Game Modding – Literature search Researching Creative Industries

Playful Play with Games, M Engeli This article discusses the modding of Unreal Tournament put into a learning process. I found this interesting because that is what the second year of my college course was, creating our own worlds with UDK (Unreal Developer Kit). UDK is essentially a Modify engine for unreal tournament however people create they’re own games, in the developer kit, which actually are released and sold. My query was that then surely those games are just commercially released mods. This article was dated at 2005 and game developer kits such as UDK would have only been used properly in education for maybe 2 or 3 years. And then there are other developer engines such as cry engine which is only used in higher education.

Explorations in Player Motivations: Game Mods This was another fascinating article I came across and it explored the reasons why people feel they need to mod. They author began by stating the needs people want so they can be fully satisfied.

Explorations in Player Motivations: Game Mods This is the research that went into this article. It has taken 160 game mods across 16 different catogories and they measured the amount of downloads each mod had and then calculated the results in to a table.

When the Game Is Not Enough: Motivations and Practices Among Computer Game Modding Culture When looking at this article after the previous article I found them to be quite similar. They each aim to discover why game modders do what they do. The main differences is that this article looks into players who want more from their games with gameplay when the previous article look at what the players do to fulfil their needs. Discovered this off SHU library catalogue.

Not just a dollhouse: what The Sims2 can teach us about women's IT learning This article is about women’s learning in IT through modding and design through the game The Sims 2. I had previous knowledge from college about how The Sims is a game that has attracted attention from the female audience. The Sims is an original game because of how the players create their own things. That got me thinking about how the games have started to become mod engines themselves. E.g. Little Big Planet, Far Cry 2, Modnation and many more.

Harnessing the hackers: The emergence and exploitation of Outlaw Innovation What caught my eye with this article was ‘Hacking and Outlaws’ I found it to be interesting because it talks about hackers as being outlaws. Real and fictional outlaws have always made a name of themselves. This could imply that hackers and modders break the rules to get their names known. (whether it be their real name or their online ID.) At the start it mentions how what the hackers do can be valuable. This paper was dated at 2008 and it can show how times have changed especially recently how hacks can destroy games

Bibliography M Engeli, Proceedings of DiGRA, 2005, Playful Play with Games: http://digra.org:8080/Plone/dl/db/06276.54243.pdf B Bostan, Proceedings of GAMEON-ASIA, 2010, Explorations in Player Motivations: Game Mods: http://www.silentblade.com/presentations/Bostan_Kaplancali_2010.pdf O Sotamaa, Games and Culture, 2010: When the Game Is Not Enough: Motivations and Practices Among Computer Game Modding Culture: http://gac.sagepub.com/content/5/3/239.short Elisabeth R. Hayes, (Professor, Mary Lou College of Education, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA), Elizabeth M. King, (Research associate, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2000, Not just a dollhouse: what The Sims2 can teach us about women's IT learning: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1771031&show=abstract Stephen Flowers, Centre for Research in Innovation Management (CENTRIM), 2008, Harnessing the hackers: The emergence and exploitation of Outlaw Innovation: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733307002132