We Built This City

The Game You've Always Wanted

Of course, there are always people who are singular in both goals and means. "The reasons for making it were: 'I want to be a game developer, so I'd better start developing something now, or I shouldn't call myself a developer,'" says Leo Gura. He's the main creator of The Lost Spires, an expansive and hugely popular mod for Oblivion that adds extra quests, maps and 3D models. To make it, Gura took a unique approach: Where most modders play with pixels and code as a hobby, Gura actually modded like it was his job. "I started in December 2007 and worked on it from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. every weekday until its release in August 2008," he says. His goals weren't the usual ones, either. "I wanted to be a game designer since I was a kid," Gura says. "I convinced my folks that I could complete this grand project and use it as a portfolio piece to break into the industry. So I had about six to12 months to get things in order." It worked - he was hired by Irrational Games (then 2K Boston) shortly after the mod's release.

Gura is, however, an exception. The vast majority of modders make their creations after a day at work or in class. We're hobbyists, and I don't mean that in a bad way. Modding is the modern equivalent of knitting your own sweater, painting, writing or building your own car. One of the main reasons for doing it is the very act of creating itself. "You do it, above all, to make something new - to create something, say you created it and have others enjoy it," says Jeroen Dessaux, a member of the four-man team that made the Hoodoo map for Team Fortress 2. Valve, being one of the more community-friendly developers out there, discovered the map and made it part of the official game.

Tim Johnson, who did most of the mapping on Hoodoo, tells a similar story. "I've always been into creating," he says. "I can't remember how old I was when my dad bought me a copy of Blitz Basic, a programming language aimed at making games. Together we went through one of the example games, Blitzanoid, a humble take on Arkanoid. After a few weeks we had a pretty neat game with all sorts of power-ups, glass bricks, metals bricks and even a little laser attachment on the bat." The practice got him hooked, and he's been working on maps in different games ever since.

The actual joy of creating shines through in all of the modders I talked to. It's a wonderful feeling to make something, to find out all the cool stuff you could do, to show it to friends and say, "See that? I made that."

So why do we create? It's simple: We do it for its own sake.

That, and the compliments, of course.

Els Bellens is a lover of all things chocolate and all games that are even slightly silly. By day, she works for several Belgian IT magazines; by night she's one of the few living people that understand the interface for Blender 3D.