Understanding Women Modders Using the Serious Leisure Perspective
In this episode I unpack Trancred et al.’s (2020) publication titled “Understanding women modders using the serious leisure perspective,” which discusses a survey that investigated motivations for participating in modding practices among women.
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Welcome back to another episode of the
CSK8 podcast
my name is jared o'leary each week of
the podcast alternates between an
interview with a guest
or multiple guests and a solo episode
where i unpack some scholarship
this week's particular episode is a solo
episode where i unpack the paper titled
understanding women matters using the
serious leisure perspective
and it was written by nicoletto tancrid
selen turkey
nicole vickery pettawayeth and anna
mccoomb
apologies if i mispronounced any names
this paper is actually available for
free
and you can find a direct link to it in
the show notes by clicking
the link in the description or by
visiting jared o'leary.com
so if you're interested in reading this
particular paper make sure you check out
the show notes so you can
dive into this a little bit deeper
alright so here's the abstract for this
particular paper
quote modding the act of custom creation
in video games is a large enterprise
comprising millions of people
despite the large number of individuals
creating mods our understanding of who
mottos are and their motivation for
modding is limited
this is especially true for minority
groups including women
in prior research with modding
communities women modders were
consistently underrepresented
using a mixed method survey that
incorporates a serious leisure framework
this study begins to unravel women's
participation in modding activities
we begin to identify who women motters
are examine what motivates them to mod
and investigate their modding practices
results show that women modders value
the creation of multiple mod types
including cosmetic environmental and
gameplay modifications
they are primarily motivated by
self-gratification and enjoyment
these findings create new insights into
how women interact with gaming
environments
as well as identifying those aspects of
the experience that motivate women's
engagement in modding
end quote so that was actually a really
good abstract in terms of it
adequately summarizing the main gist of
this particular paper
try to summarize this paper into a
single sentence i would say that
this survey investigated motivations for
participating in modding practices among
women
so you might be asking well what exactly
is modding so an example of a mod
is when you take a video game or maybe
even some software but in this case
a video game and you change it to do
something different
so for example i proposed my wife by
modding the video game minecraft
so what i did is i added in custom armor
and weapons
they were all color purple which is her
favorite color i added in our dogs into
the game
so instead of having wolves there were
four different variations that all made
different sounds that were kind of like
unique to the characteristics of our
dog's behaviors and whatnot
and added in some achievements and
quests that my wife went on in order to
eventually craft a circle of hearts
which created a
box that had the ring inside of it so
all of this
was not in the original game minecraft
so i had to add it into it by changing
the code
and changing some of the asset files in
it and that is different types of
modding
that i used in order to do that so
modding is actually a fairly common
practice
that is pretty underrepresented in terms
of research that's being done on
it however i've already done three
unpacking scholarship episodes that talk
about modding
so if you want to check those out make
sure you look at the links in the show
notes
so in their introduction the authors
mentioned that
modding is fairly common but there's not
a lot of research on it especially in
underrepresented groups like women
modders
so to explore this they had three
research questions for this
and they are who are women modders what
motivates women modders to mod
and what do women modders modding
practices look like for example
what games are they more likely to mod
and what types of mods do they create
so in the introduction they provide
three quick answers to each of these
questions
and so the first one who are women
modders they respond by basically saying
there is not a typical women monitor for
the second question what motivates women
modders to mod here's a quote from page
two quote
unlike previous studies that included
mainly men we found that women tend to
mod for personal enjoyment and rarely
mod for financial or social reasons
while some women engage in modding as
amateurs embracing professional
practices and establishing a public
profile
many others are dedicated hobbyists
modding for these makers and tinkerers
provides an avenue for self-expression
and personal fulfillment
many embrace the acquisition of
knowledge for his own sake end quote
and their quick answer to the third
research question which was what do
women monitors
modding practices look like is that it's
a range of modding
so i'll unpack each of these a little
bit more a little bit later in this
episode
