Gameplay Journal Entry #4
This week, we are looking at mods again — however, this one is a polar opposite from the practical mod we covered last week. I’ve discovered the GTA V: San Andreas Community Cam by Brent Watanabe, which is essentially a mod that converts GTA V: San Andreas from an open-world, action-adventure game into a simulation (Bittani, 2017). The cam was a livestream of the mod hosted on Twitch, following random citizens programmed to follow their own paths and perform unscripted behaviors without any player interaction. While the project is a few years old now and the cam seems to have long since turned offline, this mod is interesting because I believe it classifies as an artist mod (though a bit unconventional). Art mods by definition typically “approach either the visual design of the game… or the underlying game engine (Galloway, 2006, p. 108).” Gameplay effects may be less common, but exist in cases such as this where the player has been completely isolated from gameplay and the mechanics have been reduced to simply watching simulated interactions. “Many artist game mods are completely noninteractive, not unlike watching a game play by itself in demo mode (Galloway, 2006, p. 122).” The mod changes the game’s core aesthetics using its engine’s existing world and artificial intelligences to create a completely improvised narrative, even if it is mostly NPC’s awkwardly wandering and crying.
Countergaming is a term used to describe a movement of disruptive modifications to mainstream gaming (Galloway, 2006, p. 109). “So while user input in mainstream gaming is matched moment by moment with a subsequent response inside the game engine, in countergaming there may not be such a one-to-one relationship, and in fact some user input may be completely ignored or interpreted in radically unexpected ways (Galloway, 2006, p. 122).” A mod like the San Andreas Community Cam takes this to the extreme by literally eliminating player-driven objectives and interactive gameplay as a whole. The mod relies on the engine to do all the lifting and produce value to the player, automating the entire entertainment experience for both the “players” (technically viewers) and the modder. This poses an interesting perspective for content production — are art-mod type programs capable of producing a high enough quality of content to eliminate the labor of forming compelling stories? While the cam was fun to watch (I actually preferred watching the Community Cam’s predecessor, the San Andreas Streaming Deer Cam), I don’t think it went that far nor does that seem to have been the goal for this particular project. It is still interesting to think about artistic mods taking on lives of their own and weaving unexpected encounters and experiences through coincidental connecting points.
References
Bittani, M. (2017, January 19). Game Art: Brent Watanabe’s San Andreas Community CAM (2017). Retrieved February 10, 2021, from https://www.gamescenes.org/2017/01/game-art-brent-watanabes-san-andreas-community-cam-2017.html.
Galloway, A. (2006). Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. University of Minnesota Press. Retrieved February 10, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttss5p.
