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I used to be into 'modding' when I was sixteen, and the project I worked on turned out quite successful. In fact, some of the core team went on to work for Valve based on this (and later) mods. Looking back, I suppose it was a bit odd that there was a group of people, most of them quite a bit older than me, who spent large amounts of time working on this project. From the bits and pieces of personal information that I gathered about my team members, many of them, including the team leader, had 'proper jobs'. One of them actually worked as a lead level designer on a triple-A game. I got the impression that they spent all this time on the modification because they loved building games, they loved not being constrained by budgets or non-passion related factors, they wanted to build up a portfolio to find a way into the gaming industry, or 'all of the above'. And it worked for some of them. I'm not sure if this is the case for a majority of 'modders', but I suspect the reasons I mentioned are quite common. If you love developing things, a game is a really great thing to build. It's, ultimately, purely about fun and joy. It doesn't have to be useful. That might be enough for those who work on (boring) useful stuff during the day. |