all right so the background section of
this paper is divided into
a few different subheaders so one of
them is modding and modders
the next one is modern motivations the
next one is women modders and their
motivations
and the last one is serious leisure
framework and modding so the authors
note that modders typically have two
main characteristics here's a quote from
page two quote
they love the games they mod and they
want to change how the game is played
end quote
modders are motivated by wanting to have
fun playing and modifying a game
to make it their own version or entirely
new game and also
experience motivation through social
creative and personal means
at least typically speaking according to
the research that they are summarizing
so although a few studies have
investigated women's interests and
motivations in modding
some prior studies found that a quote
passion for modding seemed to shift the
young girls focus from pursuing art and
fashion design
to learning computer skills and wanting
to pursue an i.t centered career
end quote from page three so there's a
range of reasons
for participating in modding or
motivations for participating in modding
and prior studies that have investigated
women's interests has found that it has
shifted
interest into computer science and i.t
related fields all right so the next
section
outlines the serious leisure framework
which
is a framework that i wasn't familiar
with until a few years ago
when i happened to write a chapter for a
music making and leisure handbook so
this particular framework is useful for
understanding the ways that people
engage in subject areas or hobbies or
whatever
for leisure purposes the authors
summarize three types of leisure
so one is serious leisure the next is
casual leisure and then the third one is
project based leisure
so here are some quotes that kind of
unpack each of those three
and these are from page three quote
serious leisure
a commitment to an amateur hobbyist or
volunteer activity
where an individual can improve and
express their skills knowledge
and experience of the activity as the
activity is sufficiently substantial
interesting and fulfilling the
commitment is term end quote
and by the way here's a quote that kind
of explains the use of the word series
quote the use of the word serious is
meant to embody a sense of
sincerity and importance in the hobby
activities end quote
so it doesn't mean like if you're having
fun and like being jovial about
something
then it's not considered seriously sure
nothing related to that at all
okay so here's a quote for casual
leisure also from page three
quote an intrinsically rewarding
activity that requires little training
to enjoy
while pleasurable the activity is
relatively short-lived
unquote and here's a quote for
project-based leisure
quote a creative undertaking that is
fairly complicated
infrequent short-lived and completed
during an individual's free time end
quote so looking at modding through this
framework we could say that modding
could occur from a serious
leisure perspective a casual leisure
perspective or even a project-based
leisure perspective
going back to my initial example of
modding the game minecraft to propose
my wife it was not an example of serious
leisure it was not an example of casual
leisure it was instead an example of
project-based leisure
so it's short-lived i spent a few months
working on it whenever she would leave
the house
and i completed it in my own free time
and then after proposing
did not modify that particular mod
because i wanted to keep it intact
so that particular example is an example
of project-based leisure however if i
had continued to engage in more mods
then it could become an example of
casual or serious leisure the authors in
this article note that
many people often describe modding as
participatory which is the framework
that i talked about
a couple of weeks ago in the unpacking
scholarship
paper by jenkins at all which i'll link
to in the show notes
while other authors will also describe
modding as a hobby
so here's a quote from page three quote
hobbies are considered as
serious leisure activity where an
individual voluntarily partakes in an
activity in their free time end quote
all right so summarize
the background they're basically saying
hey there's a lot of information on
modding and modders but there's not a
lot of information on women
and there's also not really an
application of serious leisure framework
in relation to modding practices so they
hope to explore that in this particular
article
which i think is a neat idea all right
so the next section of the paper is the
methods and i'll summarize it fairly
quickly
so they sent out a survey and received
and they used 68 of them from women so
in this survey they asked for
demographic information they asked for
information
on experience with modding the types of
mods people created
and some reasons for modding which by
the way in case you haven't heard the
previous episodes on different mod types
here are some mod types that were
mentioned in this particular paper
so one is cosmetic mods which change the
way something looks so for example
when i put our dogs into the game i made
four variations of
the wolf and made it so that it was
basically changing the way that the wolf
