‘Modding’ is a term that is used among game players and in the game industry referring to player-driven modification or transformation of a computer game. Players of later twenty-first-century sandbox genre games like Minecraft have also become proficient at player-instigated changes to the game. The practice of modding began primarily in games of the ‘FPS’ or First-Person Shooter genre. In the 1990s, the first modders transformed preexisting commercial games like Id Software's Doom and Quake. For instance, Kevin Conner, cited above, modified his own so-called ‘skins’, changing the appearance of the original game's characters, and then delighted in killing off other Quake players’ characters wearing his skins. While some modifications intervene in such relatively minor ways, others make something entirely new out of an old game. Artists critique and destroy underlying gamic conventions— hacking apart the shooter game becomes chaotic artist's play. Over the last few decades, ludic mutators have evolved these game modding approaches, including the artist-hacker, the rule and game form tweaker, the world-builder, the interface modder, and the expert cheater.

The privatized commercial game industry that produces most modifiable games is structured as a managed hierarchy of specialized roles within a game developer company, overseen by game publishers and marketing agencies. Modders, on the other hand, are unpaid player-consumers who volunteer their game building efforts. As a self-taught amateur game designer, artist, or advanced tactical player, the modder first purchases (or otherwise acquires the game), and then modifies a game, thereafter releasing the modified game artifact on online forums and websites. Subsequently, the modder's reconfigurations may influence further commercial game developments and, if so, a feedback loop ensues between the two sets of gamic cultural producers: character types, gameplay styles, game themes, and level maps (what I call play material), circulate between the player's hands and a profit-oriented game industry.