Game Modifications (Player Communities) Reading 03

Game Modifications (Player Communities)


"To Mod or Not to Mod - An Empirical Study on Game Modding as Customer Value Co-Creation"

Katarzyna Bilińska-Reformat, Anna Dewalska-Opitek and Magdalena Hofman-Kohlmeyer (2020) 'To Mod Or Not to Mod—An Empirical Study on Game Modding as Customer Value Co-Creation'. Sustainability, Vol. 12 (9014) 9014.

In this article the authors focus on the customer value co-creation in relation to game modifications as well as the motives of mod users and creators. Qualitative research has been carried out which includes separate interviews and focus groups with mod creators and mod users. This research centres on the participation in the development of game mods and how it motivates the user and the creator based on the engagement of the individual. This article gives an in-depth definition of what game modifications are and the different type of game mods and their characteristics alongside some background historical information on the first ever mod created which will be useful in my research. The player communities are extremely vital as they benefit game developers and the long continuance of games. The conclusions indicate that the mod users and creators involvement in game design modifications show different motives and that mod creators are value co-creators. This article will be beneficial in terms of research as it shares the different motives of player and mod communities. There are also several examples of the different types of games that have been modded such as Second life, Adventure and Euro Truck Simulator 2 which participants had to play to carry out their research. The contributors thought that modding the game made the experience more entertaining. The modding community was also mentioned briefly in terms of the game and how different add-ons enable many possibilities such as multiplayer options in addition to sharing creations on forums and websites.

"Building the Perfect Game - An Empirical Study of Game Modifications"


Lee, D., Lin, D., Bezemer, C. and Hassan, A.E. (2020) 'Building the Perfect Game – an Empirical Study of Game Modifications'. Empirical Software Engineering: An International Journal, Vol. 25 (4) 2485.

The authors on this report provide detailed information on Nexus Mods which is a website allowing the user to download and upload mods for the computer. Game developers are constantly pressured into making a flawless game for their fanbase but with game modding being possible, it helps them boost up sales as well as improving the overall gaming experience. The authors overall goal is to dig deeper into the modding community and look at the features of popular mods in addition to how the mod developer fixes bugs and continues making the mod playable without any faults. The authors are doing an empirical study on 9,521 mods that has been made available on the Nexus Mods distribution platform. This article is useful in my research as it gives a detailed description of the Nexus Mods distribution platform alongside many other things such as a table outlining popular games and the number of mods that are available. Another table can be found outlining different mod categories and what kind of games are popular for modding in the findings section. This article has pieces of information which will be beneficial in terms of research but the overall study doesn't seem to important as it is mainly focused on bug reports. There are useful sections such as the authors studying the impact of games before and after the release of mods. 

An Empirical study of the characteristics of popular Minecraft Mods

Lee, D., Rajbahadur, G.K., Lin, D., Sayagh, M., Bezemer, C. and Hassan, A.E. (2020) 'An Empirical Study of the Characteristics of Popular Minecraft Mods'. Empirical Software Engineering: An International Journal, Vol. 25 (5) 3396.

The content of this article focuses on the difficulty often encountered by game developers when creating a game. It takes into consideration primary factors such as cost. To combat the complications that arise during this process, a viable solution is frequently seen through constructing a modding community for the game. The paper discusses how this has been quite effective in satiating the expectations of gamers along with development stress. The authors perform a study on 1,114 popular and unpopular mods from the CurseForge platform which specialise in add-ons and mods for Minecraft and other games. The articles content is not significantly relevant to my course objectives but it contains information that is useful for future research such as The Minecraft game and the CurseForge platform. There are tables outlining the different mods that the community have made for the game such as Redstone, Food, Add-on related and so forward. 

Reflection

This reading week was a little bit different. We had to research different articles that are based on our topics, mine being Game Modifications (Player Communities) and write 4 annotated bibliographies. I never really wrote an annotated bibliography before so I searched up different videos explaining the summarising what they are and how to go about doing one. Our lecturer was really helpful and spent time going through an article focusing on podcasting in relation to teaching so i'm grateful for that and I looked back over the lecture a few times. Overall I'm still a little bit confused on what I need to do and if i'm actually doing it right. I tried my best to make the annotated bibliographies 300 words but I felt like I was blabbing on afterwards so it felt a bit useless. I hope in the coming weeks I will get better at them and I feel like the lectures will help me immensely with that. All of the articles that I read were similar in terms of game modding and I tried my best to find different ones but the ones that were different talked about mathematical aspects of mods which didn't interest me. A lot of the information that I found in the articles have information that I need at the end of the day. I've also been highlighting sections as well as writing down notes similar to Shaun's approach.  I hope I'm doing this right and If i'm not then it's a learning experience and I will hopefully improve! 

Crazy Minecraft mod that I remember from my childhood 

LINK TO MY GOOGLE DOC WITH ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

-Anna Zurawska












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