What Game Modding Taught Me About Truth

I wouldn’t consider myself a religious man. Talk of God, sacred spaces, divine intervention in the world: all those things earn a cynical side-eye from me, as mantras of comfort that are fine for those who find comfort in them. But they’ve never been meaningful ideas in my own life, and so I am especially confused and somewhat unprepared when I stumble across the esoteric edge of life experience myself.

Truth can be a dodgy concept. However, there are moments that make me realize that there’s more going on than the petty personal concerns that tie me down to the present moment. Things that suggest deeper, broader meaning that I should probably notice. 

And when that happens, I can’t help but gnaw on that a bit, turn it over, try to understand it. I want to take it apart, call it mine, pretend that I made it. That I somehow own it.

I’m not a religious man, but I do reluctantly acknowledge that life gets weird sometimes, and that perhaps I am not as smart as I would like to think I am.

The Uncreated Spaces

Will Wright has spoken many times in interviews about a regular experience he’s had, going back to his development of the original SimCity: things would emerge from the rules he created, odd interactions that became meaningful little mini-stories in the gameplay of the individual player. And then he would get questions from people. “How did you know to make it do that?”, they’d ask. “It’s so cool that this strange little event can happen!”

The truth - and Wright acknowledges this - is that he didn’t code that event. He made the rules, sure, but this odd little event space simply emerged from the intersection of the rules, player perception, and our own innate talent for telling ourselves stories.

No one “made” it. The thing that draws the reaction isn’t something that anyone created. It’s something that exists in the real world, a space that emerged from the complexity of reality at this particular intersection of time, place, and circumstance.

Frankly, seeing that happen firsthand disturbs, inspires, and humbles me in equal measure.

I think I first started seeing this for myself early while developing PANPC, in 2018. By then I had been modding in the Fallout game community for many years, hacking away in a little niche corner of the community. I saw myself as a creator, but a very minor one: if I was a god, then godhood was quite wasted on me. My divine providence didn't extend much beyond making these red pixels bang into those blue ones to make pretty sparks.

One day, someone trying my mod out told me a story about wandering through the game’s downtown Boston area, and encountering a Raider girl just standing out in the middle of the street. The player raised his gun on approach; the Raider girl took off, running down the street and around the corner. He gave chase, expecting an easy kill and loot drop. He followed her down an alley.

And right into a group of Raiders with shotguns, who proceeded to blast him to pieces.

The player asked me, how did you manage to make that Raider girl set a trap like that? And, of course, the answer is “I didn’t.” As with Wright’s experience with SimCity, it just sort of happened. The rules, player perception, and our talent for telling ourselves stories all came together to generate this uncreated thing that exists as a property of the real world.

None of us can genuinely take credit for it. Those experiences come from somewhere else, and that somewhere else is the thing that makes a non-religious guy like me stop for an uneasy moment. It’s weird. It points to something profound. I can’t let that go; I have to turn it over and try to understand it, take it apart, make it mine.

It has now been almost four years since that experience, and I have since seen this play out over and over again. 

And you know what? I don’t understand it any better now than I did then. It’s not any more mine than it was then. I’ve just come to respect and appreciate it more.

What None of Us Make, Yet All of Us Share

I’ve learned that seeing yourself as the Creator (or Author, or Developer, or whatever title you want to give yourself) is not only limiting, it’s pretty disingenuous. Yes, I sit here and write code. I run tests. I fix things that appear to be broken. But in the end, I’m not creating the actual thing that matters - I’m simply fixing the fence that encapsulates that thing, working to help maintain a place where that essential, real thing can safely exist. And I’m not the only one working the fences.

I’ve come to see that when you choose to build something and put it out into the world, you are inviting a sort of communion to take place. You are drawing a circle around a shared space, where you and others can arrive and partake in this common experience of something that none of you made, exactly, but that exists in the real world because all of you are there.

I am still reluctant to use terms like “sacred space” - religious terminology, even a word like “communion”, sets my teeth on edge a bit - but I cannot deny that there is a real something in that circle. Something that none of us created, that perhaps is best only served, as a fragile and valuable phenomenon that deserves to be treated with respect and humility.

This is the thing that game modding has taught me: that I just work here.

As a result, now I can’t code, or write, or cook, or really engage in any creative activity without the full awareness that, once again, I am drawing that magic circle, not truly creating anything but only attempting to encapsulate something that is pre-existing, real, and awe-inspiring. And I am forever grateful to those who have allowed me the opportunity to discover and experience that, and who contribute and are willing to join me in my befuddlement.

That thing in the circle: I know that it is fundamentally nameless. That I’ve figured out. Anything I would choose to call it would be insufficient, something only useful as a pointer to where it is, rather as an indication of what it is. Maybe that’s how all names work.

And for that, a word like “truth” is as good as any.