I began this study by quoting Nancy Smith, President of The Sims label at Electronic Arts, who acclaimed The Sims as a ‘cultural phenomenon’ thanks to ‘the open-ended creative freedom that players experience with the game’ (‘The Sims celebrates 100 million sold worldwide’). My research has tackled precisely the players’ various ways of exercising the creative powers allocated to them in the context of this computer game. The basic dynamic of my work has been concentrated on the player activity known as modification, or ‘modding’ The Sims. The frame of reference of computer game modding has been based on the dual setting of first looking at what the game (code) itself provides for, and second, what the players actually choose to do with the game and its intrinsic scripts and affordances. Hence I have considered it important to ask, what kinds of ideologies The Sims has invited its players to articulate and play with, and how the players have responded to these propositions. More specifically, my research has been directed towards investigating the interaction between the game as a product (a commodity that can be purchased) and its play, the game as process. What has rendered the specific object of my study as a particularly interesting case is the fact that The Sims has, already from the start, been designed to cater to the needs and desires of its players by providing them with a set of tools and a kind of sandbox to play around with. The Sims in this respect has always been more like a toolset and a launching pad for its players’ creative aspirations than a fixed system of rules, means and objectives (which are considered typical of the organisation of digital games, in general). The players of The Sims do not only play the game, but they modify its contents and form to suit their individualist self-expressive purposes.

By concentrating on the modding of The Sims I have investigated specific aspects of digital games and culture that have so far been dismissed; that is why the title of the study refers to the reconfiguration of the culture of gaming through modding. What has been especially interesting in the modding of computer games from a cultural studies perspective is that the resulting data objects, mods, could be analysed as representations or as semiotic components of gameplay and the remediation of it.