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Today’s post is going to be less composed of material cribbed from other sites and more of me directing you to visit John Vanderhoef’s excellent, excellent blog Press Start to Drink, where he approaches issues in the games industry from an academic perspective and generally presents extremely interesting reading material.
The post I’m concerned with today is his entry Cease and Desist: Games Culture and Copyright Laws, in which Vanderhoef examines the rocky relationship that has developed between fans and developers in our age of game mods and vicious copyright law. The post illustrates its point by examining three separate reactions game developers took to fans interacting with and expanding upon their products–one consisting of putting together a make-it-yourself toy of Marcus Fenix of Gear of War, one a game mod of SNES classic Chrono Trigger, and the last recreating the entirety of the original Half-Life with Valve’s publicly available Source engine.
The only one of these not to end with the threat of a lawsuit looming over the offending fan was, perhaps predictably, the one involving Valve, the same company sensitive enough to its fans to make community-generated memes part of the gameplay in Team Fortress 2 (to say nothing of the phenomenon of Counter-Strike). The tragedy of the situation, as cited by Vanderhoef, is the fact that creativity is stifled in an environment where inventiveness has to be looked over by lawyers.
There’s a reason why gamers get angry when they read stories about the actions of companies like Square-Enix and Epic Games–it seems like there’s a betrayal in arbitrarily limiting the enjoyment of the people who bought their product. My personal favorite game of all time is Baldur’s Gate II, which is approaching its ten-year birthday and is woefully out of date by modern standards. It remains my favorite title because of the massive modding community behind it that remains active to this day. While the “vanilla” storyline is incredibly expansive and the choices offered within varied enough to encourage multiple playthroughs, the modding community only broadens the title’s horizons with new gameplay options, companions, and entire campaigns.
I *have* to take Minsc with me every time, though. Not because it's necessary, but because he's awesome.
Neverwinter Nights, meanwhile, took a route similar to Valve and was packaged with modding tools, effectively encouraging players to play with the game itself and increasing the title’s shelf life dramatically. The resulting examples of user-generated content was often hailed as being superior to the original campaign. Unsurprisingly, both of my examples are based off of Dungeons and Dragons, a series of products where users only ever need to buy the basic rulebooks and derive the rest of the fun by creating antagonists and adventures themselves.
At the same time, it seems like these companies are only allowing their customers to play with their product on their own terms. Valve and BioWare explicitly released the tools used to tamper with their product to their audience. And as for Baldur’s Gate II, while it’s certainly possible that large mods existed during the height of the franchise’s popularity, most of what you can find out there today was created after Black Isle (the title’s developing company) was disbanded, likely making legal action tricky.
Play No Evil 