by Edward Miller
The only closed-source and proprietary software that I have a guilty pleasure for is the Elder Scrolls video game series.
From a very young age, before I was aware of Open Source and P2P philosophy, I just loved to tinker with computers. In high school I came across the game Morrowind, which is the third (and best) installment of the Elder Scrolls video game series. While the game itself is phenomenal, what really set it apart and has held my interest for years is the modding community around it. Bethesda Softworks did something very interesting with that game, and released the Elder Scrolls Construction Kit. This kit gives users the same graphical development tool that the game itself was made on, and provides the users with the ability to easily modify all of the game’s content as well as the ability to create new content. They even allow you to redistribute derivative works that build on the original content, with some limitations.
Predictably, this created a tidal wave of mods. These user-generated modifications are known as “mods,” and are shared for free online. This culture of creativity, teamwork, freedom, and sharing is really inspiring. Because of the vast quantity of mods, the modding community needed to develop a set of common practices and utilities to manage them, so that they may be run simultaneously. Many of them overwrite the same parts of the game and need to be cleaned, merged, or loaded in a certain order, and utilities were developed for those purposes. Then other utilities went a step further and decided to modify the game engine itself.
For a quick glimpse of what has happened with all of this you can compare the original Morrowind with a fully modded version.
The sequel to Morrowind, called Oblivion, is built on a far more advanced engine. Luckily, Bethesda has followed this same philosophy and the mod community operates in the exact same fashion. As does the other big game from the same company, Fallout 3. Some of the modding utilities overlap quite a bit.
Here is a list of open source Elder Scrolls utilities (in fact nearly all of the ones that anyone actually uses are Open Source):
Morrowind
Oblivion
Oblivion Mod Manager
Oldblivion
Fallout 3
Fallout Mod Manager
All
Then there is a project called OpenMW to actually reimplement the game content of Morrowind (for users with a purchased copy) onto an open source game engine called OGRE, so it can be cross-platform, further graphically enhanced, and so modders can have complete access to the game engine. This is the project I am so excited about that I can hardly contain myself, but it will take awhile to complete.
So on one hand you have the Utilities and on the other hand you have the Mods, which may also include huge amounts of meticulously created art, 3d models, music, storylines, and so forth. What I have noticed is that nearly all of the Utilities are GPL licensed, but the modding community have an entrenched peer-based IP enforcement system that is also supported by the major mod websites such as TES Nexus and PlanetElderScrolls. They remove lots of mods that are suspected of being “pirated” and such.
I would be surprised if any of the modders made a single dollar on any of their mods. Nearly all of them are given away for free, and the modders don’t even generate ad revenue since the vast majority of users download them from these major websites as opposed to the modder’s websites, and thankfully none of them use in-game advertising. So attribution, a right that I fully support, is the main issue here. Why then is there such a frantic enforcement of IP? Surely a Creative Commons license or GPL would be sufficient for that purpose?
Because of this, I have noticed tons of hardships in the development of new mods, and derivative works. Many of the old modders are unreachable, and so their mods just sit around for years in an unfinished or buggy state, while other modders salivate at the thought of incorporating it into new work. Lots of wheels are reinvented, and lots of work is abandoned or made more difficult than it needs to be.
As a young teenager, my (perhaps overly) ambitious mod project, Project APEX, had intended to be a derivative of lots of other mods. I was notoriously anti-authoritarian as a child, and it was an amazing learning experience and role-reversal being in a leadership position managing talented modders who were much older than me… two of whom were actually in the US Navy, and one of whom was stationed on an aircraft carrier at the time. Hey, at least your tax dollars got put to some good use 😉
Sadly, I had to abandon the project, and the difficulty in contacting the original modders was a significant factor in the failure of that project.
Is this obsession with Intellectual Property because of the nature of the modding community? As I have shown, the utility creators had no such issues. Perhaps because of its relatively objective nature, programming has a very obvious benefit for being open source. A programmer submits a patch, and everyone can test whether it works better or not, and thus it is usually clear why certain decisions are made. The arts don’t work that way. Artists are more tyrannical about their work because it is more subjective. However, musicians and writers are beginning to learn the hard way that IP-based business models are becoming obsolete. Game content creators and visual artists need to learn this same lesson, and the sooner the better. Even if the process of the art creation is behind closed doors, and not collectively produced like open source code, the resulting work should be licensed liberally if no money is being made from the content directly.
The obsession with Intellectual Property is being routinized into these teens and young adults. Consider this as a sort of Open Letter to the Modding Community…. only not because I want to stamp them out like Bill Gates, but because I want them to embrace the freedom provided by the GPL and Creative Commons.
Not all of the IP-obsession comes from the community itself. Some of it is filtered down from the top. Since all of this revolves around a corporate game, it does suffer from some of the usual issues. One mod that has run into difficulty is Morroblivion. This project attempts to import the older Morrowind content into the newer Oblivion engine. Unfortunately, Bethesda has this policy that they don’t like content being shared between their games. Even though Morroblivion had no intention of distributing the actual content of the old game, and instead wrote an import process, Bethesda has clamped down hard on them. They received stern emails and all their posts were banned from the official forums. Bethesda, is a rather broad-minded company, but even so their games are loaded with Digital Restrictions Management and they do have their pet peeves.
Video games are not only mainstream, but fast approaching the level of photorealism. It won’t be long before gaming goes beyond escapism and fundamentally changes the way people experience reality. This will open up space for enormous quantities of infinitely-shareable creative content. This is the future of art and maybe the future of life as we know it. How modders conceptualize ownership in this digital space will profoundly impact the character of this future. We should see it as our duty to positively influence this next generation, so that they may avoid the mistakes of previous ones.
May be you are right.I think it is a good archive.Thank you!