Week 15- Art Experience – Remix Culture

For my remix I decided to do something that I do on a regular basis, mod a game. What modding is taking a base game and adding or removing content to change game play, graphics, sound, or even the entire genre of game sometimes. I consider this a remix because I’m taking a initial piece of content and I mixed and matched the code of the game with various modifiers I sourced from nexus to turn a game from 2012 into a game that could rival modern RPGs. The greatest challenge in this particular remix was getting all of the modifications to play nicely, considering that there are 167 mods running simultaneously. The freedom of the internet largely allowed me to do this via nexus. It would’ve taken me decades to code a game like this all by myself, but through the freedom of sharing code and mods it allows everyone to specialize and create a better more nuanced experience in a fraction of the time it would take a lone creator. That speaks largely to the heart of the internet, the freedom to share. However, whenever sharing occurs there is always the fear of plagiarism for the creators, and lawsuits for the users. The risk of getting your livelihood destroyed by something you are not well versed in (copyright law) is always apparent when using content from ambiguous sources on the internet. Which is the crux of the issue, copyright law is fundamentally broken currently copyright law protects certain creative works for decades or more. In some cases a piece of art can be copyrighted for 100 years. Somewhat puzzling patents on the other hand, which are essentially copyright for inventions only last about 20 years. If its illogical to have a piece of machinery restricted for use for more than 20 years than how is it fine that a piece of music can be copyrighted for longer than a human lifetime? Copyright law is entirely too far reaching for the world as it is and for this reason my mod list is in the public domain. The reason being is anyone should be able to see what it is they need to do to properly modify and remix their own elder scrolls game.