Following up from yesterday’s post on the 20th anniversary, The Economist also sings the praises of Doom:
Yet for Babbage, the biggest innovation of Doom was something subtler. Video games, then and now, are mainly passive entertainment products, a bit like a more interactive television. You buy one and play it until you either beat it or get bored. But Doom was popular enough that eager users delved into its inner workings, hacking together programs that would let people build their own levels. Drawing something in what was, essentially, a rudimentary CAD program, and then running around inside your own creation, was an astonishing, liberating experience. Like almost everybody else, Babbage’s first custom level was an attempt to reconstruct his own house.
Other programs allowed you to play around with the game itself, changing how weapons worked, or how monsters behaved. For a 12-year-old who liked computers but was rather fuzzy about how they actually worked, being able to pull back the curtain like this was revelatory. Tinkering around with Doom was a wonderful introduction to the mysteries of computers and how their programs were put together. Rather than trying to stop this unauthorised meddling, id embraced it. Its next game, Quake, was designed to actively encourage it.
The modification, or “modding” movement that Doom and Quake inspired heavily influenced the growing games industry. Babbage knows people who got jobs in the industry off the back of their ability to remix others’ creations. (Tim Willits, id’s current creative director, was hired after impressing the firm with his home-brewed Doom maps.) Commercial products — even entire genres of games — exist that trace their roots back to a fascinated teenager playing around in his (or, more rarely, her) bedroom.
But it had more personal effects, too. Being able to alter the game transformed the player from a mere passive consumer of media into a producer in his own right, something that is much harder in most other kinds of media. Amateur filmmakers need expensive kit and a willing cast to indulge their passion. Mastering a musical instrument takes years of practice; starting a band requires like-minded friends. Writing a novel looks easy, until you try it. But creating your own Doom mod was easy enough that anyone could learn it in a day or two. With a bit of practice, it was possible to churn out professional-quality stuff. “User-generated content” was a big buzzword a few years back, but once again, Doom got there first.
