I still remember the day I learned how to kill my Sims. I recall having heard my brother complain about the Sim kids being a nuisance, as they were wasting the resources of the family, ‘eating too much’, without producing anything tangible (like money) in return. Although they had been quite nice to have at first, in a loving-couple-eventually-becoming-a-real-family sort of way, I soon learned that they were a big hassle. Sim kids were not as easy to control as the adult Sims since their interaction possibilities were much more limited. Although they were hapless, they were also short-tempered and annoyingly cheerful. The only reasonable way to deal with them was to get rid of them.

So I set off to build pools, directed my Sim kids to take a dip and then I removed the ladder, watching the little children exhaust themselves to death in the water. I ordered an irresponsible single mother to cook for her children, without teaching her how to do it first, and soon enough the whole kitchen was on fire. The first fire left behind a half-destroyed house with three dead bodies. And once I got a penchant for it, why would I have limited my destructive activities to kids only? Some Sims washed their hands too many times, turned on a light and died of electrocution. Some starved to death, or were abducted by aliens. And for some I bought a cute little pet – with the result of them getting ill and even dying from the ‘Guinea Pig Disease’ that was raising havoc among The Sims players in the early 2001.

It is evident I did not only play The Sims by looking for different ways of killing the game creatures. However, it can be argued that experimenting with the game in this way opened my eyes for the hugely varied possibilities of play. I did not only torture my little homunculi to death, but I also learned to utilise all kinds of cheats, tricks and hacks so I could create interesting scenarios in the game to amuse myself (and not all of them were that morbid). With my colleagues, I also engaged in discussions that considered various possibilities of seeing naked Sims in the game.

I began this study by quoting Nancy Smith, President of The Sims label at Electronic Arts, who acclaimed The Sims as a ‘cultural phenomenon’ thanks to ‘the open-ended creative freedom that players experience with the game’ (‘The Sims celebrates 100 million sold worldwide’). My research has tackled precisely the players’ various ways of exercising the creative powers allocated to them in the context of this computer game. The basic dynamic of my work has been concentrated on the player activity known as modification, or ‘modding’ The Sims. The frame of reference of computer game modding has been based on the dual setting of first looking at what the game (code) itself provides for, and second, what the players actually choose to do with the game and its intrinsic scripts and affordances. Hence I have considered it important to ask, what kinds of ideologies The Sims has invited its players to articulate and play with, and how the players have responded to these propositions. More specifically, my research has been directed towards investigating the interaction between the game as a product (a commodity that can be purchased) and its play, the game as process. What has rendered the specific object of my study as a particularly interesting case is the fact that The Sims has, already from the start, been designed to cater to the needs and desires of its players by providing them with a set of tools and a kind of sandbox to play around with. The Sims in this respect has always been more like a toolset and a launching pad for its players’ creative aspirations than a fixed system of rules, means and objectives (which are considered typical of the organisation of digital games, in general). The players of The Sims do not only play the game, but they modify its contents and form to suit their individualist self-expressive purposes.

By concentrating on the modding of The Sims I have investigated specific aspects of digital games and culture that have so far been dismissed; that is why the title of the study refers to the reconfiguration of the culture of gaming through modding. What has been especially interesting in the modding of computer games from a cultural studies perspective is that the resulting data objects, mods, could be analysed as representations or as semiotic components of gameplay and the remediation of it.

Modding and participatory culture

In principle, modding can be defined in one simple and straightforward sentence: it is the activity of creating and adding of custom-created content, mods, short for modifications, by players to existing (commercial) computer games. These additions can be supplementary – in which case the mod is called a partial conversion – or mods can result in an entirely new game, which is then called a total conversion (TC). For instance, games like Quake and Ultima provide their players with flexible game engines that allow them to turn the original FPS into almost any type of game, from driving games to architectural walkthroughs (Ondrejka 2003, 8). Typical modded elements are characters, enemies, weapons, levels, textures, music and gameplay modes, and they can be added to both single- and multiplayer games. The mod-friendliness or ‘moddability’ of a game can be determined by, for example, its incorporation of gameplay variable definitions in text or other non-proprietary format files. Modding graphical elements depends on whether they are available in standard formats such as bitmaps (bmps). The modular anatomy of computer game modding is, in principle, based on the twofold architecture of game software: there is the game engine (or engines), and there are libraries containing all the data objects out of which the engine creates the game in real time as it is played. Normally, the engine remains out of the range of the player, but data in the libraries can be tinkered with. This aspect makes (certain parts of the) games moddable (Knorr 2007, 3-4).

In practice, however, game modding consists of a multitude of convoluted, sophisticated and overlapping activities that are not easily distinguishable or categorisable. Despite this complexity – and because of it – all kinds of practices associated with modding so far have in research been customarily grouped under one broad heading such as ‘addition’ (Aarseth 1997) or ‘creative construction’ of new game elements (Raessens 2005, 373). However, as the discussion of ‘reconfigurative’ (Raessens 2005) or ‘transformative’ (Sotamaa 2007) play suggests, there are numerous possibilities for the player to alter either the game-as-product or the game-as-process, both within the given ruleset and against it, as well as on the metalevel of gaming itself.