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Malleable Games - A Literature Review on Communities of Game Modders

Published: 03 June 2019 Publication History

Abstract

The creations of people who modify games (game "modders") have had an significant impact on economics of game development. Being part of a creative participatory culture, their mods serve as a source of inspiration that has even steered the direction of game development in the past. This paper presents the findings of a comprehensive literature review on game modding. We structure our findings according to the three perspectives from which game modding has been analyzed: an outside perspective, a meta-level, and an inside perspective. We identify aspects that have received little academic attention so far, but warrant future research. Our analysis of the body of literature shows that only few publications focus more closely on community aspects such as differences among individual game modding communities, dynamics and collaboration within modder communities. We argue that gaining a deeper understanding of these aspects is essential in order to be able to capitalize from the huge creative potential that lies within game modding communities.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Harmful Design in User-Generated Games and its Ethical and Governance Challenges: An Investigation of Design Co-Ideation of Game Creators on RobloxProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36770768:CHI PLAY(1-31)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
  • (2024)The Ecology of Harmful Design: Risk and Safety of Game Making on a Metaverse PlatformProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3660678(1842-1856)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Making Games to Make FuturesGames and Learning Alliance10.1007/978-3-031-78269-5_24(255-264)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2024
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cover image ACM Other conferences
C&T '19: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Communities & Technologies - Transforming Communities
June 2019
375 pages
ISBN:9781450371629
DOI:10.1145/3328320
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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  • OCG: Oesterreichische Computer Gesellschaft
  • TU Wien: TU Wien
  • EUSSET: European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies

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Published: 03 June 2019

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Author Tags

  1. communities
  2. creativity
  3. game mods
  4. games
  5. literature review
  6. modders
  7. modding
  8. motivation

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C&T '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 29 of 59 submissions, 49%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 80 of 183 submissions, 44%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Harmful Design in User-Generated Games and its Ethical and Governance Challenges: An Investigation of Design Co-Ideation of Game Creators on RobloxProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36770768:CHI PLAY(1-31)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
  • (2024)The Ecology of Harmful Design: Risk and Safety of Game Making on a Metaverse PlatformProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3660678(1842-1856)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Making Games to Make FuturesGames and Learning Alliance10.1007/978-3-031-78269-5_24(255-264)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2024
  • (2021)Heroes and Hooligans: The Heterogeneity of Video Game ModdersGames and Culture10.1177/1555412021102625517:2(219-243)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2021

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