Recursive Modding: The Post-Commodity Life of the Doom Engine

• In Event: Games, Virtual Technologies, and STS - I

Abstract

Even though id Software’s FPS classic Doom(1993) is a videogame that was released more than 25 years ago, there still exists a vibrant community that produces, maintains, and archives the various mods, level editors, and source ports for Doom. This article aims to track the underlying material environment that enables these meta-games that surround Doom. After its initial commercial lifespan had ended, id Software has released the source code of the Doom Engine to the community as a free software. Since then, the Free and Open Source Doom Engine and its development community has been invariably co-evolving. Analyzing in detail (1) the scripting language DECORATE designed to expand the modability of Doom (2) FreeDoom project that aimed to replace all propriety assets of Doom, I show how different engines and its communities serve as a ‘platform’ for modification.
While media scholars have analyzed engines and platforms as the “foundation of computational expression”, few have addressed how these foundations are themselves constantly regenerated throughout its lifespan. Referring to the works of Star and O’Donnell, I argue for a STS-inflected Platform Studies that explores platforms as a socio-technical assemblage in flux. Only through an approach like this can one understand the ways Doom modders express through the engine and at the same time modify the engine as a community. I will make further reference to Christopher Kelty’s concept of ‘recursive public’ to explain how the different layers of Doom are modified simultaneously.

Author

• Jeong Woo Jang, KAIST Graduate School of Science Technology Policy