The Mod writer

The two games I have, Morrowind and Oblivion, present a unique opportunity that other computer games are lacking. Both of the games come with a utility called the Construction Set, the same tool used by the story writers and developers to create most of the game itself. So the end user has a chance to give the games a life that extends beyond the original content. You can create new exteriors, towns, landscapes, as well as new characters and of course, stories. After creating what is essentially an expansion for the game, the user then uploads their work to the main forum site so others can download it and play it. I'm talking about people all over the world downloading it.

As for the story, the only limit is one's imagination. Take my first game mod for example. I adapted Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to the game. It was a real challenge, and I know I went over the heads of some of my target audience. With either of the two games the end user's age ranges from fourteen to forty, so it's a challenge to write something that has mass appeal. Still, some wrote to me that it was their favorite mod of all time. Others didn't like my ending. It was a good lesson in story writing and the psychology of making a game appeal on different levels.

It makes me think of being a Hollywood producer. The similarities between mod creation and film production are more than you think. I had to do set design, lighting; you have to place light effects in your interiors, screenplay; keeping track of dialog and journal entries, casting; I have to create the characters for the story and how they look conveys part of their personality, wardrobe; hunting on the forums for clothing and armor mods to use, direction; I recorded wifey-do speaking the part of one of the gods, sound effects; altering wifey-do's voice with my Nero software and creating other sound effects; special visual effects; explosions, appearance effects, moving objects in the game, etc, and programming; creating programs that run in the game to control what you see and hear.

Mods with ambitions such as I've described take a lot of dedication. My first mod, The Lost City, took a year to produce and the second, Apostates to Oblivion: Beyond the Realms of Death, took about seven months. There aren't very many of us with that kind of tenacity so such mods are not that common.