Computer games are something of an aberration in the history of games in that they are not communal property and are instead the intellectual property of a company. This is contrast to games like Chess, which is owned by no one and evolved through a process of community consensus on the rules before stabilizing in it’s current form. With the advocate of internet networked games and the modding scene, we’ve moved back in the other direction to a degree. Amateur and hobbyist game designers can play with the existing assets and systems of published games in order to create game variants which can in turn branch off into entirely new communities and games. These games can then be appropriated by shrewd companies like Valve and turned back into owned intellectual property. There’s an interesting connection to be made here to the way that scientific value is often created by publicly funded research and then appropriated and exploited by private capitalist entities. Yannis Varoufakis (who interestingly enough worked for Valve as an economist for a period) has spoken eloquently about this process, as has Noam Chomsky who has seen it first hand, given that he teaches at MIT.
I’ve written a bit about Dota 2 before and so won’t describe it at length here but it is in my opinion one of the most mechanically rich and interesting video games in existence. I’ve played about 2000 hours of it at this point. I still play it when I am largely uninterested with other video games, it’s almost endlessly interesting to me given the complexity and permutations possible within a match. It arose through the online modding scene, originally starting as a custom game mode for Warcraft 3, created by Blizzard. It attracted a community and the rules and mechanics were added to and developed over time by an unpaid group of volunteers. Eventually Valve swooped in and hired one of the prominent contributors IceFrog and created their own commercial version of it called Dota 2. Massively profitable game League of Legends is also a product of this process. Therefore two of the very most popular games in the world arose through this process of community members creating variations on games and private companies appropriating that work.
The latest popular new variant is a strange game called Dota Auto Chess. It is drawing a following and is promoted within the Dota 2 game client application, which is how I discovered it. It uses the same characters and assets (art, sound effects, animations) as Dota 2 but deploys them to make a weird low input turn based game in which you pick which pieces to buy and then let them automatically fight one another. It’s all about buying the right pieces and combining them together to make them more powerful, but completely eschews direct control, you basically buy stuff and then watch what happens. It’s compelling and I’ve started to play a bit and from looking at the community I can guess that it will continue to grow in popularity and maybe become a thing on it’s own. Valve has been smart in allowing the further creation of custom game modes in Dota 2, supporting the ongoing fermentation of game design within the ecosystem. The question is what will happen next? Will Valve find a way to keep Dota Auto Chess on it’s platform where they can capture most of the value and players? Will the developers of Auto Chess drop the Dota component and split off? Valve has a partial solution in the creation of the Steam Marketplace. If they could create a way for these kind of variant designers to earn income from their creations, they could continue to perpetuate their lock-in effects and prosper. The failure of their earlier attempts to launch paid mod support on Steam suggests they have considered this. Dota Auto Chess is an interesting case study as it grows more popular to see what will happen.
