Morris
Sue Morris
sue.morris@uq.edu.au
WADs, Bots and Mods: Multiplayer FPS games as co-creative media
Since the mid-1990s, a large and remarkably cohesive online community has developed around first-person-shooter (FPS) games, with up to 100,000 FPS gamers actively playing online at any one time. In addition to actual gameplay, the FPS community engages in practices of game development, criticism, commentary, debate, information exchange, file-sharing and social organisation, demonstrating a high level of involvement and investment by players in an online community that is vocal, influential, highly social and considers itself self-regulating and, to a certain degree, self-determining.
Unlike the film, television and music industries, which tend to actively discourage fans from modifying content by adhering to rigid interpretations of copyright, FPS game developers have actively encouraged the creative efforts of players, and an active ãmod sceneä has developed around FPS games. Online access to open-source game development tools, the provision of venues for distribution and publicity of player-generated game content and modifications, the use of the online community in game testing, and increased communication between game development companies and players are currently shifting the boundaries between the traditional roles of media producers and consumers.
This paper will focus on the inter-relationships between media, technology and culture as demonstrated by the online multiplayer FPS scene, and will make explicit the degree to which game texts and associated technology facilitate culture and the formation of community, and how in turn such social structures inflect and determine the development of computer games, related Internet technologies and subsequent models for software development and distribution. Beyond the idea of participatory media, I argue that multiplayer FPS games have become co-creative media; neither developers nor players can be solely responsible for production of the final assemblage regarded as the game, it requires the input of both.
Bio
Sue Morris is a PhD candidate in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland, researching the online community surrounding first-person shooter (FPS) games. She publishes the Game Culture website (http://www.game-culture.com ) and is an editorial board member of the computer game journal Game Studies.
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