The Right to Hack?
by jachilli
I asked on Twitter if gamers had a “right to hack.” The response was somewhat more even than I had expected.
To be clear, when I say “right to hack,” I’m talking about a player’s ability to get into the nuts and bolts of the game, wether setting or systems, and make changes they felt like making. For the purposes of the conversation, I didn’t care whether we were talking about tabletop games or video games. Call it kitbashing, homebrew, house rules, or actual code manipulation, if you will.
Most of the conversation asserted that it was, in fact, the player’s right to bend systems and setting to taste. In fact, some approached the topic from a “just try to stop me” perspective, indicating that for some, it’s more than a right and nigh upon a duty. Especially from the tabletop RPG angle, I can see this. Groups of tabletop players literally need to make their own mark on their games, because the improvised stories that emerge from them — and indeed, outside the written body of work for these games — are the game’s content itself. A publisher can construct a scenario, but once that scenario is in play, it’s inherently being manipulated toward the player group’s end.
It becomes a bit different in video games. The “right to hack” takes on an almost Oliver Wendell Holmes approach, in which a player’s manipulation of the game systems is allowed to travel as far as where another player’s game experience begins. For instance, if I’m playing a game by myself, I can hack it all I want — I’m changing the experience only for myself and I’m not affecting anyone else. But when I do it in a situation in which other people are involved, I’m not only affecting my game but theirs. If we agree to share that modified environment, that’s fine, but if I’m playing a version of the game that offers me different and not-agreed-upon differences, I’m playing against the spirit of the entertainment.
Most remarkable about all of this talk was the sense of community that the conversation indicated. When hacking tabletop games, the expectation was that the changes made were accepted by and intended to satisfy the players collectively. I’m not hacking my fighter to have an unfair advantage to outperform yours by breaking the rules. My vampire can’t use Mage magic while yours has to use by-the-book Disciplines. Changes that are made affect the players as a whole and, indeed, the gamemaster who’s coordinating the whole affair.
In terms of video games, the “right to hack” may begin with a single player, but eventually grows to encompass and benefit the whole community of players. Now, that’s not really surprising, given that few people want to identify themselves as cheaters, but the very idea of what we being hacked here game a sense that it was being performed in the interests of fair play. Not so much, “I’m going to do this,” but, “Lets’s do this.” For example, the old WoW add-on that showed the spawn locations and best routes for completing quests was initially created by a player seeking to most efficiently level his character, and that player then shared the mod with other players to offer them the same benefit. In fact, Blizzard eventually saw how many people had been using the mod, saw that it had benefit to their players, and rolled it into the “official” game system.
I love this sort of thing. As a game designer, design is really only the beginning of the process. A game is nothing but a box of pieces, a book, or some code until it’s played. The game comes to life when the player brings the spark of activity to the inanimate parts in question. If that design needs to change to accommodate a player or community’s breath of life, that’s not only fine but desirable. The game itself is just a thing. It’s what we do with it together that matters, and if what we do with it changes the nature of the game in order to facilitate that player-to-player interaction, more’s the better. After all, what right should I have to stop it?
In fact, I think there’s a certain responsibility, or at least an enlightened self-interest, for publishers to watch how their games are being hacked and to criticially determine whether those hacks do, in fact, improve the game experience so that they can be integrated into future editions, expansions, patches, or what have you. There’s no playtest so thorough and useful as actual in-play games, and with the ready communication and online, updatable nature of modern games, a designer who wants longevity for his titles would do well to turn today’s best hacks into tomorrow’s core rules.
I speak from tabletop game experience, not on the video games.
I have several friends who have utilized “third party” game books for games like D&D 3.5, where they find some class here, a race there, and some Feat out of some Dungeon magazine and claim that “it’s printed for D&D and therefore legal.” To me, that’s a way that a player might “hack” a system, using rules that are made for the system, but not necessarily designed for that game/setting.
