgrades and product add­ ons (Postigo 2003; Sotamaa 2007b).

123 Internet-based industries are not strangers to accusations of taking advantage of the casualized or unpaid work of web users, with the most extreme critics identifying continuities between new forms of digital service work and sweatshop labour (Terranova

2004: 73). Tiziana Terranova uses the term "free labour" to classify the exploited work of those who create value without monetary compensation for profit-oriented enterprises

(74),24 exemplified by the volunteer "community leaders" who for years managed AOL's chat forums without compensation despite helping to create the means by which the company generated millions of dollars in revenue each month (Terranova 2004: 92).

Building on the ideas of Autonomist Marxist thinkers, who theorize the movement of value-generating work patterns from the factory into more social spaces, where the labour goes un- (or under-) remunerated despite that it is still fundamental to the reproduction of the social conditions necessary for economic success of the dominant social model (see Dyer-Witheford 1999), Terranova (2004) suggests such practices are not limited to digital spaces, but are conditions of the "cultural economy at large" in late capitalism (73). She writes:

Labour or work, as described here, must be distinguished from employment or waged-labour Failing to do so trivializes the forms of labour that are not remunerated despite providing value to workings of capital, such as those kinds of work that traditionally get applied to women in familial situations and include child-rearing, home management and care for the elderly

124 Simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited, free labour on the Net includes the activity of building web sites, modifying software packages, reading and participating in mailing lists and building virtual spaces. Far from being an 'unreal', empty space, the Internet is animated by cultural and technical labour through and through, a continuous production of value which is completely immanent in the flows of the network society at large. (74)

The Open Source and Web 2.0 phenomena, reliant on the continued, unwaged contribution of software tinkerers and content producers are examples of what Terranova suggests is "further evidence of this structural trend within the digital economy" (91).

The output of users on social networking and user-generated content sharing sites

(Facebook, YouTube) is made an asset to those in control of those spaces. As Scholz

(2008) suggests, "the affect, authenticity, knowledge, and cultural expression of people creates surplus value through advertising schemes that transform attention into money"

(np). In extreme examples, for-profit corporations are using the asset accumulation methods of not-for-profit initiatives of the open-source era by sanctioning unpaid users to do work for them. Facebook, whose disputed value is said to be as high as $10-15 billion (AP 2009), was not swayed in the spring of 2009 by their substantial worth from approaching users with regionally-specific sounding names with requests to help translate Facebook pages into languages that matched those regional specifications.

Despite being Dutch, net theorist Geert Lovink had such an automated request come from Facebook, asking him if he spoke and was willing to provide translation help for

Hrvatski (Croatian). Lovink dismissed the appeal as the way the "religion of 'free

125 culture' (as promoted by evangelists such as Lessig...)" manifests under global capital

(2009: np).

Such trends in corporate entertainment media are not new. On TV, the content of

daily tabloid talk shows, televised civil court programs and shocking or funny home

video shows (epitomized by Maury Povich, Judge Judy and America's Funniest Home

Videos respectively - what Terranova (2004) calls "people shows") is only made

possible by the willing contributions of everyday people, participants who are "converted

into monetary value through their capacity to affectively perform their misery" (95).25

Television's more recent shifts into the genre of "reality-programming" and

"competition performance shows" with their focus on amateur and citizen subjects, and

the sometimes direct involvement from viewing audiences whose votes may control the

outcome of competition, is significantly reliant on low waged (under-scale), non­

professional labour or unwaged volunteer contributions.

As a result of the value of user input and user-generated content, made so

apparent in the rise and success of social media websites, traditional corporate

advertisers have also jumped on the user-generated content bandwagon. In recent years, users have frequently been called upon to create content that promotes or supplements

25 Terranova (2004) does go on to make an important distinction between the labour of non-professionals contributing to the content of "people shows" on TV and web users who contribute to the continued expansion of the internet TV shows, she suggests, must perpetuate the idealized moral ideology of the dominant social order, so much so that the participants of such shows who appear as deviants to the normalized morals are frequently chastised for their indiscretions by hosts, audience members and mvited experts. On the internet, suggests Terranova, the toleration of behaviours otherwise vilified in traditional media allows for less-constrained exploitation of user contributions See Chapter Six for my complication of this argument

126 their favourite products, usually by entering contests where winning entries are officially

endorsed and circulated by the product's corporate owners. One notable example is

Frito-Lay's 2007 contest which asked the public to create a short TV-quality ad for

Doritos tortilla chips that would air alongside multimillion dollar professionally made

commercials during the NFL's Super Bowl broadcast, the most watched annual television event in the United States (Poniwozik 2007). Other key examples include calls

for fans to produce entirely original music videos for rock bands like Papa Roach

(ElTonalRecords 2007), or remix an R.E.M. video from a large stock of open-sourced

footage provided by the band (Asay 2008), or write a new theme song for CBC's Hockey

Night In Canada broadcasts after the rights to the old theme were lost to a rival network

in a bidding war (CBC Sports 2008).

The Audience Commodity and the Commodification of Play

Other treatments of similar phenomena are more abstract in their approach, most notably the audience commodity thesis of Dallas Smythe. Summarizing the findings of

Smythe, Darin Barney (2000) suggests that "the 'product' of broadcast technologies was neither programming nor advertising, but, rather, the audiences that could be gathered

and delivered to advertisers... in the form of a saleable commodity like any other" (13).

Ruggles (1994) suggests that "interlocutors" in the audience commodity debate

such as Sut Jhally and Bill Livant have contributed "speculative elaborations on

This is not necessarily a new tactic: Fiske (1992) describes a competition offered in the 1980s by MTV where fans were asked to produce amateur videos of Madonna's song "True Blue."

127 Smythe's thesis" that connect audience power as commodity to notions of exploited labour power, going so far as to use Marx's labour theory of value in their arguments

(48). Ruggles writes, "In this view labor's exploitation by capital is, in the media context, capital's appropriation of some of the value to itself of the audience's activity in attending to and acting upon media messages" (48).

With this in mind, it is possible to theorize that digital game modding might provide a window through which we can understand how the "audience commodity" process might be manifested and re-articulated in the digital era. In some instances, modding exhibits the commodification of a labouring audience in which consumers create value in their productive consumption of information-based goods. The twist added when considering digital games is that the users partaking in audience labour are actually producing the products they consume. Within the television model of the audience commodity thesis, viewers are expected to use their leisure time to work on consumption (as audiences sold to advertisers whose goods they are encouraged to consume). Corporate networks on television still provide the content against which they use audience attention to sell specific demographics to advertisers and therefrom profit.

A user-generated model does much to remove the point that it is professionally provided content that draws in users - instead, users are providing the content themselves. The product of the leisure-time output by modders of consumed goods becomes a commodifible good in and of itself. Smythe's thesis suggests audience work only at the level of consumption, while mine requires high-involvement by fan audiences at the

128 production level. However, matching the older conception, the audience labour of modding, if framed as related to play, is not a kind of work that users mind doing, despite the fact that it conflates leisure activities with laborious ones.

It is hard to deny that the concepts of play and leisure in contemporary social spheres are thoroughly commodified. The instruments of play, rather than objects and ideas defined by he or she who plays, are most often defined for us and sold to us by businesses that work to control their continuous circulation (see Consalvo 2006). Even toys open to massive amounts of user-definition, like Lego blocks, are most frequently sold in "playsets" that direct construction by templates usually tied to some commercially viable IP, like Star Wars or Harry Potter. The potential creativity of such play objects is channeled into a commodity tie-in. Though modding or the "playing with" defined templates might be seen as an exercise in creative freedom, modding practices and outputs are certainly not free from either commodification or laborious investment, at least in terms of digital games. To put it simply, as Kiicklich (2005) suggests, "the game industry not only sells entertainment products, but also capitalizes on the products of the leisure derived from them" (np).

Whereas the initial reaction to game modding after the commercialization and corporate enclosure of code was in line with a logic of maintaining the workings of industrial capitalism - protecting properties for sale from people who want to "mess with" them - today there exists a cautious encouragement of fan modification of game properties, illustrating new business and marketing strategies employed by the digital

129 gaming industry in accordance with the evolving information economy. Corporate producers have conditionally embraced modder communities because they reap significant rewards from the capacity to generate value from current Web 2.0 trends - namely, the benefits of unpaid user-generated content, including game-software innovation developed by unpaid consumers, to which corporate producers lay claim.

The work of consumption is compounded by having acts of consumption also be acts of production of saleable derivative artifacts, derivatives that increase the value of their source. This, according to some commentators, sets the games industry apart from the film and recording industries, which actively dissuade fans from "playing with" their properties: "By fostering the creativity of their fans, [the film and music industries'] more agile peers in the game industry have not only survived but prospered" (Au 2002: np).

This kind of consumer labour has proved to be positively influential to the bottom line of corporate game producers. Sotamaa (2007b) and Kucklich (2005) suggest that modding's benefit to the digital games industry manifests in the following ways

(note: the numbered organization here is my own):

1. Mods can increase the popularity of a source game, perhaps extending its saleability;

2. Mod making and sharing can foster community followings that act as targeted, cheap-to-access marketing hubs and can increase customer loyalty to game brands;

3. Mods can point to consumer preferences (players will make what they want);

130 4. Mods in many cases can forgo new introductory marketing since they can take advantage of the brand recognition established by the original game or other popular mods (thus are open to the benefits usually reserved for sequels or games that use content licensed from other successful media);

5. Mods can provide a crucial source of innovation, reducing research and development costs; and

6. The best modders are very often highly skilled at one or more aspects of game design and creation, making mod communities an important recruitment pool for hired labour.

Of course, the array of benefits generated by this relationship is not mutually exclusive.

Galloway (2006) reminds us that "game modders benefit from, and in fact require,

commercial games, game engines, and hardware to make their work" (113), thus creating a "symbiotic relationship" between modders and the games industry (113).

Like Terranova's (2004) products of a digital economy, the commodity of a game that can be continuously updated via downloadable additions from the developer, or from mods by user communities, becomes "more of a process than a finished product"

(90). In these circumstances, industrial and Fordist models of understanding commodity production collapse as the consumed object becomes less discretely definable and market value generation becomes tied to continuous, labour-intensive additions to and reformulations of existing products, often from "free labour" sources. For Terranova,

the sustained success of the internet is dependent on continued contributions of unwaged

labour from its users - including, in her account, those building and updating personal websites and participating in and moderating discussion forums. While not explicitly

mentioned (Terranova's work predates the current explosion of user-generated centres on

131 the internet), Web 2.0 hubs like Wikipedia and Facebook exemplify the contemporary success of this model, with "volunteer" participants providing ever-growing gigabytes of information. The consequence of such a focus on the process commodity, to paraphrase

Terranova (2004), is that they are only as good as the labour invested in them (90).

Influenced by the work of Terranova, Hector Postigo has argued that game industries employ what he calls "programmer hobbyists" to generate game content as a form of unwaged work (Postigo 2003: 594). Postigo uses Terranova and the Autonomist social factory theory to include his programmer hobbyists and game modders who generate a significant amount of content for game industry products without compensation. He writes:

As hobbyists' leisure work is converted from gift to commodity, what results is the circumvention of the initial investment risk for the commercial developers as the development work is transferred to the fan base where costs are negligible... Ultimately, this process manages to harness a skilled labour force for little or no initial cost and represents an emerging form of labour exploitation on the Internet. (597)

While I agree with Postigo's thesis, I must acknowledge the awkwardness of identifying the forms of exploitative labour that are provided by non-professionals outside of the games industry since the waged-labour situations of those workers employed by the industry have been noted for their own forms of exploitation and precariousness (Deuze et al. 2007). I also want to extend Postigo's ideas to include players without programming experience, since game editors and modification programs have become

132 more user-friendly and simple to use in the years since Postigo's article was published.

Indeed, The Sims (2000), the mega-popular franchise of daily-life simulators, has its success predicated on its uncomplicated point-and-click customization and modification tools that anybody can use (Curlew 2004). Similar productive fan communities (of which modders are at the forefront) have been instrumental to the enormous success of games like Quake (1996), Half-Life (1998) and Neverwinter Nights (2002). Whereas fan communities have always made up readily-receptive audiences and worked to ensure the success of several popular culture franchises like Star Wars ox Lord of the Rings (see

Jenkins 1992; Hills 2002), in the realm of digital games, active fan work is now being eagerly sanctioned before a game is released (Curlew 2004). Game designer Will

Wright, describing the user-generated content that populates the simulation game Spore

(2008), says, "We wanted to give the players high diversity, as well as a huge universe to explore. The only way we could possibly achieve this was to, in essence, 'outsource' the majority of our content production to the players" (quoted in Croal 2008).

Beyond the Internet Sweatshop: Motivations in the Wake of Exploitation

The comparison of user contributions to internet content with sweatshop labour may be an extreme one that diminishes the severity of the physical and mental exploitation of those with little choice but to partake in precarious work situations for little compensation in the factories of the developing world. Western class privileges

133 aside, N'Gai Croal (2008), regarding user-generated content, asks, "is it really a sweatshop if none of the workers is complaining?" (np).

Modders and other contributors of digital user-generated content, despite hardly ever receiving remuneration for the value they create, continue to contribute, Croal suggests, motivated by little more than the slim possibility of peer recognition or do-it- yourself web celebrity moment. Contributors of free labour on the internet, suggests

Terranova (2004), do not contribute their time and effort "only because capital wanted them to, but they were acting out a desire for affective and cultural production" (77).

This position is not unlike some theories about the motivations behind participatory culture (Cover 2004), and may position modding, at least on the modder's end, as a hobby that emulates traditional work patterns or a volunteer job that is not financially compensated - the labour of personal satisfaction (Sotamaa 2007b; Kucklich 2005;

Gelber 1999). This is not to say that exploitation is not still taking place: Sotamaa

(2007b) reminds us that people generally volunteer to labour for non-profit endeavours and not multi-billion dollar industries. But this pleasurable work is reflective, at least to

Terranova (2004), of the conditions of user participation in the post-industrial, digital mediascape: "Free labour is the moment where [the] knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into excess productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited" (78).

134 Symbolic Capital and Incentives for the Establishment of Boundaries

One attempt to explain why traditional producers are paying more attention to fan ideas and user-generated content above and beyond simple economic incentives can be found in the active fan theory of Elana Shefrin (2004). She employs French sociologist

Pierre Bourdieu's "fields of cultural production" and the interplay that exists between them to help explain how powerful cultural producers are now employing active fans

(Shefrin 2004: 263). Bourdieu's theories of cultural production include a description of three interacting "fields of practice" - an artistic or creative field, which exists within and is dominated by a larger field of power, which itself exists within a field of class relations. Importantly, Bourdieu feels this final field is dominated by the initial artistic field, outlining how non-monetary kinds of capital (cultural/social/aesthetic) are important to cultural production (see Bourdieu 1993: 38-40).

Shefrin explains how Lord of the Rings (LOTR) fans and prosumers have been treated very differently from Star Wars fans and prosumers by the corporate owners of the respective mythologies. Where active LOTR fans were courted online during the screenwriting process of the recent movie trilogy and mined for their ideas about and interpretations of the Tolkien novels by filmmaker Peter Jackson, active Star Wars fans have often had a virulent relationship with George Lucas, creator of the Star Wars universe (Shefrin 2004: 262). Lucas is notorious for cracking down on fan communities who use Star Wars' trademarked subject matter to create fan fiction, websites, video

135 game mods, short films, etc. (see Jenkins 1992; 2003). In contrast, Shefrin (2004), quoting Creative Screenwriting editor Erik Bauer, writes:

Jackson's discourse with online fans can be seen as a technologically-inspired antidote to traditional demar­ cations between the production and consumption of cultural artifacts. Authorship has characteristically been a solitary endeavor, enacted in an environment that is isolated from the intended audience. By using the Internet for social communication while he is drafting his scripts, Jackson is able to be a "filter," a "final arbiter for a lot of good ideas from a group of people." (268)

Using Bourdieu, Shefrin argues that Jackson's embracing of fan cultures gives him a type of symbolic capital - in Bourdieu's words, a type of "charisma" - that Lucas does not have (quoted in Shefrin 2004: 265). This symbolic capital is generated by recognizing and appreciating core fans and is translatable into monetary capital through increased fan loyalty. Borrowing from Shefrin's theory (and in the process, borrowing from Bourdieu) outlines another reason why the digital games industry has been very successful in employing (and indeed, even exploiting) the ideas and labour of modders.

By being flexible with their intellectual property, allowing fans to tinker with it, and by incorporating original ideas culled from their audiences, producers can gain important symbolic capital.

Both Jenkins (2003) and Shefrin (2004) outline how StarWars.com has recently created a section for fans to display their prosumer work; however, such an extension of the olive branch is predicated on the basis that all submissions would immediately become the intellectual property of Lucasfilm Ltd.

136 Within this model, the traditional producers of culture who recognize the significance of maintaining Shefrin's (2004) notion of symbolic capital and operating within the workings of information capital as described by Kline et al. (2003) have already accounted for what initially might have been conceived as a threat to the system and are thoroughly ready to mine it for any potential sources of profit, hence the active appropriation of user-generated content.

Such mining in a digital information economy, however, demands the management of user practices, the enclosure of code and the introduction of rules of play

(and playing with) the properties of popular culture. Implementing these conditions divorces users from the traditions of open modification, tinkering and sharing that birthed digital games, as well as runs contrary to the fundamental forces of playful alteration that animate my argument that participatory culture is a kind of play.

Nevertheless, corporate interests are able to overcome these hurdles, as we will see, by implementing and enforcing the legal and technological strictures that constitute contemporary intellectual property. According to Nick Dyer-Witheford (2002), the enclosure of information within intellectual property is to information capitalism as the enclosure of land within private property was to industrial capitalism. Extending this allusion, Dyer-Witheford (2002) suggests that the land enclosures that led to the creation of private property in industrial-revolution era England "required a new regime of social discipline, surveillance, and criminalization" that included "poor laws, antivagrancy legislation, workhouses, and the first steps in the formation of an internal state apparatus

137 of thief-taking and policing to monitor, confine, and punish the potentially unruly population evicted from the land" (131).

Dyer-Witheford argues that this history informs the wave of "cyberspatial enclosure" we have experienced in recent years (2002: 131). Enclosure operations within a commercialized internet are chiefly based on a "sustained drive to consolidate intellectual property in a digital environment" (133) via technological means to prevent infringement and legal consequences to punish it. Subsequent chapters will explore in greater detail these tactics of enclosure and intellectual properly management - particularly Chapter Four which discusses the boundaries to play attached to digital game modding, and Chapter Six which examines some of the multifaceted possibilities for resistance to such enclosures, as suggested in my concept of counterplay.

138 Chapter 4

Play Out of Bounds: The Cultural Politics of Digital Game Modification

Imagine if we could go beyond exercising control of our individual critical faculties. Suppose, in addition to reading things differently, we could rewrite them. Imagine if we could make the most powerful images in our world more to our liking, more relevant to our lives. Would this produce a radical change in our mediascape and consciousness? - Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Anarchist in the Library (2004): 79

In July 2005, reports surfaced that a downloadable modification of the popular video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTA.SA) was circulating on the internet.

The mod, entitled "hot coffee," enabled players to see and control game characters engaging in a brief bout of soft-core sex that would have normally occurred off-screen.

Despite the top-selling GTA.SA being one of the most violent and graphically vulgar video games ever created, the existence of a few seconds of poorly animated, simulated fucking caused a brief public uproar and sparked politicians and game regulators to take

"principled" action. They suggested that this mod required GTA.SA to be rated "adults only" (fit for 18 year olds and up) instead of simply "mature" (fit for 17 year olds and up), and what followed was unprecedented in the world of digital gaming. Never before had a user modification of a digital game changed the game's rating, potentially rendering it unsaleable in several crucial retail outlets like family-oriented Wal-Mart and

Zellers stores, which hold policies against carrying adults-only rated material. The economic future of one of the gaming industry's most successful products was suddenly called into question. Indeed, the threat of an adults-only rating caused the stock price of

139 Take-Two Interactive, parent company of GTA.SA developers Rockstar Games, to drop dramatically. A group of investors soon filed a class action lawsuit against the publisher, whose carelessness with the game's code, they claimed, led to GTA's profit potential being sabotaged. A twenty million dollar settlement with key investors was negotiated years later in 2009 (Nelson 2009).

In the end, the accusations of inappropriate product use on the behalf of consumers proved to be a false alarm. Rockstar Games eventually admitted that "hot coffee" was less a mod and more an "Easter egg," a hidden but unlockable feature that some of the game's programmers, and not a user, had hacked into the game's code

(Slagle 2005). However, the mainstream media had already latched onto the notion of the rogue modder - the game player with the ability to alter the content and message of the games he or she plays. The Associated Press (AP) interviewed Patricia Vance, the head of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, who called for the games industry to

"proactively protect games from illegal modifications by third parties" (Slagle 2005).

Additionally, the AP spoke to Sid Shuman, an editor for the digital games website

GamePro.com, who described the situation as something that the digital entertainment industry "is not really well equipped to deal with" (quoted in Slagle 2005). Perhaps unapparent to Vance and Shuman, however, is that the gaming industry is very much equipped to deal with such rogue modifications, and has proactively been shaping the

creative work of modders and defining the roles of their users for some time.

140 Technological security measures, legal strictures, mandatory contractual arrangements, and heavily-regulated interactions with the most popular mod communities are all, in some degree, currently working to police the consumer modding of digital games. That being said, the industry's efforts are not faultless, and these boundaries erected to control and contain modding are not impenetrable. Examples like

"hot coffee," at least in its initial user-made theorization, is the product of what I call

"playing out of bounds." It represents the breaching of confines set up to position the users of playable new media within an industry-safe zone, a space free of two-way communication, critical expression, self-reflection, or any other controversial or subaltern product uses that might otherwise undermine the explicit profit-oriented goal of commodifying compelling cultural forms such as digital games. It is in the construction and breaching of such boundaries that much is revealed about the expectations held by producers regarding consumers, about the relationships consumers have to the media texts around them, and about the role of those consumers who use such texts as cultural forms that help create meaning in their daily lives. These revelations are what make up the focus of this chapter. What sorts of consumption behaviour do the cultural industries expect from the consumers of their products? How do they go about defining this behaviour? Most pressingly, what is the current role of the end-user of cultural objects, and particularly, the end-user of new media devices like digital games?

141 Playing Out of Bounds

As this project's introduction emphasized, the creative and re-creative possibilities for the traditional consumers of new media content like digital games are exploding because of the increased malleability of such digital objects. Such actions may be constitutive of a radical change in the operation of our mediascape, as indicated by Siva Vaidhyanathan in the quote that opens this chapter. The ability to "speak back" or add to the dominant media discourse usually delivered in a one-way flow of information obviously has some political potential, as we will come to see below

(Coombe & Herman 2001). However, there is intense effort to control this new-found dialogue - sometimes to restrict it completely (through measures like the heightened enforcement of intellectual property protection), but mostly to incorporate or exploit its loudest speakers in ways that benefit corporate content producers (through means like necessary defined-use contracts). I will outline the dilemmas raised by such practices below.

