This is my first blog post, so it's a rough draft I never finished.  I assure you if I manage to post anything else on this blog, the quality will improve greatly in the future.

Back in my childhood, my friend would come over and the two of us would play a game of Clue.  Now, those of you who have a lot of Clue games under your belt know that it is virtually unplayable with two people.  We avoided that problem by playing our own special version.  It involved the fact that I knew what three cards would be, and would "pretend" to be all the additional characters my friend did not control.  It resulted in a kind of amateur "mystery theatre", and while quite silly even when we were but ten years old, I realize now that I missed my calling as a Dungeon Master during my nerdy college years.

Since then, I’ve continuously been a fan of mods.  Mind you, since they made the transition from me stroking my fake mustache to people who actually have some design and coding talent, but the spirit is the same.  They are taking entertainment they enjoy and turning into something with a more personal aesthetic, and if others find it appealing, all the better for it.

The idea of custom content has always been a great boon to the games industry, especially when it came to the PC.  Instead of blowing through a game during the weekend, its life can be renewed for an innumerable amount of hours.  Everything from a new fighting style to a graphical tweak to a total conversion is possible. At a time where every new action title tries to be on the bleeding edge of graphics technology, the most popular multiplayer FPS continues to be a mod of a game engine that is over eight years old. 

Naturally, this creates a sense of community.  People are excited and talking about a game long after a normal shelf life period.  The brand of the companies involved is improved.  Amateur developers get to show off their talent and impress potential employers.  Hobbyists can make that adventure they always wanted to and have an audience appreciate it.  Most importantly, the average gamer gets an extension to their product for no additional cost.

Not everything about this scenario is positive, however.  Creating a set of developer tools  that is relatively accessible while protecting your own assets is a difficult task, especially for what will probably be a strong minority of customers who will ever use it.   Then there is a danger of it affecting sales.  It’s hard to get a consumer excited about a new release of your franchise if your competing with your own predecessor from three years ago, complete with A.I. tuning, unofficial patching, and five expansion packs worth of free content.  When PC game sales are slumping, making your game stay on hard drives for extended periods may not be enough of an incentive.

Combine this with the real threat of having your game receive negative attention due to something that is beyond your control and providing mod tools seems like a real detriment. 

It’s easy to point and laugh at the ignorant vitriol coming from politicians, sensationalist journalists and one particularly insistent lawyer.  Their perseverance on trying to pass regulations and restrictions always end up being thrown out of the courts on the grounds of being unconstitutional.   Never mind the irony that if any of them were already implemented, they wouldn’t have stopped “Hot Coffee” from happening.  But we should be aware that it is only a matter of time before they figure that out themselves.

The perspective of video games as a harmful medium isn’t always under the full control of the companies making them.  Rockstar had to recall, and take a loss on, thousands of copies of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas because of a mini-game you had to go out of your way to discover.  Oblivion had to be re-rated for objectionable content that didn’t even exist in the game at all.  And some unwitting people probably think The Sims is a “pedophile’s paradise”. 

There are two similarities with all of these examples.  One is the continuation of sexuality being an obsession of the American public while simultaneously being a strange taboo.  

This certainly isn’t anything new.  As long as female avatars have existed in video games, nude patches have existed, as if there was any need to further accentuate the primary demographic of the gaming community. Since my first experience with the Tomb Raider franchise came courtesy of my high school computer lab, it came as quite a shock to me to eventually discover version that featured a Lara Croft that was clothed. This continues to be apparent in titles like Second Life, which is pretty much an open slate for player made content.  When given the option to create a world where the only limitation is your own imagination, many people resort to virtual prostitution, exotic dancing, or embracing every single weird fetish the human race has come up with.

The second is that none of these incidents would have happened if people didn’t have the freedom to manipulate the game material.

One has to wonder if some companies are worried of creating controversy for their games that they didn’t expect.  Will Wright’s upcoming opus, Spore, is all about the community that will form based on the ability to create your creature and share him online.  Knowing the online universe, it’s not much of a stretch of the imagination to have hundreds of those creations resemble a phallic object resembling a part of the human anatomy.  That is, of course, unless EA places strong approval process of what will be available to share with others.  And who could blame them? 

Other companies also seem to be shying away from providing modding tools.  When BioWare first announced Dragon Age, it was touted as a spiritual successor to Neverwinter Nights, which thanks to offering the exact same creation toolset that the original designers had access to, has literally thousands of fanmade modules available for intrepid adventurers.  Since then, however, the developer has backtracked to the point where they won’t even confirm that Dragon Age will contain any modding kit at all.

Whether this has anything to do with being fearful of being under attack for including “hidden sexual content” in their games is pure speculation.  But the point remains that modding tools is becoming less commonplace on the market.   While customization is receiving a lot of attention in the console world, it still tends be highly controlled and usually confined to the single player experience.  One needs only look at how EA is clamping down on the unsavoury designs that were inevitably going to come out of the Spore Creature Creator.  One can be assured that the exciting aspect of having a free and open community will be non-existent over the family-friendly WiiConnect24 or Xbox Live should Spore ever make it to consoles.

The outrage over the Hot Coffee incident led to a removal of the sex scenes in the American version of Indigo Prophecy and nipples removed in the American version of The Witcher, despite the fact that the game constantly features rather graphic beheadings. But the point was lost on that decision.  It isn’t the sex in itself that has parents concerned, otherwise there would have been more of the controversy in the mainstream press over the release of Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude or 7 Sins.   It’s the ability to change the program to include material you didn’t count on.

The message is clear that if we want the creativity and freedom that mods afford us on future releases, we have to be more aware of how we distribute them.  Since mods don’t need to be seen by the ESRB, we should learn to  embrace the idea of restricted circulation in order to avoid outright censorship. We need to accept a better way of controlling them ourselves, because if we don’t the publishers may avoid the hassle altogether and keep them out forever.

In the meantime, has anyone played Half-Life: Episode One with the naked Alyx skin?