WADs, Bots and Mods: Multiplayer FPS Games as Co-creative Media

Abstract

This paper will focus on the inter-relationships between media, technology and culture as demonstrated by the online multiplayer FPS scene, and will make explicit the degree to which game texts and associated technology facilitate culture and the formation of community, and how in turn such social structures inflect and determine the development of computer games, related Internet technologies and subsequent models for software development and distribution. Beyond the idea of “participatory media”, I argue that multiplayer FPS games have become “co-creative media”; neither developers nor players can be solely responsible for production of the final assemblage regarded as “the game”, it requires the input of both.