While this analysis of playing out of bounds is undoubtedly lodged within the study of participatory culture and "textual poaching," it seeks to reach beyond the "de

Certeauian framework" that dominates such research areas (see Jenkins 1992; Sandvoss

2005). Here I add digital intellectual property theory from critical information studies to the approaches previously applied from cultural studies and political economy to better understand the often adversarial but frequently controlled relationship between playable new media industries and their most active audiences. Particularly, I outline how game

142 producers strive to position the end users of their products into a kind of comfortable complacency or uncritical passivity, and how they utilize various legal and technological

strategies to prevent creative or rebellious end users from playing outside of prescribed boundaries. I will outline and explain how this series of interrelated boundaries of varying severity - including legal policies like copyright and digital rights management,

and contractual arrangements like license agreements - all function to define the role of the new media user, and prevent unexpected uses of digital games and other digital

cultural forms. I then briefly introduce some examples where these boundaries are

enforced (to the chagrin of users "playing" outside them), and explore some initial consequences and reactions to this enforcement (more fleshed-out case studies will be

featured in subsequent chapters). I will conclude by suggesting that digital game modding, as "out of bounds" counterplay, has the potential to be a powerful tool that

speaks back to often problematic dominant social discourses delivered through mainstream new media culture, like those surrounding violence, gender and sexuality,

and the cultural authority of corporate entities; however, this potential is likely to be

obstructed by the boundaries in place unless more people are willing to play out of bounds.

Modding practices have the potential to significantly alter our understanding of mass media by giving users the abilities to personalize content preference, or criticize,

satirize, undermine and even outright change any ideological message attached to the

source material being modded. They have the ability to shift use-behaviours outside of

143 corporate producer expectations and move practices out of bounds. In doing so, the creative and innovative possibilities of users seem monumental - much to the dismay of the industry forces trying to maintain one-way flow of information and keep play in bounds. Indeed, as Leslie Haddon (2003) points out, codified or "in bounds" product use

seems to be at odds with what she theorizes as "innovatory use," a kind of creative or productive engagement with a use-object that is often unanticipated by or "at odds with certain wider societal discourses concerning how technologies should be used" (2).

Haddon (2003) goes on to suggest that practices like modding, innovatory use, or any unexpected use-behaviours are never really freely determined but governed by several

social arrangements and technologies that either enable or constrain the capacities of users. Before outlining the arrangements and technologies that affect the innovatory use

of digital games - detailed under the "Boundaries" heading below - it is imperative to explain why such arrangements exist.

The Dilemma: Playful Cultural Objects or Intellectual Property?

Digital games are often analyzed using decades-old (and perhaps too canonized) theories of play and leisure expressed in the works of thinkers like Johan Huizinga,

Roger Caillois and Brian Sutton-Smith (Kerr 2006). However, one point of departure

from the play theory of the past concerns the "proper use" of play objects. Starting with

Roger Caillois (1961), play theorists tend to distinguish between free play (known as

"paidia" play), where any sense of "properness" would be directly antithetical to the playing itself, and structured play (known as "ludus" play), where certain sets of

144 standards are adhered to, as in ruled games like baseball or poker (see Caillois 1961: 12-

13). However, even the objects of structured play - the pieces that make up the game - are not coded with a legally-binding "proper" use; one does not sign a contract agreeing not to use a baseball for lawn bowling, or go to jail for using playing cards for magic tricks. Granted, treating the underlying code of a video game, a commercial product that is dependent on intellectual property, like a baseball or a playing card is admittedly awkward. My intentions are not to compare or relate radically different objects of play, but to try to better explain why digital game producers face the trouble they do when they attempt to define proper use within their end-user license agreements or other boundaries that try to set proper use guidelines: positioning play within a set of legally- binding boundaries reduces the number of its possibility spaces, puts strictures on what yearns to be kept free and enters into a contest of power relations in which, some suggest, playful behaviour thrives.

The Rhetoric of Play and Power

Power, within a rhetoric of play theory that examines play as competition, is an

"expression of conflict" to garner "superior positions in some hierarchy" (Sutton-Smith

1997: 29). Indeed, this rhetoric posits that "from contest (power) comes the development of the social hierarchies (identity) around which society constructs its values" (78).2 It is no surprise then that conflicts over social power and position

28 It is within this rhetoric of play that we position the work of noted play theorist Johan Huizinga, who theorized that competitive play was at the root of cultural development and civilization (Sutton-Smith 1997: 79).

145 encapsulated by Gramsci's concept of hegemony can be understood as a consideration of this kind of play (a back-and-forth competition for ideological control), as can more explicit competitions of power like warfare (75). However, according to Sutton-Smith, there is another level of hegemonic influence at work here. The rhetoric of play as competition for power, even in serious instances such as war and "frivolous" examples like a football game (or a multiplayer FPS deathmatch), relies so heavily on the rationalized (and masculinized) virtues of conflict - the glory and ecstasy of victory, the

shame of defeat, the moral betterment and almost-spiritual transcendence attained through struggle and triumph - that the structural forces that animate why competition is

occurring, forces that may actually influence the outcomes of social conflict and competition, are overlooked (84-87).

So, to paraphrase Sutton-Smith, the play as quest-for-power rhetoric is a kind of propaganda, revealing the interests and anxieties that the actually powerful have about what play should mean and how players should behave. This rhetoric of power applied to play, like similar ones applied to other cultural practices like sex or art, distract practitioners and participants from the interests of the forces governing or regulating the

cultural practices involved (85). In the case of play, the power rhetoric is best embodied in professional sporting events, the "forms of play with the greatest public prestige in the modern world" (87). Such competitions are "hegemonic forms of play in which the hegemony is typically that of the politically powerful over the less powerful, of the owners over the team" (87).

146 If we accept the power rhetoric of play as valid (it is not without its problems - see Spariosu 1989), the first level includes the conflict of playing in game, while the second level includes the conflict of playing with a game (and in turn, playing with a game's corporate producers, where "playing with" marks conflict with them and their definitions of what play should mean, their institutionalizing or regulating of how players should behave). It is through such playing with rules and expectations that the interests and anxieties of those in power are made apparent. "On these grounds," states

Sutton-Smith, "play rhetorics... appear to be largely special cases of cultural hegemony" (85).

Thus, it is integral that we acknowledge that using digital games or any other commercial cultural artifact is not merely an act of consuming a commercial product, but also a "fully social practice" that needs to take into account unanticipated uses (Gitelman

2003: 62). Indeed, as Lisa Gitelman (2003) argues, it may be best to see new media forms as acquiring and retaining "meanings in the circumstances of their apprehension and use, and that those meanings... [arise] in relation to the social lives of people and things" (62). Meaning is only derived in use; no one static meaning or purpose can be maintained for any extended length of time, or extrapolated to an entire population if they derive their own meanings from their own use-acts. To paraphrase Kieran Healy

(2002), users do not simply learn what particular technologies are for, they decide what they are for, often through unexpected uses (482). Thus, to place boundaries on use disrupts our meaning-making capacity - something people, as creative beings, have

147 never appreciated. As Mark Tribe suggests, "we monkey around with [read: play with] new technologies in an effort to see what they can do, to make them do things the engineers never intended, to understand what they might mean, to reflect on their effects, to push them beyond their limits, to break them" (quoted in the foreword of Manovich

2001: xi). This suggests that digital technologies - games included - have uses beyond their intended purposes.

In terms of digital games, Cindy Poremba (2003) suggests that modifiable games have "meta-game" possibilities - where they can be played with (as in modded), above and beyond their capacity to be played. For Poremba, this is necessarily political, since meta-game usage makes apparent the potential to disrupt the traditional one-way flow of culture. She posits game modding as a kind of tactical media that, even when it is not overtly political, still expresses an egalitarian use strategy by defining an unorthodox kind of user agency and derivative authorship - a kind of out-of-bounds play. However, this view is directly antithetical to the mandate of most game manufacturers.

The predominant dilemma that arises in the trend of out-of-bounds play is this: how do we recognize and negotiate a place for the cultural life and social importance of the objects of digital culture - which may also be corporate intellectual properties - at a period in history when technology renders these objects so malleable by traditional consumers? Indeed, things like digital games, while obviously being corporately managed commodities, also carry weight as mass media signifiers of cultural meaning; as pop cultural artifacts, they "circulate as part of our public culture but are also private

148 properties, protected by the laws of intellectual property" (Coombe & Herman 2001:

918). Since the content, images, and mythology of everything from Harry Potter books,

Beatles records, or Halo games are technically private properties - despite their

widespread impact on the daily public lives of millions - their respective corporate

owners have exclusive rights to direct their dissemination and uses by consumers,

supported by the full extent of the law when these objects of popular culture are used or reproduced "in subaltern cultural activities" (Coombe & Herman 2001: 918). Indeed,

scholars of critical information studies like Rosemary Coombe and Siva Vaidhyanathan

(2004) argue that IP policy can work to "structure a field of semiotic possession" or

attempt absolute "control over a sign" and the meanings that may be derived from it

(Coombe & Herman 2001: 920) - something that poststructural theories that decentralize

the location of meaning and authority in cultural texts (Eco 1989; Barthes 1977) suggest

is impossible. Herman, Coombe & Kaye (2006) go on to suggest that the powers behind

"copyright capitalism" are "arrayed against a shifting coalition of artists, programmers,

cultural activists and consumers who seek to preserve and expand access to a 'free

culture' that is often animated by a rather romantic notion of the public domain or a

commons of shared cultural goods" (185-186; see also Lessig 2004).

The Boundaries

As a result of this dilemma, the use of new media objects like digital games has

been structured in such a way that works to ensure compliance and cooperation from

users. Imagine this use structure as a hierarchically arranged series of locks that prevent

149 users from playing out of bounds. In general, these locks conform to at least two key methods in place to punish and prevent misuse of IP by consumers: what Edward Tenner

(2003) calls accountability and incapacitation (62). Accountability focuses on using existing social structures of law and order to punish deviation after it occurs (which

Tenner likens to photo radar). Incapacitation frequently uses technological means to prevent or nullify deviations before or as they occur (which Tenner likens to a speed bump). These locks, of course, are not impenetrable, and innovative users can and often do find ways to crack them. They are, however, solid enough to keep the majority of users from out-of-bounds play.

The heaviest lock in this use structure, at least in terms of accountability for cracking it, is made up of the legal strictures of copyright and other intellectual property laws. Under these strictures, use is not only well governed by federal legislation that

criminalizes copyright infringement and digital rights tampering, but is also well monitored by industry organizations like the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the digital-games equivalent to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) or

Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

Next, protections inserted into software programs that prevent user access to underlying code (like encryption), digital locks that prevent code tampering or reproduction (like virtual watermarks), and physical game or console architecture that denies user interaction with code or code-processing hardware (as is the case with

software cartridges, enclosed hardware consoles, or read-only CD-ROMs), work to

150 ensure that unanticipated use of digital games is stymied before it starts Such protections employ not only computer code to prevent "hacking" or unanticipated use, but also (recalling the DRM strictures mentioned above) legal code as a supplementary line of defence (Lessig 2004). For example, digital rights management legislation advocated by WIPO and enacted as law in several countries like the U S.A. make cracking or bypassing digital and physical protections - or simply publicizing methods of doing so - punishable under copyright law (see Lessig 2004; Vaidhyanathan 2004).

Weight of Lock Lock or Boundary Description Corollary of Resistance Heavy Legal Strictures (Copyright, Trademark, Patents) Severe • Digital Rights Management, Architecture, Code Access • • Producer-User Agreements (EULAs, Warranties, ToS) • • Surveillance, Censorship (Mod Competitions, Websites) • • Digital Language, Technological Knowledge (C++) • Light Instructed or Expected Play (Manuals, Norms of Use) Mild

Beyond Accountability and Incapacitation

Tenner (2003), like other scholars of critical information studies such as Lessig

(2004), Vaidhyanathan (2004) and Gillespie (2007), marks a transition from boundaries based in accountability to boundaries based in incapacitation in the wake of American

DMCA copyright reform, roughly addressing the primary locks in my hierarchy.

Recalling my triangulation of CIS with the critical political economy tradition, I identify, in terms of some models of industry reaction to the modding of digital games, another transition (or at least another available option): a movement from incapacitation to containment and integration. This movement, elaborated upon in the following chapter with more detailed case studies, optimizes the reality of user participatory culture (as

151 detailed in Chapter Two), by way of exploited labour and co-optation (as detailed in

Chapter Three).

The first lock imposed on use that reflects such a transition toward integration/co-

optation is the producer-user agreements, or terms-of-service "contracts" that attempt to

legally define the "proper" relationship between users and new media objects. Not

accepting such agreements may result in loss of access to the objects they pertain to, or

even litigation under contract law (detailing that accountability and punishment are not

abandoned in a movement towards integration, just differently employed). Admittedly, however, legal cases arising from non-compliance with producer-user agreements are

rare.

Related, more lightweight locks include methods of surveillance and censorship

employed by producers that work to gently guide how their products are used. For

example, producers of a digital game may initiate and nurture the development of fan

communities focused on their product and do so in such a way that keeps fan

participation comfortably under their watchful eyes (see Sotamaa 2004). Producers may

host or sponsor fan websites, release modification tools and encourage mod sharing and

trading, and hold mod competitions to award the most innovative modders working with

their product, all the while selectively embracing "proper" uses of their product while

decrying or preventing other uses. Moreover, it is not uncommon for producers to treat

fan participation as an innovative marketing technique and exploit unpaid fan

modification as free research and development (Terranova 2004; Postigo 2003).

152 Finally, it is important to acknowledge what power the norms of use and expected patterns of play have in preventing out-of-bounds play. Such norms and patterns, as defined in user manuals, instruction booklets, or through product familiarity help construct ideological notions of passive use that become regular and seemingly natural. Thinking that creative use is not a possibility will prevent it from becoming so.

Cornel Sandvoss (2005) suggests these "less grounded" types of boundaries, despite not being as forceful as their harsher counterparts, "nonetheless guide the [user] to observe the boundaries set at point of production" (827). Thus, these locks need not be necessarily legal or contractual - they can also be technical or based in the logic of exclusion. Modding and other productive uses of new media objects tend to be limited by the relatively small number of participants proficient enough to use such objects in unanticipated ways. Simply put, a minority of people have the technical know-how and capacity to produce on-medium mods. The complexity of computer programming languages and software authoring tools, as well as access to advanced hardware, all work to prevent out-of-bounds play from being a popular phenomenon.

Each of the locks listed here, regardless of severity, affect the use of new media objects in some way, but it is the key locks preventing digital game modders from playing out of bounds - copyright, digital rights management, and EULAs - that I want to explore in greater detail.

153 Copyright /Digital Rights Management

One major stricture faced by critical modders, and a major force that works to determine the role of the end user, is the legal condition of copyright. Copyright is made up of a series of legal rights held by the owners of creative artifacts or "works" to determine how such works can be used by non-owners. Rights owners - who are very often a work's creator or "author," but not necessarily so - can use copyright to ensure financial compensation for the consumption of their works, control the forms in which their work appears, and ultimately determine how their works are reproduced and distributed. Thus, citing copyright infringement, a record company can take legal action against individuals who share illegally-made copies of songs in digital form, or sue D Js who sample copyrighted music in their own compositions without getting explicit permission of rights owners. Theoretically, such a system is in place to ensure that creativity does not go unrewarded; however, copyright has arguably become primarily a tool of business (Lessig 2004; Howard-Spink 2004). Indeed, the bolstering of the exchange value of cultural objects within a global economy that deals in intangibles rests upon the increasingly strict laws of intellectual property (including copyright, trademarks, etc.), a shift that suggests that cultural producers no longer sell products, but instead license out experiences (Coombe 1998; Lessig 2004).

The laws of copyright, however, are limited by a few legal stipulations like fair use, but as the Creative Commons' Glen Otis Brown (2004) proposes, "these limitations offer little guidance to users of copyrighted material... and can be very expensive to

154 argue in a court of law" (577). This latter point regarding the sheer cost of defending what might be a legal right of users is often enough to deter people from pursuing this route of action. The boundary of cost can act as a supplement to legal strictures. Also, regardless of cost, with the emergence of strict legal policy, like that outlined in

America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), many scholars feel that government is shifting protected-use rights "too far in the direction of rights owners, and away from the rights of the public," ignoring fair use and first-sale limits to copyright and failing to distinguish between piracy and non-standard consumption (Poynder 2001:

15).

Perhaps the most alarming copyright-associated boundary imposed on the use of new media comes from the notion of digital rights management (DRM). Since the late

1990s, several governments and international bodies like the World Intellectual Property

Organization (WIPO) have been advocating and enacting DRM policies that make it an infringement of copyright to subvert or sidestep digital copyright protection measures that often accompany things like computer software. DRM stipulations also criminalize attempts to publish, broadcast or otherwise make public how to subvert or sidestep product security measures (Gillespie 2007; Vaidhyanathan 2004; Wershler-Henry 2002).

Since digital game modding of games that do not come packaged with mod editors usually involves reproducing and manipulating copyrighted computer code (and often subverting digital security measures along the way), some modders potentially face retribution from copyright owners.

155 EULAs: The Dubious Contracts

Another key line of "defence" against free modding is often the end-user license agreement or EULA that all user/players are forced to accept before using a commercial software product. The standard EULA should be familiar to any experienced computer user - it is the frequently-ignored window of text that pops up when installing a new software program that outlines the legal terms of use of that product. Most users simply scroll through the often thick legalese to find the EULA's raison d'etre - the "I Agree" button, which, once pressed, seals the deal between software manufacturers and users regarding the proper use of the product. However, many see EULAs as less an agreement about proper use and more a nonnegotiable requirement regarding use in general. Not agreeing to the terms outlined - which in many cases subvert or rework governmental laws regarding fair use, privacy, and even freedom of speech - denies access to the software outright. Perhaps even more startling, users frequently are not given the EULA terms until after they have purchased the program to which it applies.

In some cases, simply removing the shrink wrap on a newly purchased piece of software counts as full agreement to the EULA terms (Newitz 2005). Such concerns about

EULAs have been well voiced by the critics such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation

(EFF):

156 These dubious "contracts" are, in theory, one-on-one agreements between manufacturers and each of their customers. Yet because almost every computer user in the world has been subjected to the same take-it-or-leave-it terms at one time or another, EULAs are more like legal mandates than consumer choices. They are, in effect, changing laws without going through any kind of legislative process. And the results are dangerous for consumers and innovators alike. (Newitz 2005)

While scholarly criticism of the harshest EULA conditions has existed for several years,29 game-specific EULA criticism has only emerged recently, mostly alongside the scholarly exploration of game modding (Grimes 2006; Sotamaa 2004, 2005; Nieborg

2004). The EULAs found with computer games usually focus heavily on proper product use and the ownership of product content. The agreements of most modifiable games suggest that all derivative content developed using in-game editing tools, official external editors, and even a game's graphics rendering engine is the exclusive property of the game developer. Such stipulations have caused much ire in the gaming world between those who claim ownership and proprietary rights over their custom creations, and corporate producers who work to prevent user/players from profiting off their intellectual property (see Nieborg 2004; Herman, Coombe & Kaye 2006).

Newitz (2005) outlines how EULAS from companies like Microsoft and McAfee have included provisions against publicly criticizing their products, or revealing "benchmark" or product performance tests results without prior approval. Borland and Konrad (2002) use discourse analysis to show how language and sentence structure used in EULAs and terms of service (TOS) contracts is often much more complex and difficult to decipher for those without advanced training in legalese. Nimmer et al. (1999) deflate the belief that software licensing agreements are necessary on top of standard copyright law to protect against product misuse and piracy, and that additional licences often bring with them ulterior motives.

157 Other Controlling Tactics

While playing out of bounds, many "rogue" modders explore controversial

subject areas, or otherwise introduce subaltern cultural forms and practices into their

creations. One common feature of rogue play is the inclusion of unauthorized subject

matter or content protected by intellectual property policies. Sotamaa (2004) explains

how many of the character mods of the multiplayer first-person shooter game Quake III

Arena were modeled on characters from our pop culture mediascape - such as The

Terminator's T-800 cyborg, Star Wars' Darth Vader, Snoopy from Schulz' Peanuts

comics, and Tomb Raider's Lara Croft - all trademarked figures whose names and

likenesses were being used without permission. Political Arena, a 2000 mod of the same

Quake game, used real-life international politicians in less than flattering ways, all the

while mashing gameplay with activist politics and politically-conscious criticism. In the

wake of such user practices it becomes of interest to game companies to develop ways to

control the content of their players' mods. For instance, Valve Software, the makers of

the heavily modded computer game Half-Life, ensure the proper use of their products

through their exclusive broadband distribution network called Steam. Established in

2002 and "built with mods in mind," Steam allows Valve to monitor, edit and profit from

mods of their games by taking on a chief role in the mod distribution process (Au 2002).

Users pay a monthly subscription to Steam to gain access to product updates and game

mods and other services that are supposed to, according to Valve's founder, "create a

smoother transition from the amateur world to the professional world" (quoted in Au

158 2002). Valve has actively tried to prevent mods of their games from circulating outside of the Steam network, and have been very successful in doing so. After all, according to the EULA of Valve games, the company owns all derivative works made from their games, even if the original code is totally converted - it can legally stipulate how the mods get distributed.

Another way to control the content of modified games is through industry mod competitions. Mod competitions are examples of what Sotamaa (2005; 2007b) refers to as the institutionalization of amateur cultural production - and I want to argue that they work to contain out-of-bounds play. Such competitions consist of game industry corporations offering large monetary prizes for the best fan mods of popular digital games. The financial rewards involved often attract the most creative and accomplished mod communities. However, such competitions have been criticized for simply providing ways for game companies to police and regulate use of their products. As

Sotamaa (2005) explains, mod competitions offer modders financial reward and notoriety, while industry organizers expect to garner good publicity and amplified sales of moddable games. Yet, there are other evident benefits to these competitions for the games industry: "Competition rules are utilized to direct the hobbyist creativity by defining what is suitable and fitting and what is clearly prohibited. The rules often mention that the entries are expected to conform to the very restrictive End User License

Agreements (EULAs) included with the retail titles" (Sotamaa 2005). Such agreements tend to stipulate that all mods belong to game developers, and that competition

159 organizers reserve the right to distribute and, in their words, "exploit" the contest entry mods commercially (Sotamaa 2005). Mods that enter controversial territory with their

subject matter, incorporate trademarked and copyrighted images, and those that dare to critique the status quo are usually denied entry (Sotamaa 2005).

What Can be Learned from "Grey Tuesday "

Despite the attempts of corporate producers to lock down and contain out-of- bounds play, some forms of it have been quite successful (albeit not without contention).

A popular example from the realm of digital music vaulted the ethos of out-of-bounds play and its consequences into mainstream consciousness. In early 2004, an American

DJ named Brian Burton, under the stage name Danger Mouse, digitally mixed lyrics

from superstar rapper Jay-Z's 2003 record, The Black Album, with remixed music

samples from The Beatles' 1968 self-titled release, commonly known as The White

Album. Danger Mouse's creation - dubbed The Grey Album - offered an intriguing fusion of hip hop and classic pop, and soon sparked the interest of fans of both genres, who began sharing it over the internet in .mp3 format (see Howard-Spink 2004). Major media publications like The New York Times, Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly

all positively reviewed The Grey Album, and the latter even ranked it among the "best in music" for 2004 ("The Grey Album"). However, despite its lauded critical reception, and the fact that it was being circulated without monetary charge, Danger Mouse's creation was deemed illegitimate and dangerous by the major record companies.

