Yesterday, a reader wrote a comment with a really great breakdown of how video game mods should be judged in a different context than official material from the game’s producers.
With their permission, I’m publishing the text here.
Ravel said:
In most games or comics, these designs of armor and these girls/women are specifically created to target a certain audience with the product they’ve been created for. If you take Scarlet Blade, for example, the models of all the female characters and their clothes have been designed to target a male demographic in order to SELL this game to them. Here, depictions of women have been used as bait, they have been objectified and they can be “owned”. The designs serve a monetary purpose: sell as much as possible of this product to a certain audience.
But mods are different. They have been created using tools the game and the software of Skyrim (in this case) provide, allowing freedom in creating new stuff. And some people decided to use these tools to flesh out some of their fantasies. They offer their work for free, without wanting to sell them to somebody specific or use them to their own benefit, they just make them available to whoever enjoys what they have created. Is it that different from people who publish their nude paintings on deviantart? As far as I see it, this mods could as well be paintings, certainly the brush isn’t to blame? And what about the amateur painter, is he a pervert because he decided to draw one of his sexual fantasies?
Yeah, it might be creepy and sad, in a way. But these are fantasies, created not to sell or to attract a certain group of people, but rather for the creators themselves. We all have dreams, erotic fantasies and wishes that we hide, just because we share them it doesn’t mean we exploit them or that we actively long for them to become reality, except as pixels, paintings or stories…?
I talked about the same issue earlier, but why not reiterate it in Ravel’s perfect wording?
Yes, mods, in contrary to official stuff, are not part of game’s marketing, audience targeting, and most of all, don’t bring profit to the game’s creators. We should always keep that in mind when commenting on fan-created content and judge it by its own merits (or faults).