Start the research

Well that would be a lie. It already started last week, but this week I got my research topic and the opportunity to get to know the people I’ll be doing this research with. So it’s actually only from today that we can start to work.

My research topic that I chose was game modding. Mikael the guy that will supervise our research talked a little bit with our group and asked our experience in the field. We soon ended up with the problems that modders have to “sell” their mod to the public. Immediate questions that we asked ourselves was what makes a mod popular, where do people hook of in the development of the mod and the such.

We are not going to lay the focus on the contents of the mod be it game experience, sound, graphic design,… We are going to look if modders make mistakes in thinking how their community reacts to certain aspects, or just think that they know their community while they actually don't know anything of it. Even going deeper in trying to find new ways for modders in communicating with their audience.

In a way this is all very related to what I do in Belgium in my courses communication and multimediadesign. It’s almost the same concept as a project (case 2.4. wondercall) that we did, the only difference is that we know have to make a real study and make a general overview how modders can brand their mod.

Some fast research I made, didn’t reveal much yet about the topic we chose. I only found some small tutorials explaining some aspects of the communication between modders and their community:

• Your mod’s website
• Getting the first impression right
• Setting up your mod’s site
• PR do's and don'ts

All of them are from moddb. Their are several other sites like moddb, but those I still have to browse through.

Words we are going to use offten or can help us:

• community: community building, understanding the market, knowing the market
  
• PR: media releases, sticking to concepts
• branding: marketing, mod branding (our new term of the research propably), internet marketing
• Site: interactivity, user input, updating, two way communication
• ...

The problem situation is already typed out and I'm going to post it as soon as I can. All People that can help us on the subject are offcourse invited to drop in a line in the comments!