160 By digitizing, manipulating, and redistributing portions of Beatles music without permission from EMI-Capital Records (the owners of the recordings), Danger Mouse was infringing on their intellectual property rights. In effect, he was misusing artifacts of our popular culture mediascape by employing them in ways not intended or expected by their proprietary owners. Danger Mouse was playing outside of the prescribed boundaries of accepted use, and the series of locks designed to eliminate and discourage such out-of-bounds actions were quickly activated. EMI, exercising rights provided in the DMCA provisions, imposed cease-and-desist orders on any websites hosting The

Grey Album. These actions did not sit well with Grey Album fans, or members of the underground remix culture, nor free-speech and fair-use pundits.

On February 24, 2004, thousands of defenders of out-of-bounds play participated in what came to be known as "Grey Tuesday," a day of coordinated, electronic civil disobedience in objection to EMI's attempts to block further distribution of Danger

Mouse's Grey Album. Led by non-profit music activist collective Downhill Battle, more than 170 websites posted the complete Grey Album for download for a twenty-four hour period, and over 400 sites in total showed support for the cause by spending the day highlighted in grey (Howard-Spink 2004). In the end, it is estimated that 100 000 copies of the album were downloaded on Grey Tuesday alone, and thousands more have been obtained since by interested listeners via peer-to-peer file sharing networks (Howard-

Spink 2004).

161 Events like Grey Tuesday suggest that there is willingness among some consumers of digital culture to play out of bounds and retain some control over the cultural objects they consume - something I hope to rearticulate with examples from the world of digital game modding in the following chapter. Grey Tuesday in particular also helped point out the corporate producers' role in making out-of-bounds play possible, and a seeming paradox of sympathies, messages and actions on their behalf. The Jay-Z rhymes used on The Grey Album were not "poached" illegitimately like The Beatles songs were. In late 2003, not unlike a game producer releasing mod tools for players to download, Jay-Z's record company, Roc-a-Fella, released an a cappella version of his

Black Album with the expressed purpose of allowing budding DJ's to remix the rapper's vocals for club play ("The Grey Album"). Roc-a-Fella and Warner Bros, also responded to The Grey Album with an "official" remix album that mashed Jay-Z's Black Album rhymes with music samples from Nu-Metal rock band Linkin Park - appropriating the illegitimate user ideas into something that fit more comfortably into their business model than unauthorized and uncontrollable fan mash-ups. From the corporate industry perspective, the role of the end user of new media is clearly defined: users may not play outside of prescribed boundaries, even if the tools to do so are provided by the industry itself. Over the next few chapters, I aim to show how these regularly contentious and sometimes paradoxical relationships between corporate media producers and the users of their products is mirrored in some cases and challenged in others by analyzing specific cases of modding in realm of digital games.

162 Conclusion

In "The Author as Producer," Walter Benjamin (2002), momentarily distancing himself from the pessimistic tone of his Frankfurt School contemporaries, suggests that there is a democratic potential within new technologies that can position traditional consumers a little closer to the culture industry production roles they have been alienated from. This potential, if tapped, can perhaps shift the fields of ideological thought proliferated within capitalist industrial regimes onto a more egalitarian path - but

Benjamin was adamant that is a matter of cultural politics, and not technology itself, that will bring about this potential shift (see Benjamin 2002; Lister et al. 2003).

I am inclined to agree with Benjamin, and I share his cautious optimism - but I also recognize how the boundaries imposed on creative play by today's cultural politics, described above, work to prevent this potential from being tapped. Nonetheless, it seems as though the stubborn nature of creative people, critical thinkers and dissenting minds, along with the dynamic nature of digital technology, usually allows for windows of opportunity to open. As I have mentioned before, no boundary erected or lock imposed on the use of new media objects is impenetrable. Resistant modifications of digital games are getting through - though most are not overtly political in their message.

Poremba (2003) and Schleiner (2005) offer examples of anti-war mods of violent shooter games and several mods are circulating now that blatantly poach trademarked material in an effort to critique corporate culture authority (see Chapters Six and Seven). Yet for the most part, the superstructural reinforcement of proper use and the role of the end user of

163 digital cultural products have been successful in comfortably containing and controlling user modification.

The rhetoric about the potential of digital new media and the internet to empower

the average consumer of culture and subvert unequal producer-consumer relations has been perpetuating for some time now. Whether or not my treatment of the boundaries

imposed on users of new media objects simply adds to the rhetoric or helps redefine the role of the new media user is not something I can speculate upon here. Defining

acceptable rules of playing with game properties, both in terms of structural forms and

conceptual influences, is a key goal of working integration or containment of player behaviour into producer-consumer relationships, alongside or in place of structures of

accountability and systems of incapacitation. But it is clear that we also need

redefinition, and any redefinition of the user's role demands a shift in dominant

conceptions of the role of ownership and authorship of popular culture and an increased

interest in playing out of bounds.

164 Chapter 5

Case Analyses: From "Foxed" Mods to Fixed Deals, Keeping Play In Bounds

It has come to our attention that you, along with other members of Kajar Laboratories, have been developing a ROM hack game called Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes ("CT:CE") based on Square Enix's copyrighted intellectual property... If any of these unlawful products are ever distributed, or if you fail to remove all infringing material immediately, then we will have no choice but to turn this matter over to our litigation counsel and appropriate authorities... Sincerely, Square Enix Legal Department - from the cease-and-desist letter sent to modders, May 8, 2009 (Square Enix 2009)

We believe that building a foundation where players' creativity is harnessed and the results are shared is becoming increasingly important. - Satoru Iwata, President of Nintendo (quoted in Lee 2008)

This chapter aims to illustrate an ongoing shift in the way user modification of corporately owned cultural properties is dealt with by analyzing several cases of digital games modding against the boundaries of play outlined in the previous chapter. In line with the thesis that user modification is a kind of play, and therefore incredibly difficult to stamp out because similar creative curiosities of alteration and adaptation occur inherently in people of all cultures, I document here, in some cases, a movement away from prevention of modder activity outright, as detailed in Tenner's (2003) notions of accountability and incapacitation, towards one of containment, integration and management of inexorable activities. Such a shift in strategy for dealing with those who

"play with" digital games seems less motivated by the stalemate situations that arise

165 when trying to dictate consumer behaviour (even via legal or technological means) and more by the profitability of taking advantage of the work of unpaid creative users. As it were, just because intellectual property is not 100% under the control of its owners in the cases outlined does not mean profitability is necessarily jeopardized.

The recent history of digital games modding, despite the practice's relation to the activities that created the medium itself (see Chapter One) and the subtle encouragement to modify game content by companies who release tools and provide access to source code, has involved a significant share of legal contention between users and corporate owners of copyrighted game properties. These contentions are perhaps bolstered because of modding's kinship with legally suspect practices like computer software hacking, unauthorized music sampling, code tinkering and, contingently, software piracy.

Confrontations frequently occur when users play out of bounds of accepted product uses by modifying a game to include elements of third-party intellectual properties they do not have the right to include in their mods. Whereas legal hurdles usually prevent even the conception of official mash-ups of properties owned by different and often competing sources, user-generated mods can be conceived and created based solely on the desire to have Halo's protagonist Master Chief battle it out with Nintendo's Mario and the ability to code one into the other's games (or both into a third, unrelated game).

166 But recognizing the kinds of fan service that come out of throwing together distinct properties is nothing new, nor unheard of in an official manner. My point is not that such things do not happen in official capacities, but instead that they are less constrained by what might be competing legal and profit interests, and therefore easier to initiate when exercised by fans. Also, recent official examples may also be motivated by the prevalence of such activities as part of user-generated practices. I have previously suggested that UGC can be read as a phenomenon not simply dependent on production realities but also as a style, aesthetic or even a genre, mimicked by official producers

(Curlew [forthcoming]). However, official mash-ups of two or more discretely owned intellectual properties bring with them what must be monumental costs and legal headaches - the classic example of Touchstone Pictures' Who Framed Roger Rabbit

(1988) is testament to both. Though the film broke ground with its on-screen interactions between cartoon characters from competing studios, including a memorable scene in which Disney's Donald Duck and Warner Brose's Daffy Duck feud with each other during a piano bar performance, several other characters originally sought out for the film such as Popeye, Mighty Mouse and Casper the Friendly Ghost did not make it into the final cut because of unresolved legal conflicts between their corporate owners and Roger Rabbit's producers (Kalgan 2003).

Still, the value generated by IP mash-ups is very frequently deemed worth it in official capacities. While fan projects that pit the likes of Mario and Master Chief against each other are frequently shut down, Mortal Kombat's Sub-Zero can fight comic

167 book heroes like Superman in official releases like Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe

(2008).30 Nintendo's Mario can race former arch-rival, Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog, in titles such as Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games (2007), a title open to contentious legal interactions not only because Nintendo and Sega must agree to terms, but the notoriously image-conscious International Olympic Committee as well.

Japanese game companies have a substantial history of having characters from distinct series "crossover" into one another.31 Nintendo particularly has recognized and released products that reflect the uncanny interest in seeing different properties thrust together, though mostly in ways internal to the company, using wholly-owned, first-party properties. Outside the mainline adventures of Super Mario (which traditionally stick to an archetype that has the portly plumber continuously rescuing Princess Peach from

Bowser, evil King of the Koopas), Nintendo's marketing machine, since the 1990s, has thrown Mario Bros, characters together with the stars of other Nintendo game franchises

- such as Donkey Kong, Metroid, The Legend ofZelda, Star Fox and Pokemon - most prominently in their Super Smash Brothers (SSB) series of games. SSB eliminates

DC Comics, owners of Superman, is a subsidiary of the Time Warner corporation. Months after Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe was released, the game's publisher and corporate owner of the Mortal Kombat brand, Midway Games, filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States. Time Warner's game publishing division, Warner Bros. Interactive, recently purchased Midway's assets, including the Mortal Kombat series - likely alleviating some of the legal hurdles facing future official mash-ups between MK and DC since the two properties are now wholly owned by Time Warner. 31 Japan has had a checkered history with poaching unlicensed elements from Western popular culture to include in official, professionally released games, particularly during the infancy of the digital games industry. Notorious examples include Revenge ofShinobi (1989) for the Sega Genesis, in which players encounter villains who bear striking resemblances in both appearance and behaviour to Western comic book heroes Batman and Spider-Man. While the character representation of Batman was later altered to avoid copyright conflict with DC Comics, Marvel Comics was successful in having Sega license Spider- Man for the game's re-release since Sega was developing an official Spider-Man game at the time.

168 Mario's adventure narrative and instead pits characters of the mentioned franchises against each other in round-based tournament combat, not unlike the popular Street

Fighter or Mortal Kombat games, though without gore or graphic violence. 2008's

Super Smash Brothers Brawl experimented with the licensing of game characters owned by third-parties with the inclusion of Sega's aforementioned Sonic the Hedgehog and

Solid Snake, protagonist of the Metal Gear Solid series, owned by games publisher

Konami.

Other companies have been more warm to third-party mash-ups and crossovers, even reaching outside digital games and into popular culture at large, despite the licensing issues involved: Capcom's "Vs." series is reliant on third-party crossovers, pitting characters from Capcom's game franchises (Mega Man, Resident Evil, Street

Fighter, Viewtiful Joe, etc.) against comic book superheroes Spider-Man, Wolverine and

Hulk in Marvel vs. Capcom; against popular Japanese Anime characters from Tatsunoko

Productions in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom; and against the heroes of rival company SNK's tournament-fighting games in SNKvs. Capcom. Similarly, Japanese games stalwart

Square-Enix has found great success with the Kingdom Hearts series, a crossover project with the Walt Disney corporation in which original characters and pop culture icons

(including Mickey Mouse himself) must team up to defeat an evil permeating between the worlds of Square's Final Fantasy games and Disney's films. Whereas the SSB and

Capcom's Vs. series use the thematically-cohesive tournament-fighting format when thrusting together properties, where opposing properties become opposing forces,

169 Kingdom Hearts is a narrative adventure game in which characters of differing origins unite in a Tolkienesque quest against evil. This format allows greater immersion into the possibility spaces offered by Disney's properties in particular. Indeed, the Kingdom

Hearts games have players revisiting dozens of environments made familiar by the mainstream success of Disney's films (Alice in Wonderland's eponymous fantasy world,

Pirates of the Caribbean's Port Royal, Hercules' Hades, Aladdin's Agrabah, etc.). The games feature narrative reworkings and modifications to the plots and conflicts of

Disney's incarnations of Pinocchio, Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, Beauty and the Beast, as well as their original properties like The Lion King and A Nightmare Before

Christmas. As such, Kingdom Hearts ostensibly represents an official work of fan fiction - a sanctioned and licensed example of the kinds of "playing with" cultural objects that traditional consumers of such objects frequently try to exercise through amateur and non-professional modding.

170 Nonetheless, these examples are best seen as exceptions to the norm as the licensing costs and barriers of competition keep most popular franchises from ever being thrust together in an official, professionally-produced manner. Microsoft and Nintendo would be unlikely to support a crossover between the worlds of Mario Bros, and Halo since they are in direct competition in producing the hardware on which those games are played. The case of Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games is telling in that its crossover only became possible several years after the failure and demise of Sega's last gaming console, the Sega Dreamcast (launched in 1998 and discontinued in the majority of the world by 2002, effectively ending the hardware rivalry between Sega and Nintendo).

Do As We Say, Not As We Do

It is in the domain of unofficial user-generated productivity, conceptually unconstrained in terms of just what can be thrown together with what, that we see most on- and off-medium mods and mash-ups of game properties and other cultural forms. It is here where we see Metroid's Samus Aran interact with Halo's Master Chief, and where the setting and characters of older Resident Evil zombie horror games are coded into the newest incarnations of the genre by modders, as is done in a mod that recreates

Resident Evil 3: Nemesis's (1999) Raccoon City faithfully within Left 4 Dead (2008). It is here where off-medium properties are frequently introduced, as in another mod of zombie shooter Left 4 Dead, entitled Left 4 Winchester, that aims to incorporate

32 See "Haloid," Monty Oum's custom animation that features Halo's Master Chief (owned by Microsoft) battling with Metroid's Samus (owned by Nintendo), with allusions to The Matrix, Star Wars and Mission Impossible films thrown in for good measure http //www voutube.com/watch'?v=K9sYixr2miY

171 elements from the 2004 horror comedy film Shaun of the Dead (McWhertor 2009), or

where children's icon Barney the Friendly Dinosaur becomes a dreaded enemy in

DOOM.33 However, though conceptual influence for these mods and mash-ups is unconstrained in users, the same cannot be said for the right to produce and distribute

them. Mirroring the Grey Album scenario presented in Chapter Four, the right to mash

together existing properties is not generally extended to users, despite the fact that this

tactic is used all the time in the official, commercial media as it bombards the popular

culture of users.

Corporations whose bottom line depends on the continued interest in and

saleability of their intellectual properties obviously have a vested interest in maintaining

absolute control over the games they produce. This means enacting directives to prevent

what might be unauthorized access to game code, underlying engines and software

technologies that might constitute trade secrets. This means ensuring that their games

are not being used in inappropriate or offensive ways (see Chapter Six), that their games

are not being made redundant by mods (Microsoft, publisher of Halo, is not keen on

seeing an amateur mod of competing franchise Half-Life that incorporates Halo IP) and

that the overall exchange value of their products is not threatened during user

engagements with them. Consequently, since the 1990s, when modding became a viable

reality and the internet facilitated new kinds of gamer interactions and allowed

communities of practice to emerge, the games industry has erected boundaries of play

33 See "Barney DOOM" at http://www.voutube.com/watch?v=M2tT781q_-8

172 that primarily enforce measures of prevention (accountability and incapacitation) against undesired user modification. However, it has more recently made increasing use of measures of user containment. We can see both systems at play in the movement from

"Foxed" mods, fan projects shut down by IP holders via legal means, to what I'm calling

"fixed deals," negotiations of integration of user-generated content into corporate marketing strategy.

Accountability and the Boundary of Copyright: "Foxed Mods "

The term "foxed" is said to have originated in the mid 1990s, after the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web, when large media corporations, most notably Twentieth Century Fox, began sending cease-and-desist letters to people hosting fan sites featuring visuals and music from their popular movies and television shows

("Fangame" 2009). Such a tactic of aggressive prevention of copyright infringement is emblematic of a mediascape not used to or prepared to deal with unauthorized mass distribution of IP. It is a first reactionary response, still very much in use today, but one based on the shock of having fan practices of appropriation and modification that had been cloaked from mainstream attention by small, niche distribution circles and inefficient, analog circulation methods suddenly being thrust onto the mass media of the internet.

Two key examples of foxed mods, at least in terms of structural alteration, are detailed in Postigo (2008) - the 'Duke it Out in Quake' mod in which modders incorporated elements of Duke Nukem 3D (1996) into Quake (1996), and a mod of

173 Battlefield 1942 which imported characters and mythology of G.I. Joe cartoons and action figures of the 1980s. Both were shut down by the owners of the properties modded into the host game, but not without some causing some awkwardness concerning acceptable user behaviour. Id Software, developer of Quake, is very mod

friendly. Three years after Quake's successful release, Id rewarded the mod community by re-licensing the source code for the game's engine under the Free Software

Foundation's General Public License, making it free software, editable by anyone with the skills to do so. That modders decided to use this freedom to incorporate properties belonging to the less mod-friendly makers of Duke Nukem led to their troubles.

Similarly, Battlefield 1942 was built to be modified, and some of its most high-profile modders were hired by its publisher EA after the success of the Desert Combat mod.

But inclusion of unauthorized material, Hasbro's G.I. Joe properties, drew the wrath of powerful corporate lawyers against groups of tech-savvy teenagers. From the legal perspective of the corporate owners involved, they are only exercising their lawful rights.

From the perspective of the creative game player, raised on a diet of official crossovers like Kingdom Hearts or Super Smash Bros and given the tools to modify similar games, the air of legitimacy floats thick with the smell of contradiction.

The Fan Game

Such scenarios play out in mods of conceptual influence as well, particularly through fan games or remakes. Fan games (sometimes written "fangames") are

174 generally user-developed games that employ existing intellectual properties and play

mechanics without relying on the structural alteration of an existing commercial game

for its code base, making them on-medium mods of concept. In this sense, they are

"original" in terms of software code, despite the fact that their concepts, plots,

characters, visuals and audio may be inspired by, copied or ripped out of existing games, making them similar to something like a Star Wars fan film. Newman (2008: 63) has

described this user-created game making as "a natural extension of fanfic," but the

shared medium between such games and their sources arguably increases the threat of product competition and consumer confusion, meaning fan games draw significant producer ire, while traditional fan fiction is now generally tolerated.

Fan game projects that are stopped by forced cessation via legal threats play out

as if by template: media company A has a digital games developer create new

intellectual property B, then brings it to market. If successful, B is followed up with

sequels and spin-offs (and perhaps a poorly-reviewed movie interpretation). However, if product B becomes unprofitable for company A, it will likely be retired or shelved, becoming an unexploited asset in company A's holdings. However, when it comes to

gaming properties, there is no necessary correlation between profitability and

desirability. If property B has a significant user fan base (or fosters a "cult" following in

the years after official releases), there will frequently be calls for the official continuation

of the series. If these calls go unheeded, able fans and nostalgic users of property B will

sometimes take up the call themselves, and begin extending or remaking existing titles of

175 property B, or making their own "original" entries based on its characters, settings and narratives. Fan communities generally recognize that they are not the owners of the IP they are working with and offer disclaimers stating this, as well as their intention to circulate the final product free of charge. Since such practices are done on a non­ compensated, volunteer basis by as few as one person, years of work can be invested into a single game project. Fan communities latch onto these fan mod projects, which frequently have dedicated web sites, forums, and newsletters. It is finally not uncommon, usually after a significant amount of fan-made content is previewed in screen shots, or a release date for the user project is posted, for the corporate owners of the property in question to intervene via legal declaration informing fan game makers to cease and desist their work on the game. Cease-and-desist orders, bolstered by the

American DMCA, avoid outright legal action against users (like lawsuits for copyright infringement) in favour of the threat of action. The latter is far less costly for corporations, but brings with it all of the threat. Frequently, cease-and-desist orders demand the stoppage of further work on a game and the complete destruction/elimination of all existing content.

Of course, some fan games that incorporate heavy, unauthorized use of others' IP can and do "slip through the cracks" and reach circulation. At least two fan remakes of

The Legend ofZelda: Link's Awakening, originally released as a 2D game on Nintendo's portable Game Boy platform, are being developed in the more contemporary, polygonal

3D style. As of this writing, neither has been "cease-and-desisted out of existence yet,"

176 possibly because each is being developed by a single programmer and may be too low profile to yet draw Nintendo's ire (Fletcher 2009). More often than not, however, high profile games that generate fan buzz and games press attention are destined to be foxed.

Two high profile conflicts between users and producers regarding fan games based on

Chrono Trigger (1995) and King's Quest (1984) offer prime examples of boundaries to play bolstered by intellectual property law, particularly where modded output is not immediately advantageous to IP owners. These cases will be later contrasted by cases of

"fixed deals" that deal with the official integration of mods deemed beneficial.

The Boundary of Containment — Fixed Deals: King's Quest IX

In the early 1980s, when PC-based digital games were in their infancy, some of the most innovative games were produced by a California company called Sierra Online.

Sierra became known for developing a genre of game known as the graphic/narrative adventure, typified by their popular King's Quest (1984), Space Quest (1986) and

Leisure Suit Larry (1987) series. Such games, evolved from the classic graphic-less, text-based adventure games like Zork (1980), involved controlling onscreen characters through the game's colourful narrative, using text commands like "open door" or "take object" in early installments, and specific mouse-controlled icons that represented open, take and other character functions in the later installments. Sierra's adventure games grew to be wildly popular among early PC aficionados in the 80s, and maintained substantial following into the early 1990s. However, by 1995, the narrative-driven

177 adventure genre had fallen out of favour as advances in game technology made new kinds of games, like first person shooters (FPSs), possible and popular. When Sierra's eighth installment of the King's Quest (KQ) series unsuccessfully incorporated FPS elements into the adventure genre, much to the dismay of critics and the consuming public, the decision was made to cease further production on the series and get out of the adventure game business altogether. Needless to say, hardcore KQ fans were devastated.

Would there be no King's Quest IX? How would the series' narrative arc conclude?

Such questions would go unanswered by Sierra, which by 1998 had been gobbled up by a larger corporate software conglomerate, and had been purged of the original minds behind the KQ and other landmark adventure franchises. By 2000, hope that a KQIX would be produced had all but expired.

But in the age of digital manipulation the fate of death is not necessarily absolute.

The adventures of KQ continued via player-controlled means, such as online fan fiction, which worked to "expand or repair the incomplete, official narratives of videogame serials" (Newman 2008: viii; Burn 2006), as well as tribute websites that kept the games in the consciousness of adventure gamers. More significant to this project, however, is that KQ lived on in the act of out-of-bounds play.

Soon after the millennium, several fan communities began creating prequel and sequel games to the official Sierra KQ series; however, these were often quickly thrown

178 together and of marginal quality. However, in 2001, one group of fans calling themselves Phoenix Online Studio began developing a large-scale, professional-quality sequel called King's Quest IX: Every Cloak has a Silver Lining using new freeware graphics-rendering programs and open-source game authoring tools like Torque.