However, what happens far more often in our sessions is that a game’s basic setting and rules are sufficient, but the canon of the game are altered to fit the whim or mood of our game.
In a recent W:tA game, players were asked to fill out a questionairre and make a Mortal. Players could fill out their Backgrounds, but otherwise had no direct choice of their Tribe, or Auspice. In some cases, their backgrounds would have conflicted with their Tribal Totem, but that and the importance of Tribal Totems were overlooked for the change in the game (A Glasswalker with Purebreed, a male Black Fury, A Silver Fang without Purebreed, etc.)
In other games, even stranger things have happened, like basing games on altered settings, like “Escape from New York”, or “Independence Day” (where, in our case, the giant ships were Void Engineer ships sucking the tass/gnosis/glamour out of sacred places, destroying them in the process, etc.)
On more extreme levels, we had a game which we called “Masque 2K”.
Originally we had “hacked” the TSR “Masque of the Red Death” game and concluded it with the heroes winning, and the Red Death being “destroyed” with Vlad Tempst basically going into a torpor.
In WWII, the Nazis awoke Vlad who was later reunited with his concious mind. In a moment of weakness, his Lawful self agreed to rules of engagement between his forces and the forces of Good (known thereafter as The Legacy.)
Masque 2K took place around 2000, using the new Spycraft rules and the game was a game of supernaturally-infused superspies of “The Legacy” against the Evil forces of Vlad and his “Order of the Dragon”. So, we took a hacked version of TSR’s “Masque of the Red Death”, and re-tooled it to (then AEG, and now Crafty Games) Spycraft engine, modifying that with Call of Cthulhu for magic and added our own rules in for bloodlines for each of the original Legacy members and other rules we designed.
In the end, what’s important is that when you are modifying the setting and/or the mechanics of a game, you need to let the players know that that is the intent as well–in situations where the characters will not know the “true world”, it’s still important to tell the players not to expect to follow the canon of the books as it’s like sending your friends to an “Aliens” movie, but it’s actually a showing of “Paul”. Everyone should be on the same page for the game, or else it’s just going to be awkward and uncomfortable. At least, that’s my two cents.
There is not a game that I run there are not “hacks” or houserules for. Some lists are long, some short, but we always houserule at least a little. And it is generally a group thing. I don’t really run where I have all the power or anything, even though we do traditional games.
And I think it is all for the good. No company can make a game perfect for every group. What works for us may not work for another group. Hell, what works for me with one vampire group may not for a different group with me GMing due to different player needs and interests.
There is a tendency with some players to say one “should not have to” houserule, and that it is some sort of failing if one does. I do not get this at all. Why not make any alterations needed for the game to best fit your group. I mean if the game is already perfect in every way awesome but I have never seen such a game in over 20 years, and I have played some really good ones.
So yes, I am all for it.
Oh, for the record, I tend to mod games as well…why I play games on the PC. They vary from games like Skyrim with only a couple mods to ones like Dragon Age Origins where I have over a dozen.
I would liken this issue with “the right to fork”. And it needs to truly and fully be a right. This is inherently understood in the tabletop RPG communities and computer gaming needs to learn from it (this seems to be happening, though possibly as a reinvention of a wheel instead of learning from example).
I would also point out that we need to differentiate the right to hack ‘from the outside’ and ‘from the inside’. On the outside, everyone should have a right to customize, modify, tweak and so forth. On the inside, everyone should be mindful that the rules of the game represent a social contract which needs to be respected. This is in the neighborhood of your comment about community aspect of various game hacks.
Which is to say, it is fine to change the Protean Discipline and then play the modified game. It is not fine to decide your Protean should be more powerful in the middle of game session because you want to win. But it should be fine if you decide Protean does not suit your needs in the middle of a game session and then modify the rules with your group, social contract in mind, then start using it differently right away.
Yes, definitely agreed here. The idea that the hack is being done to create a more mutually satisfying experience is key, as opposed to hacking for a personal advantage, which is effectively cheating.