In his now-famous article entitled Video Games As Narrative Architecture, Henry Jenkins mentions that video game designers should think about melodrama because of its “affective potential” and “reflection of internal states.”^[1] Jenkins also states that melodrama in video games is thus far explored territory.^[2] This has remained true since Jenkins wrote the piece in 2004. However, Jenkins’ statement remains true. Using melodrama as a framework for understanding games can help us understand the nature of games and those who play them.  Modding, short for modification, is a key feature of gaming culture in which game players make adjustments to already produced video games.^[3] This labor is often hobbyistic and unpaid but nevertheless popular and potentially creatively fulfilling. The melodramatic mode speaks to modding culture in a number of ways, but primarily serves as an example of Jenkins’ “reflection of internal states,”^[4] and therein presents systems of game cultures that are exceedingly personal, in contrast to the "hypercapitalistic" way in which video games are frequently perceived and discussed.^[5] In this essay, I utilize popular mods of Stardew Valley (Concerned Ape, 2016) to illustrate how gaming culture relies on melodrama to reflect personality and foster a sense of intimacy between players and games.

     In their oft-cited book Melodrama Unbound, Linda Williams and Christine Gledhill define the melodramatic mode as “one of the most prominent of cultural forms”^[6]  because of its potential for emotional expressiveness, and its “recognition of the personalized virtues and vices of characters whose actions have consequences for others.”^[7] While often unfairly stigmatized because of the mode’s relationship to the women’s films of the 1950s, the melodramatic modality is now considered cross-generic, cross-generational, and transmedial. The emotional expressiveness of video games takes shape in a variety of ways. The first is game narrative, which because of technological and industrial limitations is often limited and thus must frequently compound into easily legible emotions. The second is in game mechanisms, which inherently allow the player to adopt the goals of the avatar and respond emotionally.^[8] This often manifests as ‘excessive’ emotional reactions, like throwing the controller in a fit of rage, or becoming particularly attached to a character in some way.

     Modding, or the ability to change or modify the game’s code, demonstrates how players attempt to heighten both narrative and mechanistic emotionality. Stardew Valley is a farming simulator game in which the player character (an inherently customizable avatar) moves to a small town and starts up a farm. The player produces local goods, discovers magical secrets, and befriends the townspeople. The player may also date, marry, and/or divorce a select number of characters. While a segment of modding culture is based on hacking and hacking aesthetics, Stardew Valley and its creator allow the game to be individually modded, and a database of available mods, created by the Stardew fan community, is available to players who wish to modify their own game files.

     The nature of Stardew Valley already operates within the melodramatic mode for both its narrative and mechanism, but the fan-made mods demonstrate an increased desire for feeling and intimacy on behalf of anyone who decides to modify the game’s code. Other than mods that make the game easier, the most popular mods are primarily aesthetic or narrative-based. The aesthetic mods personalize the game beyond what is originally allowed. Your farm and the nearby town can become beholden to your personal vision, with more customizable visual features like buildings, pathways, colors, and nature. Narratively, modders have created more in-depth plot lines for various characters, have created new characters, and added previously unavailable characters to the eligible-for-marriage list. Some modders even create emotional (and somewhat humorous) scenarios in which they are caught cheating on a spouse or break-up another relationship.

     In player culture, the popularity for the aesthetic Stardew Valley mods can be read as a desire for emotional intimacy that complies with the melodramatic mode. Players spend hours creating and customizing their in-game space. This type of activity receives no in-game or real-world merit and is thus only completed for personal pleasure. That players want to customize more of the game suggests a labor of love. These design principles reflect the player’s internal state and become an expressive mode, similar to what Gledhill and Williams describe in Melodrama Unbound. The narrative modifications to Stardew Valley also suggest a sense of intimacy because they demonstrate that players want to interact with the game via its characters. When they modify plotlines and dialogue, they endeavor to feel more. They create more drama, romance, and love that indicate a desire to know the game through emotions.

     Video game culture, including modding, is ripe for investigation, and researchers have ignored the emotional propensities of the subfield for too long. As a framework for understanding, melodrama provides significant insight into the gamer’s world and should thus be accounted for when studying how games and players work. Modding culture is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Bibliography

Dyer-Witheford, Nick, and Greig De Peuter. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Gledhill, Christine, and Linda Williams, eds. Melodrama Unbound: Across History, Media, and National Cultures. Columbia University Press, 2018.

Jenkins, Henry. "Game Design as Narrative Architecture." In First Person: New Media As Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 2004.

Keogh, Brendan. A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames. MIT Press, 2018

Sotamaa, Olli. "When the Game Is Not Enough: Motivations and Practices Among Computer Game Modding Culture," Games and Culture 5, no. 3 (2010): 242, https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412009359765.