Mod Community Literature

There's not a whole lot of it. And what there is, is primarily focused on the monetization of the trend - how developers can take advantage of user ingenuity and encourage participation as a way of making life easier on them. Beta testing, level design, etc - it's all great and interesting, but not really what I'm interested in looking at.

I guess I'm more interested in looking at a couple things. The formation of mod communities and the formation of physical spaces as negotiated through modding tools.

So in a way, looking at how users-at-a-distance, through virtual interactions, are creating _real_ communities embedded in _real_ spaces, whether we're talking about a textual space like a forum or IRC or an interactive space like an in-game map. And how this is linked to other venues of personal expression/creation like MySpace pages, Facebook pages. To show that mod community uses of the internet as a collaborative, expressive tool are not just limited to the mod community.

Let's try that again in thesis-speak.

The goal of this paper is to examine the the ways in which the concept of community is incorporated in online mod communities through textual as well as graphic representation. I argue that this model of graphic representation can be applied to other forms of online community - in other words, that the same impulses that motivate modders to build physical spaces to inhabit also drives non-gamers to build more elaborate, personalized spaces to inhabit online.

Sounds all right.