Modding as game development: Investigating the influences over how mods are made

Abstract

Over the past few decades, game mods have slowly walked their way into mainstream popularity and although not being confined anymore to the dark corners of the internet, the reality is that we still do not know much about how mods are created and how modders manage to achieve their objectives. Seeking to better understand the activity of mod development, this article explores key influencing factors on mod projects coordination and development by taking a qualitative approach based on in-depth interviews with nine lead developers of total conversion mod projects. We identified three key factors ‐ tendency towards agility, co-creative nature and open source attitude ‐ that we believe are etched at the core of the activity of modding and that lead to, and are manifested, in the unique ways of how modders approach software development.