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The Oblivion Bookbinding Mod
Via GameSetWatch, an article on the Guilded Lilies site interviewing a unique Oblivion modder. Phoenix Amon has taken on the task of rebinding every book in Oblivion, as well as spell-checking the documents within. From the article: "Q: How much time do you spend modding, and do you enjoy it more than playing games? A: I spend more time modding than playing recently, but I enjoy both a lot. I wouldn't have bought Oblivion if it hadn't been moddable, but that's because I knew from experience that I don't like a lot of Bethesda's game design choices. It's not a deciding factor for all games."
For those of us who think being a Librarian in real life is too risky, you can now do it on computer.
God spoke to me.
...it's full of wasted time!
If you actually read the article before posting you would know that its a woman doing the mod. That being said, I think the article focussed a little to much on that aspect. OMFGBBQ FEMALE MODDERS!
If you hear "Build a user mod of a game" and your response is "I can fix all the spelling mistakes" then you, my friend, may be the most boring person in the entire universe.
Perhaps he will next go in and create new patterns and quilting for all of the bedding in the game. :::yikes::: Glad I'm not stuck next to him during a long flight.
She, actually.
And she's really quite cool about it. She didn't think she had the talent to come up with some huge level quest mod, so she picked a small thing that bugged her and is going to fix it. Here are pictures of the books so far.
Also, she's got a couple guys to help her incorporate grammer and spelling fixes for the books. If only the original designers would put so much thought into the little details...
well i thinking Modding as to Beautifying the game.
It sounds trivial but the change in gameplay is huge. It is like when you first played Doom and could for the first time tell you where about to pickup a chainsaw because it actually looked like a chainsaw. When you didn't need to be told what was health pack because it was clear.
This is where graphics matter. Not purely the looks but in making the world act like our own. In the real world we can check the spines of the books to see what book it is. We don't have to hover close to it to wait for a popup to tell us.
This mod is going to require a more powerfull machine but in return you can now regonize valuable books. Granted there is no real need in game, just as morrowind didn't require you to use the road signs, but you now can.
TES games are best bought a year later and then you can just mod your own game. It is amazing how much better the user mods make the game. Either I just don't like bethseda's game designer or every modder out there can read my mind.
This however does raise a question, what could be done with a game that is fully open and modders do not have to spend the first few months trying to decipher cryptic files?
Between NWN and TES I am getting more roleplaying then commercial companies seem willing to sell. Then again NWN did seem to kill of the stream of Baldur Gate games. Pity.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The original designers did put the thought in when they purposely used poor grammar in some of the books.
Why does she (and the parent poster) assume that all the residents in the world of Oblivion are capable of using proper grammar?
If she corrects all the grammar mistakes, then a player who reads the books will assume that everyone (who writes) in the land of Oblivion uses good grammer, which is not what the game developers intended. They obviously intended to subtly show the game player the diversity of the educational backgrounds of the NPC's, and to show that even though some of the NPC's may use poor grammar, that they still have a love for writing.
Fie on her elitist attitude! I shall create a mod to add the poor grammar back.
The quality of these covers is amazing. I realize it's not something that changes video gaming dramatically, but the fact that we can now use high-res textures that look like cloth is pretty cool.
on slashdot, rebinding a book = changing a graphic
I wouldn't have bought Oblivion if it hadn't been moddable, but that