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Bunny Blossom (www.kozyndan.com)
Games are fundamentally important to society. You and I might know this but a lot of people dismiss them as frivolous, childish pursuits that people are supposed to grow out of. Even people who enjoy them might undervalue them – or just not really understand why fun and games aren’t just important for psychological wellbeing but vital to human development as a whole. As game theory develops, says Koster in his book A Theory of Fun for Game Design, the central component of “fun” is being lost – and with it, the very essence of what games by their nature are trying to achieve.
Games are Education. Raph Koster – the former Sony Online executive who previously developed Ultima Online – says that games aren’t a medium at all, but just a broad facet of a defined pedagogical structure. The medium – which doesn’t seem to have a name – includes fire drills and tabletop disaster recovery exercises. Play, whether it’s playing cops and robbers in the back garden as children or deciding which team-mate to save in Mass Effect, is our brain’s essential What If impulse. We put ourselves instinctively through simulations from infancy onwards because each game has a lesson to teach us and it is through this that we learn and develop. The lesson might not be obvious: GTA IV is not teaching us how to murder criminals, but rather how to judge time and space in the driving. The lesson is the same as the Snake game you get on old mobile phones.
Koster suggests that through this system of practicing and learning, we use and even rewire our brains to help us to solve problems, and our brain rewards us for our efforts with endorphins when we succeed. This is why we enjoy playing games, and the essential driver of that enjoyment is of keeping the problems challenging and exciting but recogniseable enough for us to think we can succeed. Our brains make us seek the quickest, simplest solution – even if that’s “cheating” – and will tell us to give up if we predict failure in our next attempt. The role of the designer is to keep the challenges unpredictable so that the player thinks that they might succeed. A guaranteed outcome is boring, whether that’s to win or lose.
So how does that apply to mods?
This mod takes my Calvus and Rerlas companion mod, changes Calvus to female, and updates the dialogue accordingly.
(Adds modern ‘companion’ functions based on Grumpy et al’s scripts to Calvus Horatius (the companion in Tribunal), plus warping to the pets sold by Rerlas in the Great Bazaar in Mournhold. Calvus has more functions, more features and more personality. The pets can be retrieved if lost and resurrected if killed.)
DOWNLOAD from ElricM
DOWNLOAD from Planet Elder Scrolls
This is a really quick mod – a request by Enzo Dragon to rename the cell “Balmora, Caius Cosades’ House” to “Balmora, My House”.
Unlike Oblivion or Fallout 3, you can’t change cellnames mid-game, so you just have to plug this in when you’re ready and clean the save with Mash. If it doesn’t show up right away, try changing your load order.
DOWNLOAD from ElricM
One of the main challenges with modding is remembering to serve the game, as opposed to simply using it as a platform for my own ego. Of course, there’s a place for just making random things for the hell of it, and room for many wild flights of fancy, but the mods I like best revolve around plugging any perceived needs in the game rather than just adding stuff for the sake of it.
Whether or not you inwardly cringe (and many do) at the choice of furniture in Mournhold Expanded or the Dagoth Ur casino in Ghostgate, both were the result of my need to see a sprawling “city of magic”, and “what happened next”, respectively. Neither were produced because I thought it would be a really cool idea to add x, but because I assumed that with infinite time and infinite monkeys, those things would have been there anyway. Maybe not exactly like that, but something along those lines.
When I first saw Dominic and Machete’s House in Canterbury Commons, I was quite horrified by what I found. It was a total mess of rubble, litter, broken furniture and dirt. In order to be able to transform this into a believable living and working space, I had a lot of work to do: there was a burnt-out car in the living room, for heaven’s sake!
Dear YouTube
I made a video editing footage of the game Fallout 3 to the song Land of Confusion, because the lyrics of the song match the plot to the game.
When it was muted, I uploaded a version with a different track, used with the permission of the band/label.
As you can see, this version isn’t very interesting (no slight on the band!): without the context of the original song, the video simply makes no sense. It’s just a random collection of images set to music.
This ridiculous system of muting tracks means that a form of art – that of creating new videos to images collected from games – is impossible.
The software in YouTube is clearly capable of recognising which tracks belong to which artists, so would it not be fair, reasonable, and sane to simply annotate each video with the details of the track? I know you can do this! So why keep blocking my videos?
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Now that we’ve built two complete cells and got our town planned out, it’s time to tackle one of the existing cells: that of town leader Uncle Roe. The place he lives in isn’t very nice.
First of all, the beds and litter are removed from the kitchen area, and kitchen items put in. Litter is moved out of the way – but not deleted.
Note: These posts are drafted in advance and then scheduled for publishing, so it’s actually taking a bit longer to do all this than might be ascertained from the posting-dates. Each post represents 2-3 days’ modding, at a couple of hours per day during the week and much more at weekends.
The next challenge with Canterbury Commons is building a believable hotel that the player, just passing through, would actually want to stay in. I found the Office_b tileset with the dark red carpet ideal for the task – stained and heat-warped but still warmer than bare stone. After laying down the rudimentary reception furniture I set about building the bar – normally the first thing guests see while they wait to check in – to set the tone. As always, my focus was on clutter.
After building the “test cell” which will set the tone for the rest of the mod (in this case, Patsy’s Diner), it’s now time to take a step back and consider exactly what I’m going to do in order to turn Canterbury Commons from a (literal) bomb site into a friendly little slice of Apple Pie America.
This is the town as it appears in the GECK, with just three locations. I now have to turn this into a functional town.
In common with most ‘opinion’ features on this site, this one’s commentable. I decided to do something a bit different this time and show the complete development of a mod to show some of the processes that go into it.
