I keep seeing Day of Defeat: Source referred to as a mod, I mean all over, typically as a pejorative term - why would I pay twenty dollars for a mod, etc. If Day of Defeat: Source is a mod, the word must have no accepted meaning.
I'm just trying to figure out the etymology here. Threewave's original Capture The Flag for Quake was a mod, that seems universally understood, as it utilized existing assets toward a customized gameplay. But even in the early days of the scene, we had another term for it when the word "modification" was insufficient to describe the scope of a project. Total Conversions described works that replace every asset in the original game with custom work. TCs were still considered mods, because... The developer wasn't an official licensee? That can't be it.
Is the issue that mods in general are understood to be "amateur" as opposed to "professional"? To my mind, creating a useful distinction between amateur and independent development is problematic. You've probably seen me refer to the work of the mod community using the more ennobling term before. I've seen too many people transition into the industry via that route to believe that anything but a porous membrane separates them. What's more, I've played what people call mods to the exclusion of retail product for months on end. If the fruits of "amateur" development consist of product like Alien Swarm, Counter-Strike, Desert Combat, The Specialists, and Natural Selection, what we think of as the genuine industry has much to answer for.
As to Day of Defeat: Source, how does the word "mod" apply to it in any way, shape, or form? It's a game made by professionals, members of the original team, expressly for sale. Do you see the Combine in there anywhere? No? Are there any shared assets or gameplay between it and Half-Life 2? How about the grabber. Are Nazis picking up degenerate books with the grabber and placing them on bonfires? Maybe I haven't seen that video.
(CW)TB out.
The most useful lesson might have been that our booth was right beside Rob Liefeld, a man we were mean to at some point. It will delight our manifold enemies to know that his booth sported a line of at least thirty people throughout the entire weekend, as we filled out FedEx forms to ship back our unsold stock. The lesson was clear, and it was my glad duty to accept it.
Of course, just as with the Las Vegas con, the decreased social density allowed us unprecedented access to readers. We could talk with people about inventive uses of the Revolution controller or Lemon Bars or whatever. We met a gamer mom, with a handle and everything, who posts on the RvB boards and plays on Live. She showed us her sketchbook full of Master Chief fanart, at which point we felt we had seen everything.
We had a chance to talk to Hawk and Ananth over at AppleGeeks for what I would call a substantial amount of time, which was marvelous - Hawk is coloring the the card game, as you might recall. I took a moment to appreciate them for their contribution to Disposable Parts, a hell of a book I grabbed from the Bag of Chips booth at San Diego. We invited them out to dinner, and Matt Boyd tagged along. I passed the Tablet PC over to Hizawk to see what he thought of it, and he and Gabe ended up enmeshed in some kind of sketch jam:
That machine has sketches like this from tons of cool people, because we're usually hauling it around at conventions. I really need to get those up on the site at some point.
(CW)TB
(CW)TB
