How Much of a Game Can You Change Before it Stops Being Itself?

Have you ever played a videogame and wished you could change something about it? Maybe a jump is a bit too difficult. That enemy’s hitbox feels egregious. Hell, who gave you so little stamina?

Then again, not all changes are systemic. Arachnophobes will surely thank any developer who helps them avoid the visage of that critter. Reducing the gore or changing the enemies to robots spilling oil might get you some favor with the squeamish crowd.

And that’s… great! I’m not one to tell anyone how to play their games. If the developer ships it, and you decide to use it, go ahead! Same if you managed to mod it in. It’s your game, right? I don’t find anything wrong with people making a game more accessible to themselves or others. This is not a write-up scolding anyone, don’t worry. Let’s just have fun for a bit.

Let’s take the original Doom. Some of the best action in the business. Really, you can mod it to do anything you want. Well? How much Doom can we modify until it’s no longer Doom?

Too much violence? You could remove the blood, maybe even incapacitate the demons instead of killing them. Too little? There’s Brutal Doom for you.

Could you make a role-playing game in Doom? Yes, many games have done it to different degrees, from STRIFE to Hedon Bloodrite. Narrative choices? Moving around? Interacting with characters? You got it.

Let’s do F.E.A.R. Have you heard of Selaco? Could you make Doom about making love to the monst- We don’t talk about that (but yes).

Really, through modding support and community effort, you can make Doom into anything! And here’s where you would probably tell me that it isn’t really Doom by that point and… is it? If you play Doom with different weapons and increase brutality, or have a very good time with femme-presenting monsters… is it not Doom anymore? I mean, so much of the DNA is there. If you play Another Crab’s Treasure and decide to give the protagonist a gun, is it still Another Crab’s Treasure? I’d say that it is.

Maybe the point is the level of control allowed. Aggro Crab decided to give you a gun, so using a gun is still part of Another Crab’s Treasure.

Well, id gave us the whole modding kit, doesn’t that count? Maybe not. After all, id made it possible, but perhaps they didn’t expect or maybe desire many of the possible creations that came out of it.

We’re left with authorial intent. A game is whatever its designer defines as possible. Following that logic, a randomizer mod wouldn’t really be the same game anymore, though… that might be an acceptable compromise. Certainly, I could stop the diatribe right there and refuse to continue to indulge a useless hypothetical.

Let’s give it a last spin, however: How much of a game is what a designer intended? They set the rules of play, of course. And a good designer will be able to take the players and their perspective into account. But a game is not its ruleset. A game emerges from the interaction between the rules and the player. The way we interpret them, we react to them, and we use them to our advantage.

id gave us Doom. We can make and unmake Doom at our pleasure. But as long as we work with Doom, that’s our point of reference. That’s something we’re doing *to Doom*, or *with Doom*. Deciding to break or change the rules of a game, like with a randomizer, might detract from the intended experience. Regardless, it still allows us to try the game in a novel, different way.

While presumably all games can be modded with enough effort and enthusiasm, we have to recognize that Doom openness for modding elevates it among other cases. The same can be said for any game that enables you to modify (or break) the experience by providing you the tools or at least the documentation to do so.

Even if the developer didn’t think of it, they did decide to let us go wild. That’s commendable. The game ends up being both the game itself and the act of messing with it.

A whole medium contained in a single entry. An endless parade of ways of enhancing, changing, breaking, mutating Doom. Maybe that’s why it’s eternal.

Breaking a game is part of playing a game, then. Not that everybody should be happy with that. Whether a developer designed it deliberately or we force it through code tampering….

Maybe there’s no end. It’s all the same game. The rules are there, whether we break them or not.

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Claribel F. Millgress is a trans writer, game developer and narrative designer from Argentina. Deeply in love with fiction, games, and storytelling through play and dynamics, and found on bluesky here.