Mods and dedication: OPF FDF -MOD

Nowadays online games provide entertaintainment and challenge beyond television. Many of us are hooked up with games like World of Warcraft or Sims or Poker.

Lately I have been admiring the WW2 Finnish Defence Forces (FDF) Mod and especially the high quality of work this mod team have accomplished. The talented FDF crew has modelled terrain, various Nordic trees, winter&summer landscapes, vehicles, weapons and uniforms. They have even digitised music and sounds from the 1940's. These guys have managed to create an atmosphere and interactivity that attracts gamers, sociologists and historians alike. Word 'culture' has now a new meaning to me! This FDF mod(ification) is based on Operation Flashpoint (OPF) engine, but it is a game of it's own.

What motivates modders to spent thousands of hours building a mod? My colleagues who do games research and open source communities research may be better in answering this. Olli Sotamaa interviewed various mod teams and wrote a paper about his experiences. Olli found reasons like creating a work portfolio and showing off your talents to game houses. Still, altruistic reasons like creating something novel and common good came up. The development community spirit and the support of larger gamer (fan) community plays significant role.

Carl Rogers saw already in 1954 that creativity was motivated by people's self-actualising tendencies, the drive to fullfill their potential. Teresa Amabile sees that 3 crucial components are involved in the production of creative work: intrinsic task motivation, domain-relevant skills and creativity-relevant processes. Mod-makers need to that a lot of (technical) expertise, but also skills to communicate and solve problems creatively and co-operatively.  I would find it interesting to apply Amabile & Co's Work Preference Inventory (WPI) to game and mod developers. This personality inventory taps the major components of intrinsic motivation (self-determination, competence, task involvement, curiosity, enjoyment and interest) and extrinsic motivation (concerns with competence, evaluation, recognition, money or other tangible incentives, and constraint by others).  Has somebody done this kind of research already? I am just curious :-)

Comments

[Olli Sotamaa]

First of all, thanks to Mikko for highlighting my work. Secondly, greetings from Copenhagen to everyone reading this. Thirdly, a slight correction: the detailed analysis of mod maker motivations can be found in the following address (http://www.uta.fi/~tlolso/documents/sotamaa_modder_agency.pdf). The article is based on my presentation at Internet Research 5.0 Conference (2004) and will be published as a book chapter in a near future. The paper Mikko mentions is a followup to this one and focuses more on the mod-related game industry strategies and modder-industry relations. My intention is to update and partly rewrite that one too in the following months.