Today the mod is a game-physics sandbox of startling proportions. It provides the gamer with a smorgasbord of objects, properties and tools that at first seem bewildering and disconnected but, with a little ingenuity, can be fashioned into creations of remarkable complexity. It's a next-generation Lego kit, filled with motors, explosives, people and guns. Likewise, my first experiences were strangely reminiscent of trying to build something complex from Lego without any instructions. I ended up blasting around heaps of bodies and smacking myself unto death with flailing strings of sofas.
Not very impressive.
But players whose dedication and engineer sense surpasses my own have gone on to build baroque contraptions worthy of Da Vinci, as well as conjuring up some of the most surreal sights to emerge from games: cartwheeling furniture with rocket boosters attached; forests of floating, twitching corpses hanging from brightly colored balloons; even lurid and disturbing ways to play the original game itself. Defeating the striders by welding their legs together or battering them with rocket-propelled sofas are just some of the delights that unfold, dream-like, in this deranged remix of Valve's gaming world.
As with all the best toolkits, the possibilities for creativity within Garry's Mod are generally limited only by imagination. It was thanks to Garry's own challenges that I was inspired to plunge back into his mod. When you see what people have made - moving bridges, absurd vignettes of characters in unlikely situations, even working vehicles, spliced together from the physics objects in the game - you realize how grand this simple idea can be. It's now possible to download ready-made inventions of startling intricacy. Giant combine harvesters and zombie-drawn carts populate a deranged carnival of invention, all thanks to this unheralded piece of clever coding.
What is most thrilling though is that this sandbox toy is so easy to use. You conjure up items from noodle cartons to giant chimneys, all of which are physics objects that can be picked up, stuck together and turned into alien flesh. Instantly you work out ways to play: creating obstacle courses for the dune buggy, building domino-like chain-reactions of explosions and collisions.
Ever see that Honda advert where all the car parts knocked into one another in a perfectly engineered chain reaction? I started making that without even thinking about it. The immediacy of Garry's Mod, thanks to our familiarity with first-person gaming conventions, is part of its genius. While it takes application and dedication to create some of the more complex things that appear on Garry's forums, it's all too easy to download this tiny app, install and begin playing with a game in a way that had never been intended by the developers. It's ludicrous, filled with a surreal logic in the way that only games can be.
Where it'll end up is anyone's guess, but for now at least Garry's Mod continues to be refined, continues to expand its tools, and continues to produce works of bewildering originality. It is a striking example of the most important aspect gaming: the imagination of the players themselves. It's a celebration of what we do best - think up ever more ludicrous ways to play. The latest challenge for the fans is to build a working rollercoaster, and their efforts are already caving in the walls of my tiny mind.
