(Re)faça você mesmo: práticas de modding e a circulação midiática na série de jogos arma

Abstract

Player’s agency over a game does not mean necessarily to play it. Modding practices are known since the early stages of digital gaming culture, but currently its relatively new quality calls for an analysis. The adaptation from mods to games or just the openness to user-generated content became widespread as market strategies, especially around PC games niche. This dissertation aims to investigate from a communication studies perspective the relations following modders’ organization based on Arma series. This involves an overview of its 17 years old community and its stabilized models of creation, fueled by a mediatic appropriation within online networks uses. As conceptual background we include discussions about mediatic processes, that nowadays set up a growing perception of circulation of symbolic formations, and more specifically we problematize the concept of mediatization; also this work presents reflections about the nature of digital gaming, its editable structure and how this results in modding practices; and we include observations about participatory culture, which supports the creation of communities, as well sustains models of collective relations and produces work that could lead to innovation for game industry. We try to reconstruct the dynamics that compose Arma’s player base, giving attention mostly to construction, learning, feedback and arising values from modding practices. To achieve this, we proceeded in a long observation of media circuits used in mod-based interactions and conducted interview with modders. Our transversal question is: how the audience put in circulation a media object with such digital complexity belonging to industry?