Are we modders now?

[nieda113]

I am a gamer for almost 25 years now. The old days mods doesnt need much but a trainer or some ini file edits.

All changed with nexus .

Now adays, in order to mod your game, you need to know multiple tools, learn basics of how to chance hex codes,and on top you must learn how all of these tools work together.

If one mods excessively like 400+ mods in SE or Fo4 i guess he is a modder. too. I consider those guys like advanced modders that climbed a step higher on the modding evolution ladder , since he is able to make all those unnumerous mod play nicely togehter.

Am i right?

[montky]

an excellent question;

It remind me of Miguel Juarmierez or JP Sartre "Authenticity Theory"

ie 'who is a 'true' modder' ?

I will send a more detailed Inbox shortly.

 

 

 

I suspect you are not alone in lamenting

that some game frameworks appear to ostensibly be harder to mod than they oughta be.

"La esoterica".

 

However, there are ways to move forward.

"Modders of Yesteryear" still have skillsets, and when combined with AGI-batch automation, intermediary frameworks etc...

they can still mod newer games.

Not everyone can be a "one being army" - many mods form collaboratively,

from many individuals who work together, or via the assistance of AGI etc.

 

-----

We can also pivot as modders of yesteryear, to the indie-game makers of tomorrow;

if we look around the locale and see that, there is a movement to "La Esoterica"

we can decide how our own games we might make might be...

we can decide in our game frameworks, we will support modding etc, and take steps in that direction.

 

 

[DoctaSax]

Imo, a modder is still somebody who creates mods. What you describe is being an advanced mod user. They tend to be more likely to end up becoming modders, due to gaining insight into how certain things work under the hood, but it's just not the same.

[Rabbit1251]

What Mr. DoctaSax says. There are "mod users" and there are "modders". I have done both.

 

 

The Rabbit

[Oblivionaddicted]

Fortunately you don't always need to do extremely complicated things to create a good mod.

 

Another good thing is you don't need to immediately know everything to start modding. I never planned to learn anything about modding when I bought Oblivion and Morrowind but with the experience and many tutorials I learned a lot so don't feel too worried.

Edited July 15, 2018 by Oblivionaddicted

[Deleted55545892User]

I've created some original mods for Bethesda games, but they're so basic that I still wouldn't call myself a modder. The Creation Kit makes it possible for a know-nothing like me to produce something small.

 

I'll reserve the word for what I always thought back in the old FPS modding days: A modder is someone doing level design (or buildings or offering original textures). Not even character design qualifies most of the time anymore. That stuff is mostly done with easy to use tools. Unless you made original models for those too.

[ElPolloAzul]

To me, "modder" in the video game software sense will always be set aside to describe a person who designs and implements ("develops") a suite of changes, however simple, rather than "merely" applying them. Above and beyond a clearly-made producer/consumer distinction, there has to be some devising work that is more on the creative/design side, and less on the QA side. The people who PEEK-POKE probed memory and wrote those trainers were always socially and often linguistically differentiated from the people who just downloaded them and dodged trojans while doing so.

I think that a decade or more ago, the distinction between modder and user used to be a consensus thing around here, but some trends intervened.

One of them was that, certainly, in online console games (particularly FPS), "modder" became used as an epithet targeted at someone who used an exploit or was skilled or lucky enough to look like they did. In some rare cases, those accused actually bought or otherwise acquired knowledge of a real exploit from an original "hacker" (a word that went through its own de-evolution from the perspective of the early MIT AI community). And on the hardware side, those who sent away their consoles to strange people on the internet to be "modded" to allow loading homebrew software started to be called "modders" in league with the kind of conspicuously-tinkering "maker"-type people who would actually create their own console form factors and custom peripherals.

I think the line was originally blurred a bit in the "tuner car" culture, where you surely have a whole ecosystem of aftermarket custom parts, but the level of investment (in time, money, and know-how) led to pretty personalized, self-expression-laden combinations (there isn't as much of the "what's an essential list of body mods and the ideal paint combination in 2018?" kind of discussion there).

And I think that part of the motivation for the change was that there wasn't a really conspicuous word for mod enthusiast, the kind of person who spends thousands of hours consuming hundreds of mods, because the numbers simply didn't support that kind of person existing at scale. I think there really didn't need to be, then, because outside of domains like novelty FPS maps and skins shared across servers, the mod consumers and makers were blended together a lot closer in tighter-knit communities with a lot fewer mods which required a substantially more technically-inclined, more-generally-out-of-mainstream audience, at least to develop. I think of the collections of regular forumgoers on places like StarWarsKnights and LancersReactor and corners of gamedev.net, and of those who would leave elaborate "guest register" comments on people's personal free-hosting sites. Just like you see still for games with not much in the way of modding tools (beyond the trusty hex editor), there was very little attempt on the part of a large consumer community to support critiquing and running a bunch of mods at once (if you REALLY wanted to merge certain Freelancer mods as a user, you had to deal with reassembling string tables in (trivially) encrypted DLLs, and matching those to merged records of objects in sectors -- it was helpful to be an accomplished computer programmer just to use mods).

Finally, as others mentioned, there is inevitably the usual, "am I really a X?" question that happens whether X is scientist or programmer or writer or artist or musician, and you don't have much of a portfolio in the dabbler stage.

[Deleted54170User]

If you like to improve any part of a game, and you succeed; you're a modder imo. If you upload a mod too you're a modder imo. If you got a lot of players to test it foo. Hey! If you were one of the many who gained fame from a mod you built, again, you're a modder.

 

I've admired allot of people that are modders.

 

I miss a few who aren't with us anymore. They are probably somewhere in the ethereal plane teaching the wizards of the place how to improve and add great quest mods too to the ethereal plane.

 

Emma's Grumpy, for instance. I remember his house building instructions well.

 

RIP Grumpy.

[xvdoc]

I consider someone a modder if that person modifies certain stuff to enhance something.

 

For gaming modder, that person change/add/remove data file(s) in the game to enhance/improve gameplay. Doesn't matter if modification is big or small, It is still a mod.

[Deleted55545892User]

I consider someone a modder if that person modifies certain stuff to enhance something.

 

For gaming modder, that person change/add/remove data file(s) in the game to enhance/improve gameplay. Doesn't matter if modification is big or small, It is still a mod.

 

I can't bring myself to do that. It's really nothing to create some of the smaller mods. In fact, I think most people should and can do it. Most of the time, I'm just changing an entry to a different number. Voila! New gameplay.

 

That's more to the Creation Kit's (and some other modern tools for other games) credit, rather than me.

 

It's far more impressive if someone did that, say... thousands of times to thousands of entries (unofficial patches) or created a tool that lets players dynamically alter entries on the fly (MCM config options).