Mods are incredibly popular in Skyrim for PC gamers. There are mods that change the look of bread, the horses into My Little Pony, and more refined ones that change the basic dragons into high fantasy dragons, as seen here. While these may seem frivolous, there are other mods that change the very fabric of the game, and make me wonder if those who install and play with these mods are playing the true Skyrim, or something they have created themselves. One such mod tampers with the entire smithing system (Val's Crafting Meltdown). It allows you to smelt everything that is composed of metal down to the original components. Plates, tankards, armor, useless weapons, etc. are fair game to be reduced to an ingot that you can then use to create the items you want. What I discovered last night, as I saw this being done firsthand, is that once the item is created, it can be re-smelted, and remade in an endless smithing boosting cycle. You can use the same components to create the same items endlessly, giving you a master smithing set in no time. This seems like an excellent mod to have, because those of us who have leveled smithing the traditional way can see the appeal of sitting for ten minutes and having capped the perk. But is this too much of a cheat?
I'm in favor of mods, to an extent, but not those that change the way the game is set up.
I'm interested to see what you guys think.
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DeleteI think that the only time when mods are wrong to use is when the game is competitive. If someone uses a cheat in Starcraft or Warcraft, they should be banned from being rankable.
ReplyDeleteI have a friend who downloaded a mod for Fallout because he couldn't stand how ugly the character models were. (they're pretty hideous…)
The worst experience I've had with people using mods has been in Team Fortress 2. On some of the custom servers, you often have campers. They wait for an unsportsmanlike amount of time for people to spawn (enter into the server) so that they can headshot them. This then affects their overall ratings, but does not accurately represent their actual abilities as a player. This is especially difficult for people who want to enter into leagues.
In games that have heavy ties into esports, like Starcraft, mods and cheats can result in a permanent ban from the game. And rightfully so.
Anyway--
If someone gives into the rosebud temptation in the Sims to rake in a little extra cash, they are only doing themselves a disservice by cutting out the challenge of being successful in the Sims. It's the same case with Skyrim.
Cutting out the challenge reminds me of what Roger Caillois says about the interplay of paidia and ludus. He argues that we tend to turn free-form play into more structured and rule-based models, but maybe over the decades because of gaming, we tend to already have structured rules and desire to break them.