Quake II

WADs, Bots and Mods: Multiplayer FPS Games as Co-creative Media

Sue Morris's paper examines multiplayer first-person shooter (FPS) games such as Quake, Half-Life, and Counter-Strike as "co-creative media," arguing that these games are not produced solely by developers or solely by players, but through the combined input of both.

• The paper argues that multiplayer FPS games such as Quake, Half-Life and Counter-Strike are 'co-creative media,' shaped jointly by developers and players rather than by either alone, extending beyond the participatory-media framing common in fan studies.
• Wolfenstein 3-D (1992) and Doom (1993) set the foundation for the genre, and Doom's source-code release and multiplayer capabilities enabled a durable mod scene.
• Player contributions materially influenced development: early public betas and leaked alphas produced bug reports and patches, volunteer-built anti-cheat tool PunkBuster was later adopted by publishers, and mod authors behind ThreeWave CTF and Counter-Strike were hired or commercially acquired.