Code, Hacking, and Authorship

I brought up the issue of authorship earlier, when I discussed the ramifications of gamers incorporating their own mods to change the game to their liking, but upon further thought and reading, I can do you one better. What about when the gamer alters the actual code? A mod is a small program that changes the interface for the user. It's true that they're designed to alter the code of a game, but that's a difference from someone opening up the programming files on their computer and typing in new code.

As I'm not much of a computer game player anymore, I'm not sure how much this still happens, but this was something that used to go on all the time. Many cheat codes or special abilities, required the gamer to open the program files and alter lines of text, telling the game to do something else.

Now first and foremost, this is an obvious revising of what the author had intended. It would be like writing additional sentences between the lines on a page to add extra meaning, or crossing something out to change the intended impact. The author certainly didn't want this because if he did, he would have written it that way in the first place, so why change the writing to suit your personal benefit? It doesn't make much sense, because you're not interacting with it on the same way you are with a game. With a book, you don't believe the revisions because you know they're not real, but in the game, you interpret it a different way and can make do with the changes. So, by doing this, is the gamer taking authorship away from the original author?

But, here's the second part, often when you type in new code, it's something simple, only an extra line or two. It either tells the game to use a preexisting action at a different time, or it unlocks a hidden function. If the code was to lets say, create any object in the game, then the user is actually limited because he can only make objects recognized in the existing code, it would be like copying a paragraph from a previous chapter to insert it in a new one. And then, the ability, the interface in the game, to type in the command to "copy" would have also had to already exist somewhere in the code as well. So, this new code, is only using old material, but in a new way. Maybe the author intended something like this would happen, so he embedded certain source files in the code that could be accessed later if the user knew the right command texts.

If this were the case, then it would mean that this is a different relationship. In the first example, the gamer was taking authorship away from the original, but in the second one, the original still has the power because he created everything and knew how it would be used, so in a way, he's offering up some of up power as the author to share it with the gamer. He recognizes that things can change and helps the gamer bring them about, by making it possible. The original author also makes these changes optional, since he doesn't put them in the original version of the game, or publish the command cheats with the game, it has to be up to the gamer to find them and incorporate their use.

This sort of shared experience is something akin to the "choose your own ending" books, where the options are there, but it's up to the reader to put them all together and use them. It gives the user/reader more control over his world and allows for a deeper level of personal experience.