looked that's an example of a cosmetic
mod
an environment mod changes the
appearance of the environment itself
so an example of that in the mod that i
use with my wife
is i added in these purple ore blocks
that made some interesting sounds
and that gave purple ore that she could
use to craft her different
armor and weapons and whatnot so that
was changing the environment by
making it so that a new type of block
appeared in the game
now a total conversion mod is a type of
mod that completely changes the game
into something different so for example
you could turn
a first person shooter game into a role
playing game
another type of mod are add-on mods
which are mods that enhance the
experience
so an example that you might be familiar
with if you play mmos
like world of warcraft is you can have
add-on mods that can
keep track of stats in a raid it'll tell
you who did the most damage what your
average damage minute was
how often you healed etc another type of
mod is gameplay mods
which enhances the gameplay in some way
such as giving characters new abilities
so going back to the mod that i used to
propose my wife
if you watch the video that's in the
show notes you'll see that
i added in like new items like tofu
and things like that because we're vegan
make it so she could
cook with tofu another type of mod that
the authors mention
are sex or sexual mods which are mods
that add nudity or
sex acts to a game so a common one that
is often referred to
is in the game sims modders have added
in
things that make it so that the sims do
something they could not do without the
mod and they're related to sexual acts
and the next mod category they talk
about are joke or humor mods
so one of my favorite examples that they
mention in this particular article is in
the video game skyrim
there's this dragon at the beginning of
the game that will attack this
little outpost and somebody modded the
game so that instead of a dragon it was
a flying thomas the tank engine so you'd
see thomas the tank
flying around breathing fire and making
train sounds
while basically destroying an entire
outpost
it's hilarious i'll include a link to it
in the show notes as i highly recommend
you watching it
and the last type of mod that they
mention in this are patches and bug mods
that fix bugs in games all right so
those are the type of mods
and getting back to the methods they
used a serious leisure inventory measure
which they refer to as
slim the acronym to assess responses
to a nine point likert scale and then
they used thematic analysis to analyze
any of the open
responses so if it was like a write a
paragraph about your thoughts on
blank what motivates you as a modder or
whatever then they
take those responses and they put them
into different
clusters or categories that they would
then
label as themes and then summarize it in
the actual paper itself
all right so that's the methods so let's
get into the
nitty gritty of the actual results so
demographic wise
who are women modders so a few of the
women respondents were over 50
however the average age was 29 years old
so most of the women were unemployed at
the time of the survey
and not students and they lived in north
america australia
europe and asia however the majority of
these respondents
listed the united states as their
original country of origin
the average years of experience modding
was 4.46 years with only a few rating
themselves as extremely
experienced modders and the median
number of completed mods per person was
while the average was 36.86 mods
so the majority of modders created mods
for rpgs like skyrim
with stardew valley coming in second for
types of mods which is a great game if
you haven't played it yet
alright so here's a summary of the mod
types that they tended to engage in
so 31 of the mods were cosmetic 29 were
environmental
were joking humor mods
three were total conversion two were sex
or sexual mods
and two were bug fixes that's from page
five
so the majority of the mods changed the
way the game looked or how it played
all right so the next section of the
paper is on the slim analysis
so there were 10 different components
that i will now briefly summarize
alright so the first component is group
and unique ethos
here's a quote from page six quote on
average participants have a neutral
stance towards being part of the group
as their modding motivation end quote so
it sounds like the respondents were
indifferent
some of them may have preferred it some
of them didn't like to work in groups
and some of them
could care less either direction the
next component was persistence and
progress
here's a quote also from page six quote
overall it appears that women modders
feel they are improving their skills
managing obstacles and rising to the
challenges that they face
end quote i will say as somebody who is
new to
modding there is definitely a lot of
persistence but you'll notice a lot of
progress when you actually see the
things that you create with code
or through visual transformations
actually appear in your game itself
which is pretty cool and rewarding so
the next component
is invigoration and renewal
so women in this survey said that it was
slightly gratifying
and slightly self-actualizing the next
component is personal fulfillment
which the women who responded to this
felt that it was a
form of personal enrichment to some
extent the next component that is
similar to this is enjoyment
and the respondents indicated that most
of them modded for
personal enjoyment which makes sense
because you're changing a game to do
something
you want it to do which it can be really
fun
but also can be frustrating if you're
working on a particular bug or function
or feature
so the next component is self-expression
which kind of relates to what i was just
talking about
and they found that modding helped
people to express their identity to some
extent
the next component is career
contingencies and by career and from a
serious
leisure perspective it does not mean
like oh you're going to get a job doing
this hobby
it instead means quote the stepping
stones in a hobbyist
practices end quote from page six so the
participants were able to kind of
identify some of those stepping stones
that define their involvement with
creating mods the next component is
personal abilities
and participants found that they were
able to
demonstrate some of their personal
abilities through modding the next
component is financial return
and here's a quote from page six where
they found that the findings quote
supports a previous study that found
modders are not motivated by monetary
gain when it comes to modding
and contradicts assumptions that many
modders want jobs in the games industry
end quote so as i mentioned in other
episodes there are a lot of people who
explore modding and how that can serve
as a pipeline to get into
game related positions at companies but
these authors are saying
look some people just want a mod just
for the sake of modding because it's fun
not necessarily for a career which is
awesome
and the very last component is effort
so the respondents mentioned that they
put considerable amount of effort into
their own modding practices
which makes sense because it's not
always easy to modify a game so the next
section
on the qualitative findings the authors
provide some quotes
on the motivations of respondents for
modding as well as some case studies on
some of the participants so i recommend
checking those out if you want to read
those a little bit more
so the last bulk of the paper is the
discussion section so this paper
basically summarizes
the findings the stuff that i was just
kind of talking about in the previous
section
however one of the interesting findings
that i want to point out
and highlight is because it contradicts
something i've heard
as being important is that quote we also
found that social aspects were not a
primary motivation for women
however our qualitative and slim
findings suggest that there are some
exceptions
such as an enjoyment of community
engagement end quote from page nine
here's another quote from the same page
quote the majority of the women modders
either had not worked on a group modding
project 50
or did not answer the question 17.6
conversely previous research focusing on
men
found this to be a main motivator end
quote so in other words
prior modding research and discourse has
talked about how
oh well modding can be really
collaborative etc but this finding was
saying
well about half the people who responded
actually preferred to work on their own
which is something that
i have also witnessed in like the k-8
classes that i've worked with
in the coding classes is i get the
option where anyone could work in any
group that they wanted
in the classes i was working with and
the vast majority of people
were like no i'd rather work on my own
which contradicts some of the
discussions that i've heard around
programming for professional sake is
there's
the argument well you're always going to
be working on a team so therefore you
always need to be working on some kind
of group project
and while that might be true for most of
the programming
that you will see in a lot of larger
corporations or even smaller companies
that's not necessarily the case for
engaging in computer science and coding
for leisure
so something we need to consider is are
the practices that we are modeling in
the classroom
are they there to support corporate
practices or are they also there to
support some of the things that kids can
engage in when they
leave the classroom and just want to do
it for leisure alright so that's kind of
the main
summary of the article itself so now i
want to kind of provide some my
lingering thoughts and questions which
is something that i like to do at the
end of each of these because there's
always something that i want to learn
more about
or consider on these particular papers
that i unpack so the first question that
i have is
what context and data are missing from
the open ended responses to the survey
in other words if
these were semi-structured interviews
that had the opportunity to actually ask
some follow-up questions
what would we learn that wasn't evident
through a survey response so while
survey responses are easy
relatively easy to gather a large number
of responses from different people
without having to
invest a significant portion of time it
would be interesting to see how the
responses would have compared with
actual interviews where you could ask
some follow-up oh why did you say that
or what does that mean
or what are your perspectives on this
thing that you're not mentioning but
might be important
etc and i asked that question not as a
knock on the research itself it's a good
paper i recommend reading it but just to
kind of
say hey there are some limitations in
survey approach
and it would be interesting to see what
these findings are if you use some other
methods
so the next question that i have is how
do these answers compare with the
responses from male or non-binary
participants who may have also filled
out the survey
and what about similarities and
differences among
other demographics aside from gender so
i'm curious how responses and different
categories and types of mods would have
changed depending on which demographics
you're looking
at for this the respondents in this
particular survey
and again that's just me kind of
thinking out loud to say that hey
that would be interesting to know so the
last question that i have is do
participants strongly identify
as a female modder or are there
other identities that better align with
their interest in modding
and ask us if we think back to the
chapter three
episode of paulo freddy's book pedagogy
of the oppressed
where i talk about the importance of
dialogue between oppressor and oppressed
and how sometimes you engage in that
dialogue of somebody who you believe is
being oppressed
and you might find out oh they actually
don't feel the same way and have a
different perspective on it
and it's not something that they are
actively interested in changing so while
there might be a limited number of women
who are engaging in modding
maybe they don't see that as a problem
because maybe that's not an identity
that they
are bringing to the table when it comes
to engaging in modding practices
so for example although i'm non-binary
it's
which is an underrepresented group an
under discussed group
my gender identity is not something that
i think about when i'm engaging in
serious leisure
or discussing something in an infinity
group
such as like a video game affinity group
i'm instead there to talk about the game
not about the game in relation to my
gender identity so in that particular
context my gender identity is simply
something that i don't really consider
in those contexts and so i'm raising
this question
just because i'm thinking out loud and
wondering that just because we can
explore marginalized identities within a
group
perhaps we should ask also whether
people within those marginalized groups
even think about those particular
demographics or identities in relation
to the engagement
in that group and again that's just me
thinking out loud i do appreciate
anyone who's willing to investigate
underrepresentation in any form of
groups but i also just think that we
need to engage in a dialogue with them
to see well does this actually
is this something that's important to
that demographic that we're
investigating that is underrepresented
and if so why and if not
why mls lingering thought is how might
we consider leisure when engaging in
classroom context
so if we're doing computer science or
coding in our classes are we just
preparing for future jobs or are we also
talking about how
people can use these practices and
concepts
outside of just careers so for example
if you have some kids
who really want to go into a career that
does not use computer science concepts
and practices
but they might want to engage in in
leisure how could you make those
connections for them or help them make
those connections
so those are some of my lingering
questions or thoughts and i hope
this quick summary of the paper entices
you to want to actually read it which
you can find for free again
clicking the link in the show note will
take you directly to the page
and you can find those by going to
jaredlery.com or clicking the link in
the show notes
if you enjoyed this episodes please
consider sharing with somebody else
or consider adding a review on whatever
app you're listening to this on thanks
so much for taking the time to listen
and i hope you all have a wonderful and
safe week
Article
Tancred, N., Turkay, S., Vickery, N., Wyeth, P., & McCoombe, A. (2020). Understanding women modders using the serious leisure perspective. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–13.
Abstract
“Modding, the act of custom creation in videogames, is a large enterprise comprising millions of people. Despite the large number of individuals creating mods, our understanding of who modders are and their motivation for modding is limited. This is especially true for minority groups, including women. In prior research with modding communities, women modders were consistently underrepresented. Using a mixed-method survey (N = 68) that incorporates the Serious Leisure Framework, this study begins to unravel women’s participation in modding activities. We begin to identify who women modders are, examine what motivates them to mod, and investigate their modding practices. Results show that women modders value the creation of multiple mod types, including cosmetic, environmental and gameplay modification. They are primarily motivated by self-gratification and enjoyment. These findings create new insights into how women interact with gaming environments, as well as identifying those aspects of the experience that motivate women’s engagement in modding.”
Author Keywords
Modders, modding, women modding, game modifications, custom content, video games, serious leisure
My One Sentence Summary
This survey investigated motivations for participating in modding practices among women.
Some Of My Lingering Questions/Thoughts
What context and data are missing from the open-ended responses to the survey?
How did these answers compare with the responses from male or nonbinary participants who also filled out the survey?
What about similarities and differences among other demographics aside from gender?
Do participants strongly identify as a female modder are there are identities that better align with their interest in modding?
How might we consider leisure within classroom contexts?
Resources/Links Relevant to This Episode
Other podcast episodes that were mentioned or are relevant to this episode
Computer Game Mods, Modders, Modding, and the Mod Scene
In this episode I unpack Scacchi’s (2010) publication titled “Computer game mods, modders, modding, and the mod scene,” which examines modding practices within the mod scene, and discusses the social and corporate pressures that influence this culture.
Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture
In this episode I unpack Jenkins et al.’s (2005) publication titled “Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century,” which summarizes the three challenges in media literacy education and provides several core media literacy skills that can address these challenges.
Considering Leisure in Education with Roger Mantie
In this interview with Roger Mantie, we discuss the importance of leisure for self preservation, problematize the single focus of education for workforce readiness, discuss the importance of focusing on happiness and wellbeing, explore discourse in education and around leisure, and much more.
How to Get Started with Computer Science Education
In this episode I provide a framework for how districts and educators can get started with computer science education for free.
In this episode I unpack El-Nasr and Smith’s (2006) publication titled “Learning through game modding,” which describes two case studies on modifying video games to learn software development and design, as well as programming, artistic, and video game concepts.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
This episode is the start of a miniseries that unpacks Paulo Freire’s (1970) book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” This particular episode unpacks chapter 1, which discusses how oppressors maintain control over the oppressed. Following unpacking scholarship episodes discuss what this looks like in education and how educators can adopt a “pedagogy of the oppressed” to break cycles of oppression.
This episode is episode two of a miniseries that unpacks Paulo Freire’s (1970) book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” This particular episode unpacks chapter 2, which discusses the “banking” approach to education that assumes students are repositories of information, and then proposes a liberatory approach to education that focuses on posing problems that students and teachers collaboratively solve. If you haven’t listened to the discussion on the first chapter, click here.
This episode is episode three of a miniseries that unpacks Paulo Freire’s (1970) book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” This particular episode unpacks chapter 3, which discusses the importance of dialogue when engaging in liberatory practices. This episode builds off the previous unpacking scholarship episodes on chapter one and chapter two, so make sure you listen to those episodes before jumping in here.
This episode is the final episode of a miniseries that unpacks Paulo Freire’s (1970) book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” This particular episode unpacks chapter 4, which synthesizes the concepts introduced in the previous chapters and discusses the difference between anti-dialogical and dialogical practices in education (and at large). This episode builds off the previous unpacking scholarship episodes on chapter one, chapter two, and chapter three so make sure you listen to those episodes before jumping in here.
Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry
In this episode I unpack Kücklich’s (2005) publication titled “Precarious playbour: Modders and the digital game industry,” which problematizes modding as a form of free labor.
When the Game is Not Enough: Motivations and Practices Among Computer Game Modding Culture
In this episode I unpack Sotamaa's (2010) publication titled “When the game is not enough: Motivations and practices among computer game modding culture,” which is a case study that explores the attitudes, motivations, and practices of 29 people who create mods for the game Operation Flashpoint.
Read the chapter I mentioned in the handbook for music making and leisure
Watch a video of the Thomas the Tank mod (not appropriate for school due to violence and language)
Find other CS educators and resources by using the #CSK8 hashtag on Twitter
Free CS Resources I Have Created
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