Monday I got back from DIGRA 2005, where we showed Organum at the PoV Alternative Games Exhibition.

The conference as a whole was pretty interesting, but the stuff on user-contributed content and games mods was what really grabbed my attention. The games industry is far ahead of our other cultural industries in terms of recognizing the importance of user-driven production and development, so it was great to hear some informed discussion of it which I could try to apply to my own projects.

First Olli Sotamaa of the University of Tampere’s Hypermedia Lab presented some critical perspectives on computer game modding competitions, which touched on the issues Anne Galloway and Alan Schussman have been discussing around the commodification of DIY/hacker culture, and the commodification of leisure in general. Basically, he wonders how empowering the ability to mod games is if companies

1. make the exploitation of volunteer modder labor an explicit part of their business plans, and
2. claim all IP rights in modders’ creations?

Sotamaa contended that events like modding competitions are a way for gaming companies to cultivate a volunteer labor force, by educating would-be modders how to use the tools of the trade, building up a postive image for successful modders, and recruiting the best modders into professional positions. The result is a tendency toward professionalization in the modding community, a tendency that is masked by the perception that everything game-related is “play,” not work. This perception justifies the often unfair economic structures. But, as Sotamaa pointed out, as mods get more sophisticated, they require larger teams and greater coordination, and the resulting organizational structure (specialization, assembly line-style construction) reveals the laborious nature of modding.

Sotamaa mentioned a paper by Eileen Meehan on the political economy of fandom that sounds like it could be very useful for my own work. He also mentioned some other papers, like Julian Kücklich’s work on modders and the their relation to the digital gaming, that were presented at the Creative Gamers seminar earlier this year. The Creative Gamers thing looks like it was fascinating–need to get access to those presentations. Finally, he pointed us to Tiziana Terranova’s work on cultural industries becoming dependent on volunteer labor and T. L. Taylor’s work on corporate ownership in virtual worlds.

Next Bart Simon discussed physical modding, specifically case modding. He contrasted the trend toward “black-box” computing exemplified by Apple and gaming consoles with the counter-trend toward revealing and reveling in the “guts” of computing, a la case modding. In regard to the commodification issue, he pointed out that the perceived threat of commodification, exploitation, and “selling out” is pretty much constant across all kinds of subcultures, and case modding culture is no exception–as the reaction by “hard core” modders to prefabricated “mod kits” shows.

Later the same day there were a series of short papers on user-contributed content. I missed the first two due to a long lunch, but made it in time to see Marko Turpeinen of HIIT present some work on legal and organizational issues in collaborative user-created content. The paper examined four different collaborative content communities, distinguished along two axes:

• Blauereiter, community creating and sharing “micro movies” for cell phones (commercial, users own content)
• Neverwinter Nights, MMPORG with user mods (commercial, users license content)
• The Melrose Mirror, collaboratively edited newsblog for the elderly (non-profit, users own content)
• Habbo Hotel, avatar chat space (non-profit, users license content)

The thrust of Marko’s presentation was that there are many unresolved legal questions about user-created content, particularly around decision-making structures and liability. It remains to be seen whether existing laws are flexible enough to handle the kinds of situations that are arising in this area.

Next John Banks of the Creative Industries Research Applications Centre gave a fascinating talk about his work on opening the production pipeline with Auran, an Australian games company. Specifically, he talked about Trainz, a railroad simulator which a few years ago made the quite radical decision to allow rail fans to create models for the game, and keep all the IP rights in their creations. This was well before Second Life made a similar decision. The results have been quite positive: Trainz went from nearly being pulled off the market to becoming the number-one train simulator, even forcing Microsoft to pull their offering off the market for lack of interest. Fans are involved in every aspect of the game, from designing models for it to marketing and distributing it. Furthermore, Banks claimed that the fans, far from being exploited labor, are quite aware of and reflective about their relationship to Auran, and very vocal about their displeasure when they don’t like how things are being run. Banks used Scott Lash’s concept of disorganizations to describe the networks of fan content creators and suggested that development processes and their associated organizational structures need to be radically reorganized to support them.

Great stuff, and a wealth of scholarly trails to follow. These two sessions alone were worth the trip to DIGRA. Next year it will be in Korea, so I don’t know if I’ll make it–but if you have the time and money to attend, I highly recommend it. Biggest regret: missing the presentation on Nethack.