Gameplay Journal Entry #3
This week, we are talking about mods! In particular, we are looking at one of my favorite practical mods, Convenient Horses by mitchalek for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. While this isn’t a major game-changing mod in comparison to others creators have designed for Skyrim over the last ten years, it greatly improves a feature of the game I have found to be a bit of an inconvenience in the vanilla version. I prefer using horses over walking to get from point A to point B in Skyrim, but I hate wasting time locating them when they get lost (and even more so when they don’t respawn through fast travel as they are supposed to, which is a common bug I encounter). Sometimes my horse dies without me knowing so I accidentally wander around looking for something that no longer exists.
As of its last update in 2019, Convenient Horses introduces several improvements to Skyrim’s horse system, including mounted interactions (removing the need to dismount to talk to NPC’s or interact with the environment), a faster dismount, horse storage with its own encumbrance system, horse commands including behavior customizations and following, horse attribute training, horses for NPC followers, and my personal favorite because it looks cool — a horse call including a player animation for summoning the horse with a magic horn. There is also a short additional quest that serves as a tutorial for these features and helps to blend the mod into the game world’s overall narrative.
I find mods like this to be beneficial to both the players and the “host”, or the original developer of a modded game. Modding practices can be viewed as parasite/host relationships, viewing the parasite as the modder because “modders infiltrate a wealthier ‘host’ game system (Schleiner, 2018).” While this doesn’t make mods or modders sound very appealing, parasitic relationships are not always damaging to the host! Convenient Horses manipulates Skyrim’s engine to benefit the player but I don’t view it as disruptive because it makes an effort to adapt to the world around it (stylistically and mechanically). Instead, it works to extend a base feature somewhat symbiotically — players like me are less frustrated by it, so we enjoy the feature and thus the game more. I don’t think Bethesda views Skyrim’s modding community as negative parasites either because they host downloadable, player-created mods for the game directly on their website. In this case, the “cascade of parasitism” flows multi-directionally as play material is both gifted and poached between game developers and players (Schleiner, 2018).
References
Schleiner, A. (2018). “Game Modding: Cross-over Mutation and Unwelcome Gifts”. In A. Schleiner (Author), The Player’s Power to Change the Game: Ludic Mutation (pp. 35–60). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