Phoenix Online claimed this fan addition - this on-medium mod of concept - would faithfully conclude the series and wrap up loose ends left by Sierra when they discontinued the KQ series in 1998. By appropriating the series' mythology, a small group of prosuming fans set out to accomplish what the official producers had failed to do.

Of course, to avoid infringing on Sierra's intellectual property rights - which by

2005 were fully owned by media giant Vivendi Universal (VU) - KQIX was to be issued

as no-charge software, freely distributed from the development hub ofwww.kqix.com.

Phoenix Online would seek no payment - KQIX was to be, like much user-generated

cultural output, a fan labour of love. It was made very clear in kqix.corn's site

disclaimer that they were not interested infringing on VU's IP rights, and that they deemed their appropriation of protected materials to be tolerable with American

copyright policy as a work of fan fiction, which generally is not targeted by IP watchdogs given its prevalence online:

There were, however, some very well crafted fan-made remakes of the early King's Quest games released during this time, most notably by a duo of programmer fans called AGD Interactive, who seemingly managed to acquire a free licence to remake KQI and KQII. Details of their arrangement, apparently negotiated before Sierra became owned by Vivendi, are not publicly available.

179 All original content © 2005 Phoenix Online Studios. "KQIX: Every Cloak Has A Silver Lining" is a work of fan fiction. It is based on the popular King's Quest series, which is wholly copyright of Sierra Entertainment, Inc. 1979-2005. It is being produced in accordance with the "Fair Use" provision of Section 107 of the United States Code, without the express permission of Sierra Entertainment, Inc. "King's Quest", [its sequels,] characters, and related material are registered trademarks of Sierra Entertainment, Inc. No profits were made in the production of this game. This site is neither sponsored nor endorsed by Sierra Entertainment, Inc. (Phoenix Online Studio 2005)

Since 2001, the KQIX development team grew to include dozens of skilled writers, artists and programmers, all donating their time to modifying and extending their favourite game series.

However, in the fall of 2005, shortly before the anticipated release of the game,

Phoenix Online received their first contact from Vivendi: a cease-and-desist letter demanding that they shut down production of the game or face legal action for infringing on VU's private property. While the discussion forums ofwww.kqix.com soon filled with calls for Phoenix Online to take their own legal action and defend the fair use

stipulations in America's copyright policy that seemingly permit things like fan fiction, it

soon became clear that in any legal battle against a media giant like VU, the Phoenix team would be powerless. An informal discourse analysis of KQIX forum discussions reinforces Brown's (2004) suggestion that a fair use defence is often mute in America because many of the creators to whom fair use rights apply cannot afford the cost of

exercising them: Phoenix Online admits to not having the resources to hire a lawyer, let

alone engage in a court battle with an international corporation ("KQIX Forum"). Forum response to Vivendi's cease-and-desist order brought something else to the forefront -

180 the discussion revealed that the KQ games have a cultural life beyond just being commodities, and the attempt to eradicate that cultural life (which survives through-out of-bounds play) would not be taken lightly. KQIX supporters sparked a large scale letter-writing campaign and boycott of VU products, the results of which led to Vivendi allowing the game to continue its production, via a special fan licence, but with several stipulations, such as removing the King's Quest title from the game.

Work continued in 2006 under a new name - The Silver Lining. A public trial demo was released in 2007 and was downloaded by tens of thousands of players.

However, after several more years of work, the game had yet to emerge in a complete form, even as the amateur developers behind Phoenix Online admitted they scaled back the scope of the game - testament to the difficulties of making a polished, professional- quality product without the aid of financial backing. By the end of the decade, VU's games division had made a multi-billion dollar merger with Activision to create

Activision-Blizzard, the largest third-party digital games publisher. All of Sierra's properties moved to Activision in the process, though the Sierra brand itself was eliminated and some properties sold off. King's Quest, however, was retained, and despite that no plans were announced for official continuation of the series, Phoenix

Online received a second cease-and-desist notice in February 2010, reneging on the previous agreement. As of this writing, a decade's worth of volunteer work by dedicated

fans is at risk of being deleted as per the order.

181 All of the above conflicts and negotiations regarding the modding of Sierra properties ignore that the company's earliest successful efforts were dependent on forms of cultural modification and point to the necessary hypocrisy of cultural production in an economy that positions intellectual property as a primary commodity. As such, Sierra's history shares much in common with another, much larger media corporation.

Sierra's "Disney " Issue

Walt Disney, we are told, built his media empire by re-imagining characters, narratives and visual influences borrowed from the public domain, especially continental

European fairy tales. Disney's earliest animated features Snow White and the Seven

Dwarves (1937), Pinocchio (1940) and Fantasia (1940) rely on the German incarnation of ancient continental folklore, a piece of nineteenth-century Italian children's literature,

and Greek mythology melded with classical music, respectively. However, it is not merely the public domain that was mined by Disney artists - Steamboat Willy (1928) was based on the then-contemporary Buster Keaton movie Steamboat Bill Jr. (Jenkins

2003). Iconic Mickey Mouse himself (created 1928) is said to be highly derivative of

Ignatz Mouse (created 1913) from George Herriman's Krazy Kat comics (Heer 2003).

Contemporary intellectual property policy ensures that emerging "Walt Disneys"

of the world are not able to access, borrow from and re-imagine the Disney corporation's contributions to popular culture, including those examples based on materials in the public domain (Wiener 1994).

182 Sierra shares a similar history of building their products out of the shared stock of cultural artifacts found in public domain, as well as mining popular culture for conceptual influences that may be referenced as homage, pastiche or parody.

Coincidentally, in the mid 1980s, Disney had Sierra develop several games based on their character properties and film licences such as Donald Duck's Playground (1984),

The Black Cauldron (1986) and Mickey's Space Adventure (1984), the latter of which was written by Sierra co-founder Roberta Williams.

Williams spent much of the 1980s and 1990s writing, designing and producing the King's Quest series of adventure games for personal computers. Players of the KQ games controlled a member of the royal family of a fantasy world called Daventry as they navigated their way through a series of obstacles in order to save the kingdom, or a kidnapped family member, from some insidious evil (frequently brought about by dark wizards or witches). Such story memes already conform to archetypes of the Western

fantasy tradition, but the games truly find their strength in often clever re-imagining of

folklore, mythology and public domain narratives. Throughout the early KQ series, players encounter Rumpelstiltskin, Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks and the Three

Bears, Snow White's Seven Dwarves, and the gingerbread house from Hansel and

Gretel, among others. Players must use their expected knowledge of these fables and

fairy tales to successfully play through their re-imaginings in the KQ universe. Later KQ

35 Through some licensing blip resultant from the awkwardness of the early games software industry, Al Lowe, a Sierra designer, retains the rights to Donald Duck's Playground (1984) and The Black Cauldron (1986) despite that they are based on Disney properties, and has made the games freely available on his website: http://www.allowe.com/More/download.htm

183 games borrow heavily from ancient Greek, Roman, Celtic and Arab-Persian mythology and feature Charon the boatman, Pandora's box, the Minotaur, the Fates, a wish-granting genie in a lamp, as well as allusions to Shakespeare plays, Carroll's Alice in

Wonderland, the stories in One Thousand and One Nights, and the work of H.P.

Lovecraft.

Score: 75 of 158 King's Quest I

King's Quest I: Quest for the Crown's King Graham in front of a wicked witch's gingerbread house, as inspired by the folktale of Hansel and Gretel, popularized in Grimm's Fairytales. Image © 1990 Sierra Entertainment.

Running parallel with the development of the King's Quest games was Sierra's take on the science fiction genre, the Space Quest (SQ) series, developed by game designers Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe. Like KQ, the SQ games were a series of graphic-adventure games. However, unlike KQ, which owes much to folklore and public domain, SQ borrowed influence from modern (and protected) sci-fi staples, such as Star

Trek, Star Wars, The Terminator and Alien as well as 1980s-to-mid- 1990s pop culture in general.

184 SQ tended to present the conceptual influence and borrowing of existing narratives and cultural references as homage and parody. For instance, Star Trek's

James T. Kirk is reimagined as William Shatner-parody Raemes T. Quirk in Space Quest

VI; the Alien series' "face hugger" creature becomes a "pet" to SQ's protagonist in SQV; and SQIII concludes with the player controlling a giant robot in an arena battle - clearly modeled on the Rock Em Sock Em Robots toys - against a robot piloted by the game's chief antagonist, a caricature of Microsoft's Bill Gates. However, despite that under

American copyright law such treatments are subject to the exceptions of fair use, the conceptual borrowing popular in the SQ games was subject to a number of lawsuits filed regarding the recreation of the likenesses of musical acts ZZ Top and the Blues Brothers without permission ("Room Removed").

Sierra's King's Quest and Space Quest, like countless Disney creations and an increasingly large swath of intertextual pop cultural narratives (television shows Family

Guy, Robot Chicken, etc.) are in many ways reliant on conceptual reinterpretation and alteration of existing artifacts and properties. Yet, for all the conceptual modding that went into creating these games, like that which went into the reimagining of fairy tales as

Disney movies, there have been few opportunities for continued influence extended to non-professional modifications and extensions of Sierra artifacts and properties.

185 Secure :11B of 282 Sound:on

Unauthorized reproduction of likenesses of Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi's Blues Brothers characters in Space Quest I: The Sarien Encounter. Image © 1986 Sierra Entertainment.

All the more disheartening to Sierra fans is that during these periods of fan interest in taking up and extending or altering these narratives, the KQ and SQ franchises were dormant, unexploited by their owners, left to (metaphorically) decay on the shelf like (according to Lessig 2004) hundreds of old films in the studio archives of

Hollywood - even though a small but rabid population exists that wants nothing more than to "play with" them.

Furthermore, Sierra's influence on the creative pursuits of those who played their classic adventure games is evident not merely in the number and scope of fan-made extensions and re-imaginings of those games, but also in examples like Adventure Quest, an off-Broadway play that debuted in New York in the summer of 2009. Adventure

186 Quest is both homage to and parody of gameplay elements and narratives of the King's

Quest and Space Quest games (Frushtick 2009).36

Finally, perhaps most disheartening to those fans lamenting the boundaries of play imposed on KQIX/The Silver Lining, is the lack of interest Activision-Blizzard has shown defending its KQ intellectual property in other modified forms, even structural alterations of actual code. Case in point is Sarien.net (see Plunkett 2009a). Launched in

2009 by Dutch programmer Martin Kool, Sarien touts itself as a "portal for reliving classic Sierra On-Line adventure games... to win gamers' hearts and promote the adventure game genre" (Kool 2009: np).37 Kool developed a way for several of Sierra's most famous games published in the mid 1980s, including the original King's Quest and

Space Quest titles, to run in an internet web browser via his custom code interpreter.

Players can play through entire games, unaltered in terms of content or visuals, simply by visiting the website in a JavaScript enabled browser. However, each game's underlying code has been altered to feature new control and administration options (for things like saving your progress), and, most startlingly, online multiplayer functionality.

If they choose, users can see and talk to other players working through the same game at the same time, making the experience of these traditionally single-player games somewhat MMO like. As of May 2010, Sarien.net features nine fully playable Sierra

This is not the first instance of a theatrical performance of a digital game property. YouTube features videos of amateur stage productions of Super Mario Bros. Professionally, Capcom's courtroom drama game series Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney has been turned into a stage musical by the Takarazuka Revue, an all-female Japanese theatre group (Ashcraft 2009).

37 The title "Sarien" is borrowed from Sierra's Space Quest franchise. Sariens are the antagonists encountered in the first few titles of the series.

187 games, with plans to add more titles and more features to the site. It has received no cease-and-desist orders or warnings from Activision Blizzard, despite that it is undoubtedly marks both direct copyright infringement (in terms of the reproduction of code) and unauthorized access to and modification of Sierra's code and the expressive content therein, and has been in operation, unhindered, for more than a year. In the year since Sarien's launch, Activision Blizzard has even made King's Quest and Space Quest games available for sale on digital download sites like Steam and Good Old Games, reintroducing these products to market, despite that the official releases use unaltered, original code that can lead to limited functionality with newer operating systems like

Windows 7 and thus run more poorly than the freely available, browser-based versions found on Sarien that could potentially undercut the profitability of the new releases.

The Boundary of Containment: The Fixed Deals of Red vs. Blue

Whereas examples of foxed mods represent prevention of user work in terms of accountability and incapacitation, this chapter is also concerned with identifying that these systems of prevention are increasingly being accompanied by strategies of containment and integration of user output, even that which technically infringes IP law.

Corporate producers usually force modders to agree to end-user license agreements that prevent any modifications from being sold and that often claim all game mods as the game company's property. This, of course, leads to questions about ownership rights of cultural products derived from someone else's intellectual property. Nowhere in the

188 gaming world are these questions more asked than within the cult of machinima.

Machinima mods - which are animated films made out of three-dimensional digital gaming technologies - involve extreme forms of modification in which gameplay takes a back seat to other creative possibilities of the game's software. Whereas machinima artists were once only able to play their films within the games they modded, technologies have developed to allow them to export their animations to standard .mpeg or .avi digital video files (Marino 2004). For modders who have made completely original animations out of a game like Quake III (meaning all characters, sounds, backgrounds and narrative storylines were produced by users, and no original corporately-produced material remains), and who then export their films to a digital video file, there is some question about whether or not the corporate game's EULA still applies (see Arnone 2004). When treating a digital game as a production platform rather than a set of properties licensed to players for use in particular ways, the question becomes this: what is different between a Quake game and any other platform or tool of production? If someone makes a film with a Sony super-8 camera, Sony does not own the final product - should the makers of Quake own a machinima film made with

The title "machinima" is a hybrid of "machine" and "cinema" (Marino 2004 1) Machinima provides the ability to make "real-time animation - animation that is created as you watch it" (Marino 2004. 11), which makes digital animation "more akin to filmmaking as scenes are recorded as opposed to rendered Virtual environments become more akin to film sets, and characters become more like actors (their actions can be 'puppeteered,' scripted, or driven by programming). All the while, the camera records the action as it takes place" (Marino 2004 11) This process is made possible by the ability of 3D game engines to pre- render virtual environments with real-world conditions (physics, gravity, lighting, perspective, solidity, etc.). The term "game engine" refers to the template on which a game environment is built - the underlying technology that "provides a game with its basic functionality" (King & Krzywinska 2002: 27, see also Mactavish 2002, Marino 2004, Lowood 2005, Jones 2006)

189 Quake! The concrete answer to this question is still some time away, as machinima filmmaking is still very much in its infancy. Thus far, corporate game producers have been slow to deter creative freedoms of machinima enthusiasts. However, they are paying attention, especially when the ways that people "play with" their games are deemed good for business.

A machinima-made web sit-com called Red vs. Blue (RvB) by a group of modders calling themselves Rooster Teeth Productions, created using Bungie

Software/Microsoft's popular game Halo (2001), changes almost nothing from the original game - characters, locations, and storylines are lifted directly from Halo (they are, however, given a humorous, satiric spin and laced with profanity). RvB started in

2003 and ran for five full seasons through 2007 for one hundred regular-appearing episodes, as well as several still ongoing mini-series. At its peak, the series was said to

"rival Halo itself in popularity," with nearly a million unique downloads of RvB episodes on a weekly basis in 2004 (Allen 2004: np). Such was the success that RvB's producers were able to quit their day jobs and turn Rooster Teeth into full-time work, generating significant revenue via the sales of RvB merchandise, which they most certainly share the bulk of with Microsoft. Just how much money Rooster Teeth has generated from RvB's success is not a matter of public knowledge, as a non-disclosure arrangement with

Microsoft prevents them from revealing their earnings (Varney 2006). While the details are not public, it is suspected that Rooster Teeth is able to continue producing and profiting from RvB because Bungie and Microsoft approached them with a marketing

190 proposal, and RvB has been recently used in marketing campaigns for Microsoft's Xbox gaming console and the Halo franchise (Arnone 2004). One special edition version of

Microsoft's official Xbox 360 release Halo 3 (2007) includes RvB episodes as bonus content, and the first RvB mini-series, a spin-off of the regular series produced at

Microsoft's request, premiered exclusively on their Xbox Marketplace digital entertainment distribution network accessible via the Xbox 360 console (Burns 2006).

A 2004 New York Times interview with RvB's creator Michael Burns expresses surprise that Microsoft did not shut down the series, with the interviewer stating

(uncouthly) "They could've choked it in its crib" (Allen 2004: np). Burns responds by stating that Bungie favourably acknowledged RvB right away and "wanted to make sure we were protected," presumably from a threat of wasting a then cutting-edge, virally- situated resource for product promotion in cease-and-desist orders. What could very well be seen as an infringement on Bungie/Microsoft's intellectual property was mined for its relational source value, and RvB was positioned as a kind of outsourced advertising.

Beyond intellectual property concerns, the profits made by Rooster Teeth using Halo axe permissible given the massive success of the Halo games. Indeed, as Arnone (2004) outlines, presale-orders for 2004's Halo 2 topped 1.5 million copies alone, grossing $75 million before the game was released (Allen 2004), numbers that would have constituted the total sales and revenues of several blockbuster titles in previous gaming generations.

Red vs. Blue marks a key example of a potential shift from models of accountability and incapacitation, lodged in tactics of punishment and prevention, to one

191 of containment and integration. The freedom to play with digital game properties, to

avoid the harshest boundaries of play erected in previous models, is allowed with

negotiated assimilation into the profit paradigm of the source material, under a cultural

politics of consumer/producer collaboration. But the motives for this mutually

beneficial, if lopsided, relationship may not be immediately clear to user actors involved.

RvB creator Burns has insinuated that the work of Rooster Teeth is approved because

"[ejveryone's got this need to tell a story, and I think more of these big companies

recognize that" (quoted in Allen 2004: np). However, given the patterns of keeping play

in bounds expressed above, as well as the number of cases of user-modified work being

"foxed" by image-conscious corporate owners, it is reasonable to believe that such a

need would not be reciprocated by companies like Microsoft if the stories produced proved disadvantageous to product saleability or business ethics. The following chapter

shows that examples of both are part of the reality of the plays and counterplays of users.

Conclusion

This chapter suggests that the way traditional producers deal with the user

modification of their products is experiencing a reformation. Alongside the previous models of product protection based on prevention and punishment of unauthorized user

appropriations and manipulations of source material, there exist newer models based on

the containment and integration of user efforts, especially where such efforts prove profitable to original producers. Indeed, what modders do can provide value in a myriad

of ways. For example, the appeal of some tropes of user modding, such as franchise

192 crossovers, have been increasingly emphasized in an official capacity, legitimized by licensing agreements that make possible games such as Kingdom Hearts or Mario and

Sonic at the Olympic Games. However, this legitimized form of "playing with" pop culture is generally not extended to the vast majority of users, even if the creative impetus to mash together existing properties is fostered in them. Users instead face boundaries erected to keep play in bounds, experiencing foxed mods of prevention as well as fixed deals of containment. Outside of profit motive, the logic that governs reaction to mods is at times contradictory even for producers erecting the boundaries. A notable example of this is The Silver Lining, a fan-developed extension of Sierra

Online's long-dormant King's Quest series. Over the past decade, the Silver Lining project has been "foxed," then granted permission to continue, only to be "foxed" again

- an erratic pattern that denies Sierra's history of cultural appropriation and conceptual influence in their games. The Silver Lining's challenges also defy economic reason since the current owner of Sierra's IP has ignored other high-profile copyright infringements of the same game properties that allow free, playable access to early Sierra games within a web browser, despite these games still being available for sale. Things appear to be different where discemable economic value can be derived from user activity, as the case of Red vs. Blue makes clear. The following chapter further elaborates on these ideas with attention to how they might be opposed in playing out of bounds.

193 Chapter 6

CounterPlays: Disruptive Opposition and Negotiation in the Contemporary Modding Mediascape

The joy of a toy has to be converted into the enjoyment of tearing that toy apart.

- French semiotician Christian Metz, quoted in Raessens (2005: 378)

The boundaries, rule sets and containment strategies applied to how users play with digital games are not static or absolute, nor are the cultural politics of user modification around which they revolve. Essentially, the remainder of this project is dedicated to the analysis of key examples of modding that resist or disrupt boundaries of play, as well as some dominant cultural ideologies that define tenets of intellectual property ownership, corporate control of culture and moral decency (in this chapter) and conflict acceptance, ethnic difference and gender relations (in Chapter Seven).39

With that in mind, there is a necessary tension present in any discussion of resistances to "dominant ideologies" made in and out of popular culture. This kind of research opens itself up to criticism that tends to limit the subversive work of media users (most notably active readers) to "political interpretations of the seemingly apolitical activities of fairly well-heeled Westerners" (Highmore 2006: 14) - absent of actual political import and perhaps undeserving of the label "resistant" given the political

The phrase "dominant cultural ideologies" here refers to "the core set of beliefs, ideas, and identities that are circulated through forms of popular culture" (O'Brien and Szeman 2004: 237), but recognizes, according to the tenets of cultural studies, that "ideology" is a fluid concept, open to variation across spatial and temporal divides. Dominant ideology here is less a set of concrete absolutes pressing against all opposing ideological positions and more a series of cultural constructions "that regulatfe] our activities through the establishment of very powerful cultural norms - norms that everyone adheres to in some ways, but that everyone also contravenes or goes against in numerous others" (239).

194 struggles of the globally disenfranchised. My aim in this chapter is to provide a strong case for the importance of subversive play without glamourizing or overstating its political effects nor trivializing games or the culture that surrounds them. What follows is designed to graduate beyond the criticisms of the active-audience pitfalls by mining only what is important from previous generations' findings about popular culture as a site of struggle and moving into more contemporary terrain.

If the preceding chapters have fulfilled their purpose, it should be clear that there is tremendous confusion on the part of those who sell digital media texts and those who buy them regarding what each other wants. This confusion is compounded by the potentially bipolar identity of users that can be "at the same time part of the new media system and agents of appropriation and change" (Roig et al. 2009: 94). If modding, as a participatory cultural practice, is a kind of play, and the terms by which this play is legitimized are being artificially constructed via boundaries shaped by interests of capital and government legislation, then the play that continues to exist outside, beyond and against these boundaries must be re-classified. The term I suggest here to mark the out- of-bounds play of modding, covering activities that can resist and disrupt both old and new conventions of user behaviour, is counterplay.

Counterplay is made up of a range of user practices that with intention or by accident interfere with the ways corporate media producers and policy makers work to prevent or contain new abilities of user modification in digital environments. It is a series of actions against reactions where users act counter to measures put in place by

195 dominant influences of post-industrial cultural production, such as the boundaries of play described in Chapter Four catalyzed by pop culture's plunge into networked digitalization. Some of the practices of counterplay described here have the potential to taint, reduce or eliminate the commodification and saleability of the source products or

cultural forms modded or borrowed from via changes to the sources' ideological foci and other means. These qualities link counterplay to the two concepts that influenced its formulation here: the first, out of Alex Galloway's (2006) work on concept of countergaming; and the second, out of Stuart Hall's (1999b) work on negotiated and oppositional readings of pop culture.

Countergaming

There is a lot that is useful in Galloway's notion of countergaming, but its basis

in a set of assumptions about culture that hierarchically organizes the work of "artists"

above and against the work of everyday users does not fit in with the goals or ethics motivating this project, hence my modification of his concept. Basically, countergaming represents a movement among software artists - whose medium of creative expression is

digital code - toward the modification of digital games in ways that deny their ludic

origins. This runs counter to mods of gameplay, which are more typical of the output by non-artist modders, whose work Galloway (2006) refers to as "gestures of fandom"

(107). Artists, he suggests, generally make "mods of game technology" that disrupt the

"intuitive flow of gameplay" via hacking games into unplayable abstractions of their

196 former forms (108). Galloway connects this countergaming to the 1960s avant-garde film movement of countercinema, as exemplified in the work of French filmmaker Jean-

Luc Godard that breaks with standard narrative form and disrupts codes of expectation audiences have for the way a film is supposed to unfold. Examples of countergaming - found in the work of new media artists Brody Condon, Cory Arcangel and the internet art collective Jodi - redefine both visual and ludic game qualities in their disruption of normative forms and values to the point at which Galloway suggests their mods "conflict violently with the mainstream gaming industry's expectation for how games should be designed" (108). In countergaming, then, "aesthetic experimentation often trumps interactive gameplay" (118), with game technology and software arrangements

"repurposed to serve the same sort of modernist formal experiments that the avant-garde has pursued for decades" (118).

Such abstract pursuits, as apparent in classic examples of modernist opposition to the encroachment of capital into spaces of art and culture, derive political potential in being too abstract (too resistant to expected form) to commodity - at least until modernist art developed a canon, and around that canon, developed an economy of exchange values. But more than being upsetting to industry business practices,

Galloway (2006) feels countergaming is an "unrealized project" (126) since its disruption of norms affects the visual and aesthetically charged output of games and not their gamic elements. This reduces the political potential of countergaming: "This is

197 essentially the reason why Jodi's work is apolitical, while Godard's was hyperpolitical:

Jodi aims to create better abstraction, not to create better (or different) gameplay" (125).

Galloway thus calls for "radical action" in avant-garde usage of digital games that mod into them "radical gameplay, not just radical graphics" (125). It is against this point that my conceptualization of counterplay is made incongruent with countergaming, since the resistance and disruption in game modding that I am identifying relies on the

"tweaking" of the "visual components of a game," something which Galloway suggests under countergaming is "missing the point" (125). He argues:

Artists should create new grammars of action, not simply new grammars of visuality. They should create alternative algorithms. They should reinvent the architectural flow of play and the game's position in the world, not just its maps and characters. (125)

While such actions provide challenges to the limits of play put on the medium by commercial game producers, they do not adequately address the limits put on playing with digital games and the pop cultural mediascape of which they are a part. Nor do these actions extend to the wider population of digital game players and software users.

Galloway's focus on the modification work of "artists" and on avant-garde aesthetic politics does not speak to the efforts (resistant, disruptive or otherwise) of kids, teens and

adults whose modding output never "rises to the level of art" and instead remains merely

"gestures of fandom" (107, emphasis mine). Thus, my formulation of Galloway's

countergaming is refocused and supplemented with help from a concept central to

contemporary British cultural studies: Hall's work on encoding and decoding.

198 From Oppositional Interpretation to Oppositional Production

Stuart Hall's (1999b) encoding/decoding model of communication, developed throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, provided a theoretical basis for cultural studies'

shift toward active audience research, and the legitimized possibility for resistant interpretations of popular culture. The ideologies of control that Marxist structuralism

suggest are coded into popular texts and messages are "yoked," according to Tudor

(1999), within the encoding/decoding model - leaving an "account of culture and

ideology in which there are 'structures in dominance' [but] within which the 'struggle in ideology' is continued" (128). Such a capacity for ideological struggle is made possible in Hall's three possibilities or strategies of interpretation of media messages by their receivers provided within the model: preferred readings, negotiated readings and

oppositional readings (515-517). Raessens (2005) provides a good summary of these

options:

Respectively, these strategies point out the possibility to read a text according to the dominant ideology, the possibility to negotiate this dominant ideology and to varying degrees mix adaptive elements with oppositional elements, and the possibility to go against the dominant ideology and come up with a purely oppositional reading. (375)

Concerning the latter two options, the struggle between authors or producers and

decoding audiences often leads to a kind of conceptual "culture jamming," or the

appropriation of an image, emptying it of its preferred meaning and recoding it with

different meaning. Cultural jamming (explained in greater detail in Chapter Seven) is

frequently exercised as "adbusting," the "practice of turning manifestations of consumer

199 culture... against themselves for political ends" (O'Brien and Szeman 2004: 251; see

also Klein 2000). This process is in line with the earlier Barthian conception of mythology, something part semiotic and part ideological that invests ideas in perpetually unstable forms (Barthes 1972).

Certainly, Hall's concept of encoding/decoding and his three available kinds of interpretations have drawn significant criticism from within and without cultural studies.

Notably, Fiske (1987) suggests Hall's possibilities for negotiated and oppositional readings within the encoding/decoding model are overdetermined by the class positions of decoders, while Morley (1980) has argued that the idea of a preferred reading actually props up the top-down model of communication Hall is trying to rearticulate. However, the possibility of interpretive resistance by audiences is perhaps most contentious in the debate between the perspectives of political economy and those of cultural studies. One

of the key texts in the debate is Nicholas Garnham's "Political Economy and Cultural

Studies," in which Garnham (1999 [1995]) suggests that cultural studies (and particularly

its "active-audience-as-resistant / pleasures-of-consumption" phase) is romantic and idealistic, and that it treats coping with the oppressive weight of dominant ideology via

subjective interpretation as equal to resistance.

Lawrence Grossberg (1998) offers a direct reply to Garnham's critique.

Grossberg insists that cultural studies does not assume coping is the same as resistance, but that the former can inform the latter. To Grossberg, using limited subjective resources that may enrich the lives of consumers under exploitive power structures is

200 significant to understanding power and fundamental to challenging it. But even within the subfields of cultural studies that ground themselves in Hall's encoding/decoding contribution, such as participatory culture, the limits of the solely interpretive spheres of negotiation and opposition have been identified. Jenkins (1995) problematizes resistant readings as they have been understood in active audience research, pointing out how they risk becoming a "catchall solution for all the problems within popular culture" and "a way of escaping the need for ideological criticism or research into the political economy of media institutions" (263). Jenkins (1995) suggests, resistant reading "only describes one axis of a more complex relationship between readers and texts" (262). The other axes, as Jenkins' most recent work attests, can be seen as spaces of participatory cultural production.

As described in Chapter Two, practices of participatory culture production reify much of the theory in encoding/decoding, concretizing the act of decoding in playing with the material output of popular culture, not merely playing with its conceptual interpretations. For example, creative users of digital games have modified blatantly sexist releases into feminist critiques on the medium, or transformed war games into calls for peace by importing into them anti-war user-generated content (Poremba 2003;

Schleiner 2005). Game modding, like fan fiction or music remixing before it, extends beyond and complicates realms of simple interpretation and resistant reading by not only manipulating interpretations of text, but by manipulating actual textual material itself

(actual film footage, actual game files, etc.).

201 Thus, I propose analogues of Hall's three kinds of interpretation within the doings of participatory culture, particularly in the play of modding of digital games.

Such a formulation is hinted at in Raessens (2005) but not fully realized in his calls for more "political-ideological" treatments of games as participatory media culture (381-

384). Mapping Hall's decoding categories onto practices of play results in the analogous

categories of expected play, negotiated play, and resistant/disruptive play:

Kinds of Reading Kinds of Production/Playing Action Preferred Expected Play Negotiated Negotiated Potentially Counterplay Oppositional Resistant/Disruptive Counterplay

Hall's model of interpretive decoding is not unlike some theories of play, in terms of the rhetorical understanding of play as an exercise of social power (complete with preferred and/or expected ways of participation) that suggest "major social forms of play are introduced and manipulated for their own benefit by the rulers of society"

(Sutton-Smith 74). But, Sutton-Smith contends, "subordinate classes sometimes invert these play forms to express their own hidden rhetorics of resistance or subversion" (74).

Such inversions are examples of negotiated or disruptive playing, and, more

significantly, indicators that the power relations of certain cultural spaces can be

interpreted and challenged through its social play. Thus, I suggest counterplay as a

subjective resource with which social actors can partake in negotiated and oppositional production, or forms of play that resist or disrupt a varied array of ideological discourses

circulating in contemporary pop culture with both positive and negative implications,

and do so, importantly, on both interpretive and material levels. Yet this should not be

202 taken to mean that counterplay's complications of the boundaries of play placed on the

modification, be they disruptions or resistances, always function uniformly. To

emphasize this point, it is best to distinguish how disruption can be conceived differently

than resistance in counterplay.

Resistance and Disruption

"Resistance," suggests Bennett (1998), "is an essentially defensive relationship to

cultural power that is adapted by subordinate social forces... As such, it arises in

relationships of cultural superordination/subordination which have an impositional logic"

(170-171).40 I am qualifying (modifying?) this notion of resistance by pairing it with

disruption in my discussion, since the kinds of activities that fall under the rubric of the

latter differ (sometimes wildly) from the politics that informs the former. In this

discussion, resistance has intent to have a "defensive relationship" to centres of

authority, while disruption does not require intent but can still be detrimental to the

normal functioning of the same authority.

To better understand the multiple kinds of subversive behavior that can manifest

in the user-manipulation of digital games (as they unfold across this chapter and the one

which follows) I want to create a functional - if limited - distinction between disruptive modding (as a subcultural practice) and politically resistant modding (as a

countercultural practice). This distinction between subculture and counterculture will use

40 See Bennett (1998: 168-170) for a historical and semantic explanation of the term "resistance" in regards to culture.

203 a model outlined by O'Brien and Szeman (2004).41 They write that "by creatively expressing their dissatisfaction with existing social norms and practices, subcultures challenge and modify what counts as normal, everyday life" (320), but also posit that

"while subcultures may be political in their aims and activities, countercultures are explicitly so. The goal of countercultures is to replace with their own social and political values and beliefs the values of the majority, which they see as unjust, discriminatory, limiting, and regressive" (242). They continue by arguing that the "energies that fuel countercultures come from the possibility (and hope) of radically altering the way things are. On the other hand, the power of subcultures comes from the tensions created by the relationship between subcultural practices and the practices of majority culture" (242).

One node of power that frequently incites user tension from disruptive sub- cultural behaviour - as evidenced in the examples and cases below - lies with commercial producers of pop cultural artifacts who have their standing bolstered by governmental policy that grants and provides legal protection for intellectual property rights. Agents of this power are part of a wider, dominant philosophy of cultural production under the regimental ethos of post-industrial capitalist marketplaces - that which until recently had comfortably mass produced culture for consumption according to a one way, top-down paradigm of communication "in which institutions speak while citizens listen" (Rakow 1999: 75). Within such a sphere cultural production is

41 Subculture, according to their definition, does not necessarily include those cultural practices that operate outside of the mainstream or cultural groups with small populations. Instead, in this conception, "a practice shouldn't be considered subcultural unless its aim is to draw attention to the limits of majority practices and to offer new practices or cultural forms as an alternative" (O'Brien and Szeman 2004: 240).

204 hegemonically controlled - networks of delivery, methods and modes of production are

out of reach of, incompatible with or aligned against non-professional cultural producers.

Under this model, resistance from a space of subordination in the form of counter- narratives or oppositional cultural forms that circulate on the same channels of delivery

as dominant culture (TV and radio airwaves, movie theatres, book shops, etc.) is necessarily limited by access to those channels (financially, creatively and politically).

However, opposition in practices of consumption and interaction with dominant cultural

forms is not uncommon. Such has been demonstrated by often subordinate sub-cultural

groups - notably punks, hipsters and Goths - who "are able to use the resources of

dominant cultures to fashion their own enclaves within them, to render the space of 'the

other' habitable in affording a means of escaping [dominant culture] without leaving it"

(Bennett 1998: 168). Some modders of digital games need to be included as participants

in such oppositional - or at least disruptive - practices.

However, it is important to note that the transformative practices of subcultural

groups who "play with" cultural forms, and those of modders examined here, contain

opposition to different kinds of dominant ideologies in different instances - they are

articulated differently in different cases, meaning while one message might be resistant

or disruptive of dominant ideology of mass market standards of "safe" apolitical products or moral conservatism, it may still be (grossly) supportive of other predominant

ideologies like gender chauvinism. The act of user-modification of cultural forms is

205 frequently celebrated in work such as mine, but that does not mean the content for those modifications is treated uncritically.

Disruptive Opposition Need Not Be (Anti-Capital) Resistance

Marxist political economist Nick Dyer-Witheford argues that contemporary "e- capital" is challenged by multifaceted opposition that can inhibit the success of digital enclosure in a similar manner to the way the terrestrial anti-enclosure movement resisted emergent forces of privatization during the Industrial Revolution (2002: 129). The terrestrial anti-enclosure movement fostered opposition that varied from "appeals, petitions, and lobbying of Parliament to directed uprising and riots, mobbing of the surveyors, destruction of records, sporadic and clandestine arson, fence breaking, poaching and systematic trespass" (131). This resistance to private property is said to have been particularly resilient: "Aghast at the recurrence of these outbreaks, the rulers of the day spoke of rebels as a 'hydra' whose regenerative powers resisted their own

'Herculean' attempts at decapitation" (131).42

Digital enclosure, especially in terms of widespread acceptance of intellectual property rights it trumpets, has not had a clean or comfortable history of acceptance

(Gosling 2001; Stallman 2003; Gillespie 2007). Resistances, suggests Dyer-Witheford

(2002), emerge not only from idealists who remember and champion the pre- commercialized Net's "academic/anarchic phase," but also from "generations who have

42 Dyer-Witheford (2002) is borrowing a metaphor relayed by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker (2002) in their book The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.

206 grown within cybercapitalism's digital culture, but experience contradictions between its

abundant potentiality and actual exclusions and banalities" (135). Along with the boundaries imposed upon digital culture grew those who play out of bounds: hackers,

file-swapping pirates, free software developers, cyberactivists and others that work,

according to Dyer-Witheford, to subvert information capitalism. Thus, Dyer-Witheford

believes the hydra metaphor used to describe the multifaceted and nimble resistance to

terrestrial enclosure during the Industrial Revolution is just as appropriate when applied

to resistance to the digital enclosure of the information revolution: "When one head is

lopped off a hydra, another grows; on the Net, anticapital may be quickly suppressed, but

also regenerates and alters fast" (135).

However, Dyer-Witheford does not address the possibility that some of the heads

of the many-headed hydra that oppose the enclosure of information capitalism do so

without being explicitly anti-capital or anti-capitalist. Politically charged modders and

code hackers certainly exist (see Chapter Seven, as well as Poremba 2003; Galloway

2006; Jones 2007), but many of the people who mod inappropriate content into games or

violate a corporation's copyrights are teens or kids who have not heard of "digital

enclosure," corporate "hegemony," or "dominant ideologies." They may be anti-

capitalist in that they impede the doing of normal business, but not because of any

necessary political ambitions or affiliations. For them, it may be just a form of

(subversive) play or ritual behaviour, not adherent to any one set of politics, accidental or

207 premeditated. It is the disruptive actions of such actors with which the remainder of this chapter is concerned.

Legal analyst Mark Methenitis (2008b) suggests, from a legal perspective, there are two kinds of user-generated content in digital games that cause concern for corporate lawyers: first, content which is offensive; and second, content that infringes on intellectual property of others. To these, from a socio-cultural perspective, I add the potentially disruptive content that is based in rituals of daily life. It is in line with these three categories that I will be exploring disruptive counterplay in digital game modding.

Offensive Disruptions

No penis level? Come on internet, what are you doing? - response left in the comments section of a Kotaku.com story describing available user-generated levels for the Wii game Boom Blox Bash Party (2009)

Hardcore media fans, suggests researcher Matt Hills (2002), are ideal customers given their loyalty and predictable purchasing habits (29). But they also frequently function in opposition to producer wishes by envisioning, then modifying, their target products in what might be seen as unsavoury ways, making such fans at once a benefit to producers' bottom line as well as the bane of producers' existence. This is true of writers of slash fan fiction, who "express dissatisfaction with the limits and constraints of popular culture" by focusing their creativity on imagined pornographic encounters between their favourite pop cultural characters (O'Brien and Szeman 2004: 240).

Agents Mulder and Scully, never to knock boots during their run on The XFiles, are

208 recurrent bedfellows in the online archives of slash fiction. The same is true for Harry

Potter and the muggle-born witch Hermione Granger, despite the latter fancying Harry's best friend Ron within the series' official canon. Indeed, it is not beyond the scope and want of slash fan writers to have Ron "join in" on the fun. And Dumbledore too.

The charm of using language, of using words, as tools of cultural production is that they can be arranged and rearranged in a countless number of ways according to an equally countless number of desires, be they socially acceptable or not. While that charm has not always carried over into photorealistic visual media forms, it has become significantly easier for users to recontextualize the elements of visual pop culture in the wake of digitalization, especially when those elements are based in cartoon animation or video game pixel art. This can, depending on the content of user recodings of such images, result in what I call offensive disruptions. Take for example, the "Cobra Island

Rave," a mash-up video featuring the edited animations of dozens of 1980s era cartoon characters, mixed with original voice-overs, posted to the internet in 2006 by its creator

GringoJ. The short video stars He-Man, protagonist of the Masters of the Universe franchise, and Lion-O, leader of the ThunderCats, both emptied of their roles as archetypes of heroic masculinity, and recoded as bumbling, horny buffoons trying to get into an exclusive rave party that promises "a lot of disenchanted youth and controlled substances." During the humorous debauchery that unfolds, the G-rated source material is taken up and transformed by users into R-rated derivative work - corrupting the

43 See "Cobra Island Rave" at http://www.voutube.com/watch?v=VRKY-rmlLvk

209 characters, trademarks and brand franchises corporate producers spend millions of dollars developing into saleable commodities that embody a specific ethos of appropriateness for their target audience. This is not merely the unauthorized reproduction of intellectual property, but a categorical misuse of it.

At work in the "Cobra Island Rave" and its many complementary videos on

YouTube is a kind of counterplay, a potentially disruptive modification of cultural artifacts with political (or at least politicized) consequences marked by its offensive additions. That its creator has no apparent political activist ambitions or anti-capitalist affiliations might prevent this video mod from being labeled resistant or countercultural, but does not detract from its embodiment of a playful, oppositional inversion of popular media, nor its potential threat to the content's corporate creators, like the mentioned examples of slash fan fiction.

The same is true for some modified digital games. For Terranova (2004) the

"digital economy cares only tangentially about morality. What it really cares about is an

abundance of production, [and] an immediate interface with cultural and technical labour" (96). But what happens when the labourers sought out for their (unpaid) productive potential interfere with expected norms of good taste? Offensive content in

Methenitis' formulation of UGC in digital games - what constitutes "offensive" here, however, is never defined - is to be avoided for several obvious reasons: to maintain the

"desired atmosphere" of the community (basically means that a family-friendly game

should only be updated with family-friendly user-content); to avoid negative publicity

210 and potential public backlash; and to prevent legal liability in extreme cases where user- created content might be deemed hate-speech, or pornography accessible by minors, which would put that content's distributor at fault (Methenitis 2008b).

Yet, there is no shortage of digital game mods that are offensive. Critics know that the professional game developers have been among the chief purveyors of sexism, racial stereotyping, homophobia, ultra-violence, bad taste and puerility in popular culture over the past thirty years, but little professionally produced content can stand shoulder to shoulder with the most offensive content created by game modders. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the subculture of ROM hacking. ROM hacks are not particularly hard to make given that they are frequently just mods of a game's visual assets - the underlying structure of gameplay (the pro-base that allows the code to function) usually is untouched. This relative ease of practice marks both the charm and detriment to modding's credibility: echoing the sentiments of critics of amateur production (Keen

2007). One overview of tasteless ROM hacks online notes, "for every would-be

Miyamoto [critically acclaimed creator of NES classics SMB and Zelda] there's 100 socially repugnant high schoolers... just begging to damage the [source] program"

(Agent B 2009). It's from those "socially repugnant high schoolers" we get what may be the most deranged and offensive NES ROM hacks (Agent B 2009), categorized in the chart below as off-colour, sexualized, violent or discriminatory.

211 Description Examples Off-Colour Hacks of game visuals to -Baby Dodge Ball Hacks include strange, illegal or -Hash Cookie socially taboo content Sexualized Hacks of game visuals to -Ernie and the Muppets Take it All Off Hacks include general nudity, -Nude Punch-Out! genital exaggeration, -Dick Kids sexual activity including intercourse, masturbation, ejaculation Violent Hacks Hacks of game visuals to -Dishonor Thy Father include graphic violence, blood and gore, mutilation and torture, rape imagery Discriminatory Hacks of game visuals to -Super Amish Bros. Hacks include racist, sexist or -Super Nazi Penis Cartel Freedom homophobic content Fighters 3

Off-colour hacks include repugnant or taboo additions into normally clean games, such as Baby Dodge Ball (a hack of Super Dodge Ball (1989) that replaces ball's sprites with those of baby, which is bounded back and forth between players) and Hash Cookie (a hack of puzzle-matching game Yoshi's Cookie (1993) which replaces matchable pieces with cannabis related drug paraphernalia). Sexualized hacks frequently include the removal of game characters' clothing (or rather, replacing character clothing pixels with flesh-coloured pixels), as well as graphic sexual situations. Examples include Ernie and the Muppets Take it All Off, a hack of a Sesame Street game that includes character nudity and masturbation; Nude Punch-Out!, hack of the classic Nintendo boxing game where player's opponents are disrobed; and Dick Kids, a hack of the McDonald's restaurant-themed "advergame" M.C. Kids (1992), whose child protagonists are rendered

212 naked and put into sexual situations with company mascot, Ronald McDonald.

Discriminatory hacks highlight and deride racial, ethnic and cultural differences, as exemplified by Super Amish Bros., a hack of Super Mario Bros, that gives Mario Amish facial hair and traditional clothing and replaces enemies with electrical appliances and automobiles. Examples such as Super Nazi Penis Cartel Freedom Fighters 3, a ROM hack of Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. 3 which self-proclaims to be the "most thorough, polished and impressive hack about bigotry and genitals you'll ever see" (Bad Hacks

2008), seem to celebrate offensiveness for shock and humour value.

The ROM hack examples come from source games released during the life cycle of the Nintendo Entertainment System, meaning they are generally 17 to 25 years old, well outside the gaming mainstream and often no longer saleable commodities. This temporal separation from the foci of today's gaming industry, as well as the small

audience of actual users of these kinds of mods, means the offensiveness modded into these games is not actively addressed by source game owners. Of course, integrating

offensive user-generated material into game modifications does not go unnoticed by industry developers, even if it there is no official reaction taken to it. Comments reported from a recent game developer conference exposed an industry phrase circulating as a lighthearted response to the public's phallic obsessions: "time to penis"

or TTP. For game developers, TTP marks the estimated "amount of time it will take children to make something rude out of a set of tools they've been given," noting that

"typically, that object is a penis" (Kelly 2009).

213 The TTP qualifier indicates that the majority of what constitutes offensive mods fall into this category of games hacked to include crude and inflammatory content, but with a childlike celebration of crudity that denies the seriousness of the offending content. This lack of seriousness in the offensive play of modders conforms to what

Sutton-Smith identifies as the rhetoric of play as frivolous activity. However, more than simply marking something negative or unwarranted, frivolity in this conception applies to "historical trickster figures and fools who were once the central and carnivalesque persons who enacted playful protest against the orders of the ordained world" (1997: 11).

For those who might write off such disgusting content as a signal of contemporary cultural decline, McGillis (2003:184) reminds us that youth culture's "delight in the impolite" is nothing new (see also Sherman and Weisskopf 1995). It marks a fascination with socially-regrettable functions of the human body, repressed in civilized society except for those moments of carnivalesque reclamations of nature and its basest bodily processes (see Bakhtin 1984). When exercised outside of the prescribed boundaries, erected to contain non-conventional behaviour in order to maintain convention (McGillis

2003: 185), carnivalesque expressions can obviously disrupt and contaminate dominant conceptions of cultural decency. Rushdy (1999) suggests such celebration of vileness can function as a "covert political statement of the people against oppressive hegemony"

(2). This transgression is frequently the case when youths delight in offensive material:

"They have learned that adults disapprove of anything that smacks of the smutty and scatological, and so they enjoy the fun of shocking both themselves / and those adults

214 who represent the staid and perhaps stodgy politeness, that wishes to keep itself clean, both bodily and mentally" (McGillis 2003: 185-186). However, theories of the carnivalesque that allow moments of the "gross" into the accepted order do so to provide release, pacifying whatever threats to the social order offensive expressions might have.

"To delight in the disgusting is one way of demonstrating freedom from control"

(McGillis 2003: 187), but this still frequently conforms to market forces. McGillis is non-committal on whether or not a culture of grossness and vulgarity provides genuine access to transgression (190).

Outside of socio-psychological theories of carnivalesque activity leaking out at inappropriate times, the motivations for offensive play are likely varied and none are absolute. Offensive play may be related to empowerment in creative play derived from being a cause of change that sparks response, even if it is negative response (Sutton-

Smith 1997: 75). Or, as some streams of psychoanalytic thought suggest, these types of mods might be expressions of the Freudian id, that frequently repressed part of our minds driven by instinctual impulse towards pleasure regardless of how scatological, scandalous, uncouth or violent those pleasures might be. Such expressions form a window through which these impulses are sublimated in ways that do not completely

erase the regulation on such things supplied by the super ego or the social structures that developed to distract the id (like those behind consumer capitalism). Ultimately, however, it is beyond the scope of this project to nail down why the majority of

disruptive mods take on an offensive facade.

215 More troubling are the hate mods, developed in absolute seriousness. Notably detailed by Nieborg (2004), hate mods are typically made by radically racist, sexist or homophobic individuals or organizations. The specific and sometimes organized politics makes these more "countercultural" than other offensive mods, but they are disruptive to source games nonetheless.

Disruptive Infringements: "Game 3.0" and the Case of LittleBigPlanet

Planet Earth. Or as the rest of the omniverse call it, the Orb of Dreams. The occupants of which spend so much time asleep and dreaming. Their vast imaginations humming away, charged with creative energy. Where does it all go? Up through a cerebral umbilical cord where it collects and melds with all the other dreamers' energy. And something wonderful happens - it forms a world, an ethereal dreamscape of adventure and possibilities, an abstract plain of beautiful wonderment, just waiting to be explored. And you can go there now. - narration over the opening movie of LittleBigPlanet (2008)

In terms of legal and financial consequences, user-generated content that infringes intellectual property rights is perhaps the more genuine concern for the digital media industry. In 2007, inspired by the success of websites like MySpace and

YouTube, Sony Computer Entertainment's President Phil Harrison used the term "Game

3.0" to describe the moving of the user-generated promises of "Web 2.0" into the gaming world, particularly to non-PC gaming consoles. Harrison's explanation of the label breaks down like this: Game 1.0 was marked by game consoles with changeable static game units (be they cartridges, tapes or disks); Game 2.0 was marked by the technology of networked connectivity which enabled online multiplayer and downloadable content;

and Game 3.0, forthcoming, will elevate gaming to new heights by "leveraging online

216 collaboration and user-generated content" and putting the "spotlight back on the consumer," whose creativity will "power the next decade of growth in our industry"

(Harrison quoted in Radd 2007). By late 2008, Nintendo of America's CEO was echoing this rhetoric, stating that user-generated content was not only the future of video games, but also the future of entertainment business in general (Lee 2008).

Such tactics of focusing control over user-generated and user-modified content for digital games (and entertainment in general) depend on closely managing the distribution of the content. As Methenitis (2008a) relays, "user created content isn't worth much to anyone unless it's distributed, and developers are realizing that integrating the means by which to share [user] work can be a critical point to developing a community around a game" (np). However, as stated previously, mods or gamer add­

ons, as derivative work generally reliant on corporate intellectual properties, almost never legally belong to the people making them, meaning unauthorized public distribution of mods can technically constitute copyright infringement (Methenitis

2008a; 2008b). At the same time, most mods are made using editing tools provided by the games' developers - so, at least implicitly, they want users to mod - and widespread

distribution among gamer communities is expected if mods are to truly provide the

added value Postigo (2003) and others suggest they contribute to games. Thus, the

distribution side of "Game 3.0" initiatives is frequently managed through game

developers hosting mod-sharing websites for users, a model popularized by Electronic

Arts with their ultra-successful, community-focused strategy with The Sims (Curlew

217 2004), or by platform stakeholders on their own networks (Valve with Steam; Microsoft with Xbox Live; Sony with PlayStation Network), where producers can use terms-of-use

agreements to manage such spaces. This keeps user contributions deemed appropriate in

circulation (or for sale, in some circumstances), while allowing stakeholders to moderate

away any disagreeable content (such as that which infringes copyright or is offensive).

Methenitis (2008a) calls this an "example of our digital reality stepping beyond the

theoretical basis that created copyright" (np), with the selective enforcement of property rights employed not to protect property (to which access is granted for modification), but

to protect the commodity appeal of user additions and the source product from the

influence of competing properties or the taint of material that might be considered

distasteful.

One of the most blatant examples of this "Game 3.0" ethos at work is Sony's

LittleBigPlanet, developed by UK game makers Media Molecule and released in late

2008 for the PlayStation 3. LittleBigPlanet (LBP) is a side-scrolling platformer in the vein of the classic Super Mario Bros, games of the 1980s - that is, it is a game where the playable character progresses through a level by running and jumping over obstacles, usually from left to right on the screen. What makes LBP significant is that while it

includes a substantial set of levels professionally developed by Media Molecule, it also

includes the ability for players to develop their own levels and post them online for

others to play. It is one of the first games developed for gaming consoles (and not the

PC) to invoke the pro-base, amateur-specifics model popularized by The Sims using the

218 networked connectivity of modem TV-attached consoles. Fairly user-friendly "point and click" tools are provided with the game which allow players to build, test and share levels regardless of whether or not they have any software programming or game design experience. The game is also accompanied by a philosophy of play as wondrous

experimentation and imaginative opportunity, noted in the ornate narration played over its opening, quoted above, and was launched with a marketing campaign that synergizes the same ideas. LBP is sold as an outlet to materialize "an ethereal dreamscape of adventure and possibilities." If you can dream it, it is possible to make it, then "meld" this fruit of your creative energy "with all the other dreamers' energy" by uploading your creation to the game's level databases, which can then be immediately "explored" by

others. The result is something that can boost the value of game that would otherwise be limited by confines of its professionally created content: "Like the game? Great, and guess what, new levels created by players like you are added everyday!" And by all

accounts, the initiative to harness user-generated input has been very successful for

Sony: Since LBP's launch, over two million user-created levels have been developed

(McElroy2010).

But the unveiling of Game 3.0 tactics has not, of course, been free from the

complications that crop up whenever the tools of cultural production and channels of

dissemination are shared with users. LBP's opulent intro narration does not say that the

"vast imagination" of players might be incompatible with international copyright or trademark law, or mention that Sony's revisions to its PlayStation Network terms-of-use

219 stipulations just as the game was being released take an increasingly commonplace approach to managing user creations. Along with standard clauses that allow the corporation's moderators to remove content deemed illegal or inappropriate came the language of exploiting the labour of creative users. As legal analyst Mark Methenitis

(2008a) explains:

[Under their revised terms of use] Sony can use user content without restriction to advertise. They can also 'commercially exploit' your creations without permission, and if they do benefit 'commercially' (read: monetarily) from your creations, they owe you nothing. You're also agreeing to abandon your moral rights to the work. Most importantly, you're not allowed to commercially benefit from your creation without their permission, (np)

Mario's Law and Sony's LittleBigContradiction

It would be less than accurate to say that the stance on LBP user levels is anything other than bi-polar. Confusion abounds when users are asked and encouraged to modify LBP. By creating levels in LBP, users are, to some degree, making derivative works that are technically and legally dependent on the source material from which their contributions are derived (Methenitis 2008a). The encouragement of players to build levels, access to tools to do so, and the hosting and distribution of UGC by Sony itself all offer at least an implicit "authorization for the user to create" content (Methenitis 2008a: np). The quagmire created by offering users the capacity to modify or supplement game content is this: people rarely stay within the boundaries erected to define proper use of any given creative tool. As a result, giving video game players the capacity to create

220 their own levels in LittleBigPlanet has resulted in those players using the stock of knowledge they have of the medium to recreate popular game elements of the past.

Among some enthusiasts in the gaming community, this phenomenon is known as

Mario's Law, which (rather unscientifically) states: "The first thing that anyone does when given a creation tool is to use it to remake something from some other source that they know - more specifically, the first level from Super Mario Bros." (Davis 2008: np).

Indeed, one of the first user-generated levels to emerge in LBP was a remake of the opening stage from Nintendo's classic game, the layout of which is burnt into the consciousness of any gamer from the 1980s. Further supporting the theories of Mario's

Law, users recreated, with striking detail, the first level of space shooter Gradius, complete with a scanned image of that game's space ship as controllable object

(Bettenhausen 2008). In the first few weeks after LBP was released, user-generated levels would poach design elements and other influences from Tetris, Pac-Man and The

Legend of Zelda. Other users produced levels that synchronized the playable character's movement on screen with the triggering of musical notes, so as a player progressed through the level a song would be played. In one instance, it was the theme music of the popular Final Fantasy digital games series, in others, it was Guns N Roses' song "Sweet

Child O' Mine" or Radiohead's "No Surprises" (Gerstmann 2008; Bettenhausen 2008).

Rinse and repeat with countless other pop culture properties, few of which belong to

Sony. To paraphrase games critic Jeff Gerstmann, one of these days some lawyer at

221 Sony is going to open his or her eyes and shout "Whoever came up with this user- generated content thing has some explaining to do" (Gerstmann 2008).

Sony's response has been to set up LittleBigWorkshop, complete with tutorials, items and info about how to create (proper) user-generated levels, as well as an attempt to satiate users' thirst for intertextual remediation of other game properties by allowing costumes or other items from certain Sony games to be used, for a small fee. Where

Mario, produced by rival first-party games console maker Nintendo, is taboo in any Sony property, other classic games characters, settings and narratives are not necessarily so.

Case in point are the series of user-levels for LBP called LittleBigContra that make a

"miraculously-faithful recreation" of the entire NES action game Contra (1988), released in early 2009 (Klepek 2009).

Game publisher Konami, owners of the Contra intellectual property, have not sought takedown of the LittleBigContra levels as of this writing, despite that they are a blatant, unlicensed violation of Konami's copyright and trademarks. This complacency exists, suggests games journalist Patrick Klepek, because both Konami and Media

Molecule "respect" and "support" the fan homage initiative. Further underscoring fans' desires to recreate or modify the past as UGC rather than develop original content, Sony has partnered, via licensing deals, with third-party intellectual property holders. This has led to official crossovers within LBP that make available character costumes from non-

Sony games series like Metal Gear and Assassin's Creed, as well as other popular media franchises, such as The Watchmen or Ghostbusters (Plunkett 2009b).

222 But this has not stemmed the flow of borrowed content that finds its way into

LBP via users who see a paradox between allowing Contra IP to be implicitly acceptable and Mario, Zelda or Halo IP to be prohibited. This now requires a constant level of monitoring and policing to keep legal departments of all associated producers happy and free from the disruptive counterplays of IP infringers. Yet this itself is not without its contention. Level creation in LBP is more accessible and easier to execute than many other games, but this does not necessarily mean making quality levels takes no time or effort on the part of creative users. Users claim to have spent weeks perfecting their stages before they upload them for others to experience. So it is no surprise that those who contributed hours making levels were upset when their levels were subject to what

Sony calls "moderation" - deletion without warning or explanation of disruptive counterplay output, like levels containing offensive material or that may infringe on the

copyright of others (Good 2008). This eliminates entire levels without the possibility of just removing infringing content, thus side-stepping the DMCA cease-and-desist warning process. Worst of all, once "moderated," a level and the work that went into it are gone for good - a process games journalist Owen Good (2008) likens to "summary deletion"

(np). One LBP user who had his level "moderated" away is quoted in Good asking:

"What's the point of having a community driven game if you're not going to let your

community do anything with it in an act to try and please everybody?" (np). Perhaps the ultimate eye-for-an-eye retribution against users who frequently violate copyright laws is

LBP's repurposing feature - Sony and Media Molecule have made it possible to import

223 interesting elements from someone else's user-created level into your own level. As

Good notes, such actions produce "a chilling effect on user-created content for the game that was supposed to set a new standard for it" (np).

Despite these bumps along the way, Sony's "play, create, share" ethos, beside which LBP was marketed, has proved not to be unique and marks what appears to be a resurgence of customizable games on internet-enabled gaming consoles, albeit borrowing heavily from the networked history of PC gaming. Within twenty months of release, LittleBigPlanet has been joined by console and handheld titles with advanced

level creation features such as LucasArts' Lego Indiana Jones 2 (2009), Nintendo's

WarioWare: DIY (2010) and Sony's own ModNation Racers (2010), as well as a portable version of LittleBigPlanet (2009). A full PS3 sequel, with even more possibilities for user-generated game elements, is scheduled to be released in early 2011.

Such releases - and the success that has thus far accompanied them - mark a shift away

from Schleiner's (2005) distinction between the more open strata of PC gaming spaces

and the traditionally more "closed source" spaces of console games. While these console

games may not be justifiable "open source" by any means, they are also no longer

completely closed due to their capacities for user participatory production and manipulation. However, as the moderation incidents described above suggest, they are

heavily controlled participatory spaces, marking another example of a move away from preventing user-generative input towards harnessing and containment of the same forces.

224 Similarly, 2008's Guitar Hero World Tour (GHWT) included an option with which users could compose their own songs, with Activision, the game's publisher, hosting the songs online for other players to enjoy. Activision estimated that 100 000 user generated songs would be available for play by the end of the 2008 - and, should user response to these songs be positive, the option of charging a monthly subscription fee to access them was something the company would consider (McWhertor 2008).

However, any direct method of generating revenue from user-created songs will likely be rendered legally contentious for Activision given the number of users that are not creating original compositions, but repurposing existing music, particularly that from classic video games. In the weeks after GHWT's fall 2008 release, digital game news sites reported countless tracks that recreate the theme music from such popular gaming franchises like Super Mario Bros., Legend ofZelda, Final Fantasy and Sonic the

Hedgehog were available among game's user-created selections. Many of these unsanctioned covers were removed by Activision's UGC moderators by mid November.

Yet, as one news blog suggested, it would not take much for users to "get creative" with song titles and fly under the radar of moderation. To paraphrase the blog post's author, calling your poached offering "The Sonic the Hedgehog Theme" is likely to result in a hasty deletion, but using "Baby Stole My Heart And Stashed It In Green Hill Zone"

(referring to the setting of Sonic's original adventure, a reference most gamers are sure to get) may allow your illegal tune to remain accessible (Plunkett 2008). Thus marks the political potential of disruptive counterplay as a shifting and elusive beast, no less hydra-

225 like (recalling Dyer-Witheford's metaphor) than the resistant actions of politically-

explicit, countercultural modders described in the following chapter.

On Unexpected Game Usages as Ritual (Disruption in Cultural Practice)

Apart from legal disruptions made possible in the counterplays described above,

it is important to acknowledge that there are disruptive ritual practices associated with

game culture and game modding that subvert proper or expected use stipulations in less

than insidious ways. This is made apparent by briefly exploring the cultural life of game mods.

The cultural life of game mods is, of course, best illustrated in the unexpected or non-traditional output of modders and those who play with digital game properties.

Bethesda Softworks, makers of the popular post-apocalyptic RPG Fallout 3 (2008)

anticipated many varied user interactions with their game as evidenced by their EULA, but it is unlikely they believed their product might become a medium for a marriage proposal. The significant other of one avid player had the Fallout 3 mod community build a game scenario in which a character resembling her proposes on bended knee to

the player (Good 2009a). The elaborate proposal mod took nearly three months to

develop and was reportedly successful in its goal.44

Similarly, Nintendo could hardly have predicted when releasing Super Mario

Bros, that its art assets and gameplay would be used in an elaborate job resignation

44In-game proposals might raise flags for some for their potential to be an example of the "Warcraft Widow" phenomena, where romantic partners of hardcore gamers are subjected to neglect in real world because of time spent in virtual world.

226 notice twenty-five years later. When game developer Jarrad Farbs announced his intention to leave employer 2K Australia to focus on independent game development in the summer of 2009, he did so not with a written letter of resignation but with a brief

Flash game built using assets and elements ripped from Nintendo's classic game (Fahey

2009). The resignation game, which Farbs posted online after presenting it to his bosses, has its player ending up in a familiar castle setting that concludes the first world of Super

Mario Bros., accompanied by the following message: "Thank you 2K Australia! You gave me a paycheck, an incredible project, and a world class team to learn from. But my princess is in another castle."

Another example includes the ritual of transformative elements in the play of children. Kids' play is often regulated and managed, very likely because it has the potential to be most free and non-rational. Grimes (2008) analyzes the safety measures in place in girl-focused, massively multi-player online games, like Mattel's Barbie Girls, that limit the ability for free communication between players - it is impossible to say anything that is at all upsetting or dissenting within the game space. However, kids find what Grimes calls "work-arounds" which allow subversive behaviours to flourish despite the game's protective technology: using words like "sect" and "bit" in place of sex and bitch. In Barbie Girls, where male characters are not an option, players have developed a culture in which boys are connoted by having female avatars dress in black (Grimes

2008).

227 These examples show that cultural practices and rituals frequently taken for granted in real life - such as marriage proposals, job resignations and subversive

children's play - pervade into player determination of game experiences via modding and can complicate the attempt to manage the use of game properties.

Outside of the digital realm, playing with game elements and properties has also flirted with ritualized cultural creation. Knitting patterns for infant-sized versions of the iconic green tunic and adventurer's cap of The Legend of Zelda's protagonist Link

circulate among gamer parents (Sliwinski 2009). Bead artisans sell custom fridge- magnet designs that not only represent modern day game characters as beaded magnets, but do so by re-imagining these characters to look as they might have if their source games had been released during the 1980s, 8-bit gaming era. Interestingly enough, and

connecting back into the legal disruptions above, the magnets are presented with a message asking people not to reproduce their custom designs, despite that they are based

on trademarked characters from copyrighted games.

Conclusion

Emphasizing that much of this project deals with articulation of different contexts

from different disciplinary angles, this chapter has worked to identify and interrogate moments of opposition and disruption between users and corporate producers within the

cultural politics attached to digital game modding. The question of whether digital games

can be oppositional objects, or used in subversive ways reiterates the importance of the focus

on contexts provided by the triangulation of differing perspectives: console video games,

228 emerging as consumer products in the 1970s, before the widespread adoption of cable television, modified the expected use patterns of television sets and rendered mute the ad- dependent model of TV broadcasting by overriding the normal network output with game content. To a certain degree, the introduction of digital games subverted the interests of advertisers and potentially disrupted audience attention metrics, disturbing the price of the audience commodity along the way. While corporate game structures that have evolved over the last thirty years have more than done their share to make up for loss of corporate power by television advertisers, identifying this oppositional possibility of unmodified games precludes the potential for the medium to be a conformist tool of dominant ideological structures, be they reflective of corporate control and ownership over pop cultural expressions, or the tenets of tasteful versus offensive material.

While recognizing that within a political economy perspective post-industrial capital quickly contains and removes the political potential of much modding activity through the boundaries of play described in previous chapters, I acknowledge here that this does not mean that a cultural studies or participatory culture approach that positions pop culture as a site of hegemonic struggle should be dismissed. The theory of "counterplay," taking cues from Galloway's (2006) notion of "countergaming" (109) and Hall's (1999b) notion of oppositional interpretation, allows for the possibility of user disruption of and resistance to dominant ideologies reflected in the cultural politics of modding. Examples of counterplay include not only the straightforward making of modifications that challenge the ideological norms of the digital games, such as anti-war and feminist mods (Schleiner 2005), but also

229 the indirectly (and often unintentionally) disruptive mods that poach and mash together intellectual property from all over pop culture spectrum without permission from IP owners,

as well as mods that change the ratings of certain games, particularly through the addition of profane or "adult" content - something which has the potential to disrupt a game's saleability as some major vendors will not carry games with the harshest ratings. Attempts from industry sources to contain this possibility for disruption is practiced through the

"Game 3.0" initiatives and the close monitoring of company-hosted distribution networks, strategies that extend new powers to the holders of such platforms (Sony, Microsoft, Valve).

However, the application of those powers appears to be selective, in terms of what is good for business, as the case of LittleBigContra UGC for LittleBigPlanet shows.

The next chapter aims to explore what exactly changes when explicit countercultural politics become the impetus to modify games and identify a different series of counterplays that take on expected media use and play patterns.

230 Chapter 7

CounterPlay as Counterculture: Modding Against the Grain

In order to strive for change, you first have to imagine it, and culture is the repository of the imagination.

- Stephen Duncombe, Cultural Resistance Reader (2002): 35

The previous chapter sketched out instances in which the creative play of game modification by users - the process I have deemed counterplay - disrupted expected play practices and corporate business models with the inclusion of offensive and/or IP

infringing game mods. This chapter expands counterplay to include more explicit, politically charged modifications, mods of resistance not to social expectations of good

taste or specific business operations, but to wider cultural ideologies. Here, I will

examine the intersections and moments of contact between resistant or counter- hegemonic activity manifest in three forms: first, the countercultural activity within

digital environments (electronic civil disobedience and hacktivism); second, political

expressions of opposition and resistance in (and with) popular culture (oppositional

de/re-coding and culture jamming); and third, oppositional or subversive incarnations

found in play and playing (symbolic inversion and anti-authoritarian play). All three

forms are present - to varying degrees according to specific examples - in the practices

of the explicitly political counterplay of digital games.

Unlike the counterplay mods discussed in Chapter Six, the mods described here

are less likely to be developed by individuals, instead being built by activist groups and

artist collectives. The activist actors described here use digital games to reify their

231 counter-cultural politics. They appropriate and manipulate what are often regarded as products of complacent consumer culture to engage with what they see as oppressive or unjust structures and beliefs that go unaddressed within contemporary society. Their goals are to develop outlets for alternatives on media platforms where alternative messages are relatively infrequent. As O'Brien and Szeman (2004) note, counter­

cultures are defined by their "contravention and contradiction of not just mainstream politics, but also the culture that produces these politics" (244).

Finally, the politics or political activism discussed do not necessarily reflect my political beliefs and are presented here because they make interesting case studies, not because I want to argue that they are true or right. A cultural studies approach to counter- hegemonic positions tends to latch on to and glorify moments of resistance to expressions of hegemony and dominant cultural ideology. This serves an important purpose in the critical understanding of culture and power structures that work within and against it but does not mean every moment of resistance discussed is personally

supported.

Digital Resistance: Electronic Civil Disobedience and Hacktivism

Activism, some of its practitioners would suggest, cannot be limited to political action in physical space. The space of the web very quickly gained its activists, or

"hacktivists," who claim their resistant practices against the dominant social order (or at least the orders structuring/regulating cyberspatial areas) is the result of "activism gone electric" (Jordan and Taylor 2004: 1). Such is the domain of electronic civil

232 disobedience and tactical media deployment, described in the work of Meikle (2002), the

Critical Art Ensemble (2001), Wark (2004), Nissenbaum (2004) and others, which identifies the ethos of resistance via breaking (into) the technology that organizes or drives media culture, communications network, financial system, national defence, etc.

Popular Culture as Oppositional Culture

Popular cultural forms are, of course, significant contributors to dominant hegemonic social structures, frequently embodying and circulating dominant ideologies, codes and values (Williams 2006; du Gay et al. 1997). However, the same forms can also be used to convey "emergent practices and meanings" within cultural spaces that may provide moments of opposition (Williams 2006: 140). That popular media forms can be used as sites of cultural opposition and political resistance has been suggested extensively within cultural studies, particularly within the sphere of music and music subcultures (Hebdige 1979; Frith 1981; Pratt 1990; Martinez 1997) and the world of subversive participatory culture (Jenkins 1995). However, as Martinez (1997: 271) notes, there is still "profound disagreement" from other disciplines of cultural criticism, notably that which conforms to the Frankfurt School philosophy that sees little redeeming value in pop culture and denies any ability for it to resist the "dominant hegemonic model" that produces it (see also Gunster 2004). While there is much valuable in the critical theory of the Frankfurt alumni, I argue there is more to be gained by recognizing the "convoluted maneuvers which make up relations between dominant and subordinate cultural discourse" than simply denying that a subordinate position is

233 even possible (Martinez 1997: 271). Being subaltern does not preclude powerlessness, at

least not in the domains of communication and culture (Nash 2001). The power of

appropriation and manipulation are never limited by the content of messages poached,

only limited by the conditions of symbolic communication itself. The diversity of

different forms of symbolic communication around the globe insinuates that it is a

fundamentally flexible set of procedures. The socially constructed structures, codes and

boundaries erected to contain, manage or prevent appropriation, manipulation and

symbolic inversion, or deny access to mainstream channels for circulation - as we have

seen throughout this project - are far from impenetrable.

During colonial eras, dominated peoples have used their culture as a point of

opposition, sometimes incorporating and transforming appropriated forms from

dominant culture to ridicule their oppressors (Hechter 1975; Mitchell and Feagin 1995).

In the post-industrial, neo-liberal Western world, critics of corporate capitalism identify

different kind of colonialism at work (Schiller 1989; 1995; Dyer-Witheford 1999;

Giroux 2004). But within such a model, the cultural forms of dominant cultural ideology

(commodified culture: pop music, cinema, digital games, etc.), are accepted by the

"dominated" masses as their own. Lady Gaga, Harry Potter, Guitar Hero and Grey's

Anatomy are not objects of a foreign invader's culture - they are part of the accepted

popular culture of the general Western public.45 Accepting this - and remembering from

the tenets of participatory culture that how such texts are used by the public cannot be

45 From a Canadian nationalist perspective, the CRTC might argue otherwise...

234 predetermined - it is not a huge conceptual leap to accept that these forms of culture might also be taken up and turned into markers of opposition. Using pop culture against itself, like using local culture to express opposition to encroaching domination, can be

seen as a countercultural act. Nowhere is this more clear than in the practices of culture jamming.

Culture Jamming

Culture jamming, epitomized in the critical guerrilla art movement of New

York's Guerrilla Girls and the modifications of advertising spaces by San Francisco's

Billboard Liberation Front, uses the corporate media's channels of communication

against the messages and ideologies that frequently circulate therein. Essentially, the products of culture jamming ("jams") are politicized mods, which conform to my earlier

definitions - they can be either mods of conceptual influence or actual form.46

As a concept, culture jamming is said to be linked to the beliefs of radical thinkers like Guy Debord and the European Situationist International (SI) movement of the 1950s and 1960s, of which Debord was an integral member (Klein 2000). The SI

saw revolutionary potential in the piercing of the "veil of illusion" or "spectacle" of

ideologically-charged and carefully-controlled communications that envelopes

contemporary capitalist society and the turning of the fabric of that spectacle in upon

itself. They called such an action detournement, the politicized potential of having an

46 Jenkins has been reluctant to include overtly political culture jamming into his conception of participatory culture, epitomized by the creative work of media fans.

235 "image, message or artifact lifted out of its context to create a new meaning" (Klein

2000: 282).

The Guerrilla Girls' famous attack on institutionalized gender discrimination in the art world is a key example. Asking, "Do women have to be naked to get into the

Met?" the Guerrilla Girls took on the modem art collection of New York's Metropolitan

Museum because (after conducting what they called a "weenie count") they discovered only five percent of the artists featured were women, but nearly all the nudes represented were of the female form. They designed a critical poster noting this discrepancy that would eventually be featured on public transit ad spaces, modding French painter Jean

Auguste Dominique Ingres' Grande Odalisque, which originally featured a nude chambermaid looking over her shoulder with mute impassiveness towards the painting's observer, holding an embroidered fan. The Guerrilla Girls removed the painting's background, added a gorilla mask to the nude figure, and obscured the detail in the fan she holds, making it look noticeably phallic. The "suggestiveness" of their modification soon came to the attention of the New York City transit authorities, who removed the messages from their buses (see Guerrilla Girls 2005; Rutherford 2000: 172).

Other key examples include the "subvertising" campaigns of Vancouver's

Adbusters Media Foundation, whose Adbusters magazine features modifications of familiar Camel cigarettes commercials (where their Joe Camel spokestoon becomes Joe

236 Grande Odalisque (1814) by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Image is in the public domain worldwide.

0o women hove to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?

less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% ^ Jr of the nudes are female.

GUERHLIA GIRLS {BHSLHM BFTOt MT WOf.Ul ^ » V V ^ 3

The feminist modification of Grande Odalisque. Image © 1989 Guerrilla Girls. See Guerrilla Girls (2005).

Chemo, dying of cancer) and mash-ups of Calvin Klein fragrance and fashion ads (where a hypermasculine model is shown staring into his CK underwear, questioning his genital fortitude under the headline of "Obsession"). These modifications circulate as socially- conscious critiques of the cultural lifestyles endorsed by the source products.

237 Such culture jamming and "adbusting" practices are not new. Klein (2000)

identifies explicit examples dating back to the 1930s. Humorous attacks on Depression-

era advertisements and challenging the ads' promises of happiness through consumption

made up much of the content of The Ballyhoo magazine, what Klein calls the

"Depression-era Adbusters" (304). But she also states that the roots of culture jamming

are nearly impossible to pinpoint, since "the practice is... a cutting and pasting of

graffiti, modern art, do-it-yourself punk philosophy and age-old pranksterism" (282).

While clearly a mature practice, Klein (2000) identifies a resurgence or "rebirth" of

culture jamming in the late twentieth century was made possible by accessible digital

technology and global networking, which allowed for the sharing of resources, materials

and strategies within and across activist communities (285). Use of scanners and

Photoshop allowed "jammed" outputs to "mesh with their targets, borrowing visual

legitimacy from advertising itself (285).

Perhaps indicative of the playful nature the modification (and "pranksterism"

involved), the forces that animate culture jamming are also identified in play theory,

especially in the play forms that reject or resist dominant authority.

Resistant Playing and Symbolic Inversion

Within play theory, the examples of culture jamming outlined here are examples

of symbolic inversions. Babcock (1978: 14) describes symbolic inversions as acts of

"expressive behavior which inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or in some fashion presents

an alternative to commonly held cultural codes, values and norms be they linguistic,

238 literary or artistic, or social and political" (see also McLaren 1985). Such behaviours are

common in subcultural communities and countercultural groups - including those that

surround games, sports and other play forms. For instance, Beal (1998) examines the

symbolic inversion of skateboarders who in the early 1990s denounced the increasing

encroachment of commercial culture into their hobby and the lifestyle that surrounds it.

Skaters in this study rejected or defaced (even literally "inverted") commodified

examples of skater culture (clothes, board decals, etc.), marketed to them (212-213).

They also inverted the norms of sport and organized competition, with its focus on

scenario outcomes (winning or losing) by emphasizing cooperative support in learning

and executing tricks for all participants during events organized by outside forces as

competitions. This kind of resistant playing also exists when marginalized groups

subvert expected rules or forms of play to express opposition to something - for

example, to the high costs that working class people must pay to participate in organized

sport (see Gruneau 1983).

That play can be disruptive, resistant and a factor in symbolic inversion of social norms should not be surprising. Certain conceptions of play, including those of Caillois

(1961) in terms of paidia play, are fundamentally bound to elements like freedom of movement, infinite variability and the absence of static rules and centres of authority,

even when exercised in a playspace with physical constraints. These same elements, of

course, are often incongruent with economic, cultural and political structures of society

as they have been developed and accepted. The anarchy of "free" play - as reified

239 imagination - does not compute in rule-based capitalist oligopolies that make up the developed world. Indeed, play, as theorized by Huizinga (1955), is uninterested in material things and resistant to profit foci (13). Researchers like McLaren (1985) have detailed how children can use this type of play behaviour to resist the rule systems imposed by adult authorities in their lives - much to the frustration of parents trying to

impose a defined bedtime, bathing or diet regime.

With these considerations in mind, I would like to position the politicized

counterplay of digital games as embodying elements of each of the above oppositional forms. The politicized modification of games frequently involves hacking, and the ethos that sees countercultural potential in using the tactics of electronic civil disobedience.

Politicized mods are also examples of culture jamming and symbolic inversion -

Situationist detournements - that use pop culture against itself. Finally, they resist, playfully, expected behaviour patterns and hegemonic norms.

Resistant Digital Games

That digital games might have the potential to serve "a function beyond entertainment" by being "elevated to the level of political expression" is incongruent with much of the mainstream reporting on the medium (Jones 2007: 2). Games, as we

are frequently told, are expressions of junk culture, colossal wastes of time, or psychologically damaging (Newman 2008). But these denunciations ignore that games and game-derived cultural forms are being built and rebuilt with strong political messages attached, including counter-hegemonic or resistant messages. This political

240 counterplay deserves to be differentiated from the less explicit political experiments of disruptions of dominant culture covered in Chapter Six since politicized activities of modders who include offensive content into games or infringe on corporate copyright are often not motivated by countercultural or oppositional political agendas. Whereas the counterplay examples of Chapter Six were motivated by adolescent thrills of being perversely offensive - putting dicks where dicks do not belong - more explicitly political counterplay is (in many cases) informed by counter-hegemonic activist politics attached to issues of social justice, including but not limited to the rights of women and minorities, the antiwar movement, environmental protection, animal rights, and general denunciations of authoritarianism and contemporary capitalist society.

Such explicit politics have started to be identified and analyzed within the culture of digital games in recent years (Poremba 2003; Jones 2007). Productive digital game players do not simply experience a game as an isolated play object or mediated event.

Instead, they often use it "as a medium in and of itself' through which they express

"player agency" (Poremba 2003: np). Opportunities for player agency afforded by digital technology provide players with the ability to "reshape" or "recontextualize" the message of a game medium in multiple ways - in terms of narrative, gameplay and cultural position (Poremba 2003). And in the hands of productive players keen on expressing an explicit set of politics, the medium becomes a political platform. Jones

(2007) suggests that "videogame technologies offer a unique form of rhetoric that opens up new avenues for political and social activism," resulting in what he calls "videogame

241 activism" or "the intentional use of videogame technology to bring about social or political change" (2). Because procedural rhetoric of ludic media differs from that of visual or written media (see Bogost 2008), Jones believes games can have a "Trojan horse" quality as tools of activism: their "gameness" might appeal to those who might not otherwise entertain engagement with the political issues explored. Finally, given their adaptability as digital artifacts, with game engine foundations (pro-bases) that sustain program functionality even after significant user manipulation, digital games fulfil the "tactical" quality Jones suggests is required for (media-centred) activism (4).

From these distinguishing qualities, Jones (2007) develops three modes through which videogame activism can be expressed: original design; engine appropriation; and machinima animations.

Original design constitutes those games built from scratch by activist developers, often funded by non-profit organizations, educational institutions or interest groups to relay a political message via gameplay (4). This mode is embodied by the Serious

Games Movement - though it suffers from limited exposure. Original activist games, be they counter to dominant cultural ideologies or merely politicized playspaces, are hardly new. Against the social construct that necessitates the equation of female beauty with slender bodies, games like "Feed the Super Model" appeared on official Riot Grrrl homepage nearly fifteen years ago (Klein 2000: 289).

Engine appropriation as videogame activism is reliant on on-medium mods of actual form, most usually commercially available games, but not necessarily so (Jones

242 2007: 5). Jones suggests these activist mods are more able to reach wide audiences than original design games because they modify already-established game forms, using game engines that offer the look and "richness of commercial games" played by general consumers, thus avoiding the often dated visuals of serious games and the "prohibitive costs of original design" (6).

Finally, the activist use of videogames is perhaps most apparent in machinima, the extreme form of modding that uses game engines' graphics-rendering capabilities to build animations (see the definition offered on page 189).

These categories are helpful but not without their problems. Where do in-game protests fit? Online virtual worlds have been used as sites of protest and political assembly in response to current events for several years now (Wadham 2003).

Nevertheless, examples of each kind of videogame activism, attached to the activist forms identified above that most inform their constitution, are detailed in what follows.

Engine Appropriation /Hacking: Velvet-Strike and Tiny Signs of Hope

In the immediate wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, there was a proliferation of protest games released online, "some allowing you to kill, maim and generally terrorize Osama bin Laden and other terrorist representations, some providing critical commentary on US foreign policy" (Poremba 2003: np). While most were simple original designs, many were modifications of existing games, especially FPS games like

47 Jones (2007) mentions open source, non-commercial game engines that circulate for engine appropriation purposes.

243 Quake, Unreal and Battlefield 1942. Later, modders transposed the rhetoric, locales and armaments of the U.S.A.'s War on Terror and its campaign in Iraq into such games, creating cultural reflections on the conflict much more quickly than other cultural industries (Poremba 2003).

Cindy Poremba (2003) detailed two important examples of videogame activism that she positions as expressions and validations of player agency in her MA work at

Simon Fraser University: Velvet-Strike and Tiny Signs of Hope. The former, developed by web artists Brody Condon, Joan Leandre and Anne-Marie Schleiner, consisted of a series of anti-war themed visualizations that were imported into the popular, online multiplayer war game Counter-Strike, itself a mod of Half-Life (Schleiner et al. 2002).

Velvet-Strike allowed players to insert a counter-narrative of anti-violence into the game via Counter-Strike's "counterspray" graffiti patch, with which players could spray paint in-game surfaces with personalized messages (see Poremba 2003). Poremba relays that the Velvet-Strike message is not only communicated with the anti-war visualizations

4J»

Screenshot of a Velvet-Strike counterspray: it Close up of another counterspray: "We are all Reads "Hostages in Military Fantasy." Image

244 themselves, but also with an accompanying website that features a manifesto, downloads and instructions for making further countersprays, as well as a gallery of both supportive and inflammatory comments from players. She suggests that sharing the activist- generated elements provided by Velvet-Strike's creators, along with the public display of the criticism received from players not interested in seeing an anti-war message in their violent war game, helps "disrupt the standard game experience [the artists'] oppose" and reap the esteem of other activists/artists "by incurring the disapproval of the

'establishment' and the non-reflective player/modder" (Poremba 2003: np).

Similarly, Poremba outlines the efforts of the (now apparently defunct) anti-war group "downloadpeace," who responded to the unprovoked invasion of Iraq in 2003 by releasing an anti-war poster collection entitled "Tiny Signs of Hope" for The Sims. The posters, literally "tiny" versions of real-life protest iconography, designs and slogans used by current and past incarnations of the anti-war movement, could be used to decorate the virtual homes of Sims characters.

Combining hacking and culture jamming elements with engine appropriation, one gay programmer of the mid-1990s PC game SimCopter, disillusioned by the overabundance of heterosexual affection (and lack of anything remotely homosocial) being coded into the game, hacked the game to allow for representations of over-the-top same-sex affection (Silberman 1996). The programmer, who was eventually fired for his

"insertion of unauthorized content" into the game, later perfected his activist culture jamming in his current role as one half of the jamming duo the Yes Men, known for

245 posing as representatives of large corporations like Dow Chemical or institutions like the

World Trade Organization, then publicly apologizing for social and environmental ills associated with them.

Original Design / Culture Jamming: Greenpeace, PETA and the Politics of Institutional Videogame Activism

Videogame activism, if we are to accept Jones' definition, uses game technology to communicate activist messages, to express an explicit politics. As the Velvet Strike and SimCopter examples above have shown, hacking or modding existing games, in the sense of altering their actual form, is a significant factor in such a process. But my treatment of modding or playing with digital games in this project has not been limited to alterations of actual game form. Mods of conceptual influence can also fall under the umbrella of videogame activism, as can examples of action that not only use game technology to express a political stance but target digital games themselves. Recent digital game-related action campaigns launched by environmental activist group

Greenpeace and animal rights advocates PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of

Animals) provide perfect examples of such instances.

Digital gaming, of course, has never been the "greenest" of hobbies. It is a pop cultural practice completely dependent on continuous electricity consumption, with current generation gaming devices tallying significant power consumption numbers while in use. Like other mass-produced consumer electronics, digital game hardware depends on metals like coltan, tungsten and gold which are often extracted with dubious

246 environmental effects, and in certain regions with geo-political turmoil. Coltan, whose

derivative tantalum is a staple in game consoles, is regarded as a conflict mineral, the

mining and sale of which has financed ongoing political violence in central Africa for

decades (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009).48 The games industry has also, for nearly

forty years, relied heavily on the use of chemical plastics to make controller input

devices, console hardware and media storage cases in moulded shapes that render them

impossible to process in conventional municipal recycling programs. In fact, Newsweek

magazine's recent ranking of the 500 largest corporations in the United States based on

their environmental friendliness placed major gaming industry player Activision behind

oil producers ExxonMobil, and no games-related company were among the top 200

greenest, according to the methodology used (Newsweek 2009). Finally, the gaming

industry has structured itself into a post-Fordist paradigm in which continuous

incremental innovation has contributed to planned obsolescence of gaming platforms,

fueled by market ideology that compels a "rampant drive for more megahertz, more

RAM, more resolution and the rapid turn around and replacement of out-dated systems"

(Downing 2004: 9). Within this paradigm, the current "hardware lifecycle" of a gaming

console generation is four to six years (Kerr 2006), meaning every half-decade or so, a

new series of gizmos on which games can be played is released, relegating the old hardware to the sidelines, and eventually, in many instances, to the nearest landfill. Like

48 Industry major players like Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo now have corporate social responsibility policies that aim to keep conflict minerals out of their chains of production, but still admit that it is "very hard to reliably trace metals to mine of origin and verify that they are conflict mineral free" (Microsoft, quoted in Crecente 2010: np).

247 countless other consumer electronics products, home gaming consoles, handhelds and

PC gaming rigs contain materials deemed environmentally dangerous and undesirable for general landfill sites. The fear is that lead, mercury, PVC plastic residues and other harmful contaminants can leach into soil and local water supplies. As such, gaming devices no doubt make up their fair share of the e-waste crisis, an environmental problem caused by developed Western world and often dumped upon developing Asian countries that are sent waste for disposal (Dowdall 2009).

To address the precarious role gaming technologies play in what they categorize as today's environmental crisis, Greenpeace released a series of awareness-raising videos online in the summer of 2009, targeting gamers. Perhaps unique as examples of

"appropriative" videogame activism, Greenpeace's efforts did not feature mods of game elements or conceptual influence, but instead videos that incorporated mods of gaming hardware to express their criticisms of its manufacturers. Sony, Microsoft and

Nintendo are all targeted by Greenpeace individually, with each video featuring the dissected innards and deconstructed shells of gaming hardware formed into an anthropomorphized face, animated to speak to gamers about the unneeded environmentally harmful elements included in them. Presented as appearing on a fictional interview talk show called Scrap Talk, and hacking and wheezing as if sickened

49 Videos for all three consoles are available at http://kotaku.com/5318542/greenpeace-turns-ps3-wii-360- into-spokesmen-against-toxicity-in-consoles. See also http://www.greenpeace.org/international/clashoftheconsoles.

248 by the "poisons" that constitute their being, the dissected spokesconsoles regurgitate the

official public relations rhetoric from each company about their commitments to the

environment. After they cough and "hack" themselves to pieces, the interviewer pipes in

that (in the case of Nintendo's Wii) the console contains "PVC plastics, brominated

flame retardants and phthalates," continuing (over pictures of e-waste dumps in the

developing world) that "once all that is in the environment, it takes more than an Italian

plumber to put it right" (referring to Mario, Nintendo's iconic mascot). The video

concludes with a call for gamers to "tell Nintendo that it's game over for toxics."

PETA's conceptual modification of the Cooking The cover image of an official Cooking Mama Mama theme. Image © 2009 PETA. game for Wii. Image © 2007 Cooking Mama Ltd.

PETA's attempt at videogame activism more closely conforms to serious games

initiative in that their "protest" game, featured on their website, was built from scratch using Macromedia Flash, with no commercial game engine or game assets appropriation.

However, their game, entitled Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals, is a conceptual mod of (and grotesque parody of) the popular Cooking Mama series, published by Majesco

249 Entertainment. The source game is a cooking simulator aimed at children, in which players follow "Mama's" instructions to prepare different kinds of food in a kitchen setting.

PETA's game took aim at what they feel is Cooking Mama's failure to address conditions and treatment of animals that appear in the official game only as already- processed cuts of meat - excising the act of slaughter from the game. Not wanting to glaze over for children what they see as the bloody reality of an animal-based food culture, PETA's mod of Cooking Mama walks players through preparations for a traditional Thanksgiving turkey dinner. Players must pluck the turkey, lop off its head and remove (though "tear out" is probably a more appropriate descriptor here) internal organs - all of which is gruesomely depicted, despite being rendered in Cooking Mama's

"cutesy" and colourful graphical style. In line with PETA's mandate, the game promotes a vegetarian lifestyle; an alternative "tofu-rky" mode is unlocked with completion of game, along with links to information about and graphic visuals of the poor conditions of

some corporate turkey farms.

Engine Appropriation /Hacking: SuperKidFighter - "How to Pervert GameBoy"

The Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) have carved out a space in the digital resistance movement that champions their calls for "electronic civil disobedience" and the means of

"tactical media" engagement that facilitates it. It is not surprising that the modding of digital games can be a kind of tactical media if tactical media is defined as the

250 critical usage and theorization of media practices that draw on all forms of old and new, both lucid and soph­ isticated media, for achieving a variety of specific non­ commercial goals and pushing all kinds of potentially subversive political issues (CAE 2001: 5, quoting Dutch cultural group Next 5 Minutes)

The tactical use of digital games against dominant cultural ideologies (and social authorities in general) is advocated for and was attempted by the CAE in conjunction with the Carbon Defense League (CDL) in the final years of the last century as a way to include "children as tactical media participants" (CAE 2001: 135).

After claiming that the structure of education in advanced capitalist society

"functions to block any conduit that could allow / the individual to flow in directions other than those approved of by dominant culture" (135-136), the unnamed CAE authors suggest critical discourse with children socialized into such a structure is particularly challenging. However, "video games," they contend, "provide a good starting point" for critical engagement since "children are already socialized to the form... no education is needed" (143) and "distribution possibilities come prepackaged" (144).

The CAE writers go on to provide a "how-to" guide for hacking Nintendo Game

Boy cartridges to make resistant games on the platform, then distribute them to kids, using their modified creation SuperKidFighter (SFK) as a model. SFK is said to be designed to introduce children to "anti-authoritarian" subject matter (such as mature sexual content, tactics for police evasion, etc.). However, the hack's "how-to" instructions are opaque and technical, and the assisting diagrams featured are poorly rendered and blurry in the CAE's publication, making the attempt at resistant modding

251 humorously bad and nearly impossible to execute successfully. Ultimately, the SFK example comes off as a misguided attempt to resist against authority using the media of the dominant culture.

Ironically, mods made by kids and teenagers (both when CAE was drafting its

GameBoy initiative and now) are far less complicated to execute, far more accessible and wide reaching, and in some cases far more subversive than CAE/CDL's laughably awkward attempts to bring counter-hegemonic tactical media messages to children with

SKF.

Machinima: The French Democracy

The French Democracy (TFD) is a short machinima film created in response to the mainstream media's coverage of riots and acts of conscious civil disobedience (Les emeutes de banlieues) that erupted in the Clichy-sous-Bois suburb of Paris, France in the fall of 2005.50 The umest started in response to the deaths of two youths of immigrant descent who were electrocuted while trying to avoid police in a part of city known for police harassment of poor and non-white citizens. This served as a breaking point for the poor and mostly immigrant North African communities of Clichy-sous-Bois, some of whom faced systematic discrimination on a daily basis in traditionalist French society.

The umest spread throughout the city and persisted for weeks after this triggering event, leaving millions of Euros of property damage (mostly torched cars) in its wake and

The French Democracy can be viewed at http://movies/lionhead/com/movie/11520.

252 resulting in France declaring a state of emergency in Paris that lasted into January 2006

(see Winter 2005).

Upset that the news media were not addressing systematic causes that led to the eruption of riots, Alex Chan, a young Parisian of Chinese heritage, used Activision's The

Movies, a film-studio simulation game for PC/Mac to build TFD. The film was an overview of three immigrant teens' experience with anti-immigrant prejudice, police suspicion and unemployment, and an exploration of the forces and feelings that might lead such individuals to riot against the culture that accepts them on paper, but not in lived reality.

TFD's quality, as well as its timely and controversial subject matter, drew significant media attention in 2005-6, and a smattering of academic analysis later

(Sotamaa 2007a; Lowood 2008; etc.). Digital games, for so long scorned as detrimental to young people, including being labeled as one of the many barriers keeping youth from civic and political engagement (U.S. President Barack Obama's calls to political action frequently include phrases such as "It's time to put down the Xbox") were, if briefly, catapulted into the spotlight via their usage as tool of critical, political expression, and the speed at which they could relay that expression. Jones (2007) notes that while activist filmmaking is nothing new, the use of machinima here allowed TFD to be completed and accessible online at The Movies official website only days after the rioting ended (13-

14).

253 Henry Lowood (2008) suggests that TFD's creation "shows us that community players - players who create and circulate game-based performances within communities of game players - can contribute to public discourse about current events" (165). Chan, interviewed by MTV after the mainstream press pounced on TFD shortly after its release, stated, "[TJhrough these tools you can get some more spontaneous reaction or reflection, not from mass media, but from a simple citizen like me" (quoted in Lowood

2008: 167).51 But no matter how positively Lowood, Jones and others play up the political potential of TFD and how it opened up game-based expression to critical

"public discourse," it must be identified as an exception to the norm. A founder of a

French machinima website, quoted in Lowood saying, "[T]here has never been a machinima with such a clear and prominent political message" as TFD (167) is just as accurate now as he was in 2005. As Lowood himself identifies, there is a danger in

"overvaluing" the "more serious forms of activity" as the primary point of justification for interest in machinima and other modding practices (168).

The viability of actual political change resulting from such countercultural modification is suspect to many, myself included. While Naomi Klein (2000) positions culture jammers as "writing theory on the streets" and "literally deconstructing corporate culture with a waterproof magic market and a bucket of wheatpaste" (284), she herself details how the process is frequently neutered or co-opted by commercial interests it

1 Jones sees the mainstream media's extensive coverage of The French Democracy as an example of Jenkins' convergence culture, where traditional media structures help publicize grassroots expression (Jones 2007: x; see also Jenkins 2006).

254 aims to critique (296-301). Co-optation aside, there are those that believe that reaching the consciousness of the "mainstream public" with culture jamming of any sort is frequently an unsuccessful endeavour. Most genuinely subversive messages, suggests

Rutherford (2000), circulate "only on the fringes of society: [on] posters on the street... in little magazines and university classrooms, on a few websites, and sometimes in art galleries. Otherwise [they] are lost in the profusion of other messages that bombarfd] the population daily" (173). To Rutherford (2000), culture jamming is destined only ever to be a "marginal phenomenon" and an "interesting diversion," but never realistically "a tool of significant resistance" (173). Other critiques are more blunt in their analysis of culture jamming and countercultural resistance in general: Heath and Potter (2004) say simply that it "doesn't work" (2).

Conclusion

Examples of out-of-bounds play, or counterplay, which manifest as disruptions or resistances against the attempts to manage or regulate user modification, work to derail or change boundaries of play erected, but there is no apparent evidence that the latter

(politicized resistance) is any more effective in changing producer/consumer relations, or any wider social contentions, for the better. The former (counterplay of disruption) is more widespread, less explicitly politicized but still imbued with cultural politics, and perhaps more effective as a platform of change, at least at the microcosmic level of producer/consumer relations.

255 If nothing else, how people are playing with digital games in political ways should work to allow games to graduate beyond the "cultural legacy of being about fun or the plaything of children," at least when used as tools of activism or counterplay. As

Jones (2007) conveys, "videogames have to gradually carve out a space within mainstream media where they are seen as legitimate modes of expression for social and political commentary" (10). The examples described here are an attempt to do so.

256 Conclusion

Poachers, Puppets and Property Rights: Redefining the Role of the User of Digital New Media

Bart: So Dean Martin would show up at the last minute and do everything in just one take? Homer: That's right. Bart: But Wikipedia said he was "passionate about rehearsal." Homer. Don't you worry about Wikipedia. We'll change it when we get home. We'll change a lot of things. - from The Simpsons episode "Apocalypse Cow" (2008)

Salen and Zimmerman (2005), addressing how players commonly reauthor the conventions of playing games, state, "Players break rules: this is a simple fact. But instead of viewing this behavior as negative, destructive cheating, we see it as one of the most fascinating and creative aspects of play" (15). That fascination needs to be expanded beyond play to culture in general, and needs to be expanded beyond rules to the bits and pieces of games themselves and expanded to include the cultural politics such a "simple fact" stirs up. These are things this project has worked at fulfilling.

At the culmination of this analysis, it is important to recall the disparity between the original definition of modification and its contemporary meaning, as outlined in the project's introduction. Whereas the early use of "to modify" in English meant "To limit, restrain, keep within bounds" (OED 1978: 576), our more commonplace understanding of the concept has it meaning to "make partial changes in; to change (an object) in respect to some of its qualities; to alter or vary without radical transformation" (576).

However, that the definition of "modify" has been modified, or subjected to "partial

257 changes... in respect to some of its qualities" over the years should not be shocking

given my positioning of modification as a regular/normative cultural practice in the preceding pages. The concept of modification is present in the forces that animate the

evolution of the cultural construct of language just as they are in the forces that animate the constant reimagining of cultural narratives, forms and practices, including (digital)

games and the "playing with" them.

What is startling, given the continuous presence and ubiquity of cultural modification are the methods and tactics used by certain centres of cultural authority and the owners of certain mass cultural forms to stop, contain, control or even commodify the practices and output of those who modify the world around them. If this project has done nothing else, it has suggested that these methods and practices have reconfigured the role of the user/consumer within their constructed relationship with professional and

for-profit cultural producers, at least in the context of modification of digital media.

The catalyzing forces behind these reconfigurations are many - there is no simple hierarchy between them which identifies one influential force or cause over another.

That said, recognizing that access to capable means of cultural production via the proliferation of digital technologies (like Prometheus' theft of fire) works to enhance and

accelerate participatory practices already established in niche media fan circles before the rise of the digital has provided a functional base for this project's analysis. However,

it is important to recognize that such participatory practices, embodying the qualities of folk culture, were never absent from do-it-yourself practices that have persisted

258 alongside the mainstream one-way flow of culture, bubbling to the surface every so often, when fashionable.

What is unique with digital modification is the possibility for actual user participation in the wake of decades of promised but underwhelming consumer interactivity. The small but loud steps of definitive choice, control and impact on a new mediascape taken by modders counterbalance the more popular but illusory conception of choice/control offered with much of contemporary mainstream media (which includes individual customization of products, increased consumer selection with hundreds of media channels to choose from, etc.).

As stressed in the previous pages, the participatory choices of users who modify are not always legal, not always in good taste, but not free from exploitative grasp of traditional producers, despite the fact that user mods might be more harmful than beneficial to their bottom line. Thus, there exists the ongoing, unofficial (and certainly lopsided) negotiations between producers and consumers that work to define what role in contemporary cultural production is acceptable for the latter. The history of cultural practice, of course, complicates any negotiated agreement, imposed regulation or user habits fostered in these cultural politics; each runs the risk of being "played with" by each new generation of end users.

As the role of the (new) media user has changed in the last generation, so will it keep changing, and so must we who aim to analyze and understand these changes be willing to transform as well (in line with Hall's conception of cultural studies as a

259 discipline never to be pinned down because what is under examination is always in flux).

It is, of course, important to recognize that the role of the user will continue to be reformulated beyond the scope of the interesting cultural practices and outputs described here. If a new phase in user/consumer (citizen) relationship with traditional centres of cultural production has started, with new power dynamics, new expectations and new potential for both resistance and exploitation, we must recognize the tensions on all sides will only lead to further reconfiguration, complicated by further technological development, new social agents and cultural practices, as well as state policy initiatives unforeseen in this project.

What the Future Holds

Indeed, the next wave of users who "play with" the artifacts of digital culture are already at play. There are already practices, emerging over the period this project was composed, that do not get covered here and need to be recognized as future sites of study.

The headfirst plunge into digital gaming by Apple, with its iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad tablet computer becoming viable platforms for game applications, developed by a spectrum of creators ranging from major publishers like Electronic Arts, THQ and

Konami to amateur programmers working out of their apartments, has shown the potential to be a thorn in the side of traditional structures of producer-consumer game relations. Apple's reliance on mandatory digital distribution for game delivery

(eliminating retail), and a pricing structure that challenges the higher-per-unit price

260 points of handheld Nintendo and Sony games (sometimes for the same exact game) has forced the Japanese giants to take notice. The newest incarnations of Nintendo DS (DSi) and PlayStation Portable (PSP Go), both released in 2009, feature the capacity to play download-only games, provided by both established major publishers and emergent programmers or start ups - increasing, if nothing else, the number of potential voices heard on mainstream gaming platforms. Also, the massive number of games in Apple's app store, added over a short period, has allowed a few "disruptive" or "subversive" games to slip into the marketplace, if only temporarily. These include games that challenge norms of good taste such as a game application called Baby Shaker, which features a crying infant that can only be silenced by shaking the iPhone (Good 2009b), and unauthorized mods of conceptual influence, such as a ripoff of Nintendo's Duck

Hunt designed for iPhone, which Nintendo succeeded in having removed from Apple's store (McElroy 2009).

Alternatively, while the gaming industry has benefited with both financial returns and symbolic capital by allowing, to various degrees, their games to be targets of user- productive practices, millions of dollars are still being invested to develop new ways to

"lock down" games. Contentions surrounding the legal liability over the disruptive, offensive or resistant content frequently imported into games by users, along with the industry scourge of "piracy" (or rather, game copying and sharing), and the heated debate over "used game" sales and their effect on developer/publisher returns have resulted in plans for new avenues of game delivery to consumers. One of the most

261 prominent avenues in development, currently titled OnLive, removes all potential player access to a game's code by forcing a geographic separation between players and the actual game. The technology behind OnLive introduces an altered version of the broadcast model of media distribution into gaming spaces. OnLive plans to set up several distributed hubs across North America, each containing banks of powerful computers, where digital games are housed, loaded and processed, with only a visual feed of the game sent via high-speed, broadband internet connection to players in their homes. Like interactive streaming video, players' controller inputs and button presses are sent to the OnLive hubs in real-time, where the game (essentially being played there) responds accordingly. Players never come into contact with or have actual access to the game or its code - thus any potential to "play with" a game is seriously compromised.

Analysts are divided about the viability of OnLive, especially given the hold major industry players like Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft have on developmental directions of the industry. Nonetheless, OnLive has recently been given a major influx of capital investment from sources like AT&T Media Holdings and Warner Bros. (Grant

2009), and is seen by some as sowing the seeds for a future model of digital game distribution, even though it may not be successful itself. Finally, should the OnLive model catch on, or be purchased by one of the current industry heavyweights like

Microsoft, it may be enough to change the direction of industry and affect the viability of the user-modification of digital games, at least in terms of their structural alteration.

262 Recalling that the PC game market has traditionally been the most robust space in

digital games for modding, other potential hiccups for current modding practices include recent decisions by major game publishers Activision and Ubisoft to amend their PC

game operations. Starting in early 2010, Ubisoft requires that players be continuously

connected to a constant, high-speed internet connection in order to play their major PC releases. Initiating their games is not possible "offline" and losing an internet connection while at play causes the game to stop functioning. These measures, called draconian by

a majority of critics, are designed to eliminate game piracy, but could potentially affect user ability to modify game content.

Activision upset fans of their successful Call of Duty first-person shooter

franchise by eliminating the possibility of "dedicated servers" for online multiplayer matches with the PC release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (MW2) in the fall of

2009. In the past, the computer servers which host multiplayer battles in online-

compatible games (played against other users around the world via the internet rather

than locally) could be rented by groups of hardcore users creating exclusive communities

of players, many of which chose to modify and customize game features and maps (Graft

2009). By not offering a dedicated server option in MW2, Activision was able to control

distribution of add-ons features and locations, charging for incremental upgrades, and

eliminate the agency of modders for one of the biggest games of all time.

Not knowing how each of the above developments will affect the practices of

modding and user access to, and participation in, shaping the pop cultural products cues

263 my segue into the cliched territory of concluding chapters: saying, "I have just scratched the surface here! There's more work to be done!" etc. Although including analyses of these developments is beyond the scope of this project, I am confident the methods, contributions and findings put forward here will be of benefit to future research of modding, be it done by me or others.

On the Topic of Findings / Contributions /Judgments

If dissertations were sweaters, this one would be knit with threads of fabric that go off in all directions. This project weaves together multiple examples, disciplinary angles and theories, all to create a functional (and comfortable?) fit to best understand the contemporary cultural politics of modding. But what makes this sweater different and/or better than the others in the closet, knit before it? Acknowledging the work that inspired, made possible and provided the base for this project, it would be more fruitful to position my contributions as important additions to a larger whole. Therefore, the fabric of my work makes not merely a sweater, but also a patch on an ever-larger quilt.

As such, the following make up what are perhaps the most important additions contributed here.

A duality by definition: The etymology of modification shows the concept to be invested in both regulation and change. The modification of behaviour to retain boundaries of accepted conduct, attached to an archaic definition of modding is

seemingly contradicted by our current definition of the term, which its emphasis on

change and alteration. More pressingly, however, is that beyond the conceptual level,

264 both meanings are still active, it seems, in the practice of digital game modding and both reveal themselves in the cultural politics that surround the practice. Modding can be used to establish and maintain a set of boundaries, and it can be the practices that aim to play outside of those boundaries. The fullest realization of this duality as it plays out

across the multifaceted techno-cultural practices that make up modding can only be

elucidated by triangulating existing theory about culture, politics and play, in both their

digital and pre-digital contexts.

The identification of cultural hypocrisy: Popular culture (and gaming culture within it) is saturated with official crossovers, mash-ups, and licensed remixes. These are modifications, no more valid from a creative/cultural perspective than the crude ROM hacks of teenagers that import Sonic the Hedgehog into a Super Mario game. Erecting boundaries of entry to "remix" culture leaves a wide swath of creative people unable to

access means to official modification (due to licensing costs, legal implications, etc.).

The result is an underclass of cultural contributors, unable legally or financially to speak

to the culture in which they are immersed. When they are able to gain entry to avenues

of cultural production, they have their creativity contained, policed, or mined for

exchange value from which their own ownership rights are stripped away. However,

such regulations on user behaviour are doomed to fail in contemporary culture where

customization / user-generated practices filter into ritualized, everyday experience - as

indicated in the quote that opens this chapter with the casualness of Homer Simpson's

consolation of Bart that they would edit a Wikipedia entry to their liking. The ability to

265 edit - to photoshop, to remix, to participate in wiki culture, regardless of truthfulness or right to do so - is increasingly normal for more and more people, particularly youth born into the ubiquity of the digital metamorph. For such actors, the contradictions that exist between what official producers can and are allowed to do and what users can and are allowed to do is too absurd to acknowledge, and too abnormal to accept. While it is beyond the scope of this project to confirm why such recreative abilities are so appealing to users (and omnipresent in the history of culture), it may be ingrained in the physiological phenomenon of play itself.

The appeal to play: Positioning digital game modding, as well as user- participatory cultural practices that preceded it (tinkering, hacking, etc.) but continue to work alongside it, as forms of play will help us better understand and deal with contentious behaviours and practices involved. From a policy or regulatory perspective

(governmental / corporate), attempting to stamp out or control play practices will ultimately fail. Regulations of play, in its "possibility space" conception only fuel its transformative leaning - constraints applied to play are invitations to play, and particularly, to play with and against those constraints. Children recognize this and adapt their play habits accordingly (Sutton-Smith 1997), while regimes of industrial/post- industrial cultural production (and regimes of cultural regulation) have not and likely will not - continuously frustrated by their unsuccessful efforts either to stop or control what people do with the cultural objects around them. Thus, it is important not to limit ourselves, as some treatments of modding do, to exploring the playfulness present in

266 engagement with new media via digital games. This ignores the history of user playfulness in pre-digital contexts and disregards user participation and playful cultural modification that might be innate to human creativity and curiosity. Such histories become apparent when identifying parallels between contemporary modding and the participatory cultural forms of the past, as applied to games, art and other media objects.

They also transcend the material focus of most modding literature (at least insofar as digital objects can have materiality). In my articulations of the playfulness that informs modding, structural and material alterations that occur through the "playing with" digital games (at the level of the computer code that constitutes their being) cannot be divorced from the alterations that happen at a conceptual level (at the level of the ideas, narratives and characters that round out any intellectual property). In this formulation, mods of conceptual influence, including fan games, writing and art, are just as important as mods of structural alteration.

The new face of old theoretical exploitations: From a political economy perspective, it is possible to theorize that digital game modding might elucidate how the

"audience commodity" process might be manifested and re-articulated in the digital era.

Modding, in many cases, involves the commodification of a labouring audience - where consumers create value in their productive consumption of information-based goods.

The difference when considering digital games is that the users partaking in audience labour are actually producing the products they consume. In previous formulations of audience commodification, media networks provided the content against which they use

267 audience attention to sell specific demographics to advertisers. A user-generated model does much to remove the point that it is professionally provided content that draws in users - instead, users are providing the content themselves, or amending content that was professionally produced. The product of the leisure-time output by modders of consumed goods becomes a commodifible good in and of itself.

Disruption should not be second tier to resistance: In examples of out-of-bounds play, or counterplay, which manifest as disruptions or resistances against the attempts to manage or regulate user modification and work to derail or change the boundaries of play erected, there is no apparent evidence that the latter (politicized resistance) is any more effective in changing producer/consumer relations, or any wider social contentions, for the better. The former (counterplay of disruption) is more widespread, less explicitly politicized but still imbued with cultural politics, and perhaps more effective as a platform of change, at least at the microcosmic level of producer/consumer relations.

Reconfigured Roles: Poachers and Puppets

The roles of users and consumers are constructed to conform to subject positions or identities built up in contested relations to cultural producers and regulators. While user-generators, modders and other amateur contributors to the productive processes of digital culture are increasingly welcomed (reluctantly and with exceptions) into the fold, there is no uniform understanding about how their roles affect, or are affected by, the cultural politics of contemporary production and consumption. The modder's role is constructed as a junior partner in production by traditional producers, but interpreted

268 within critical political economy as a puppet, fulfilling the motions set out by the

architect behind the forces of cultural production, providing uncompensated labour creating content that is then sold back to the gaming population. From this angle, the modder's efforts are frequently exploited for the value they bring to the productive process when managed correctly.

Within differing disciplinary rhetoric, the same role is filled by the poacher (an identity filtered through the influence of de Certeau in the Jenkinsian model of participatory culture - see Jenkins 1992). The poacher is not the slave to existing cultural politics, but instead the empowered actor who uses the bits and pieces of culture itself to challenge and change those politics.

One of the goals of this project was to stab holes in both perspectives, to twist them together and wrench them apart, just to see what parts stick when both are combined. While this approach is not entirely original, it has nonetheless not been categorized as I have done so here. Here I have attempted to modify the disciplinary approaches to understanding participatory cultural practices and the politics attached to them, to identify how the role of the user may be articulated as poacher one way, as puppet in another, how both might not necessarily be mutually exclusive, and how users may be re-articulated as more than either.

Here I have provided a thoughtful and theoretically-sound analysis of the cultural politics of digital game modification. To reiterate the stance taken in this project's introduction, such an analysis can only provide a complete picture by taking into account

269 the disciplinary perspectives offered by cultural studies, political economy and critical information studies. The results of making these perspectives intersect in triangulation should not be seen as contradictions, but negotiations that best reflect the fluctuating realities of user behaviour in our contemporary mediascape, as well as the invariable human reality of playful modification. Dominant structures of power, both cultural and economic, are not automatically subverted in the ways in which we mod, or by the mods we make. But our mods are not always already absorbed by exploitative and neutering structures of capital, legal regulation or domineering structures of "good taste" and

"proper use." The cultural politics at play are too plastic (or too flammable? Too digital?) for this to be true.

This project's twisting and bending of disciplinary perspectives - as well as its three-way articulation of those perspectives in the grounding of its methodological basis

- transfer to these pages some of the same qualities as the topics addressed. This has been an exercise in modding, an exercise in playing with existing forms and ideas to make them into something new (perhaps even important, perhaps even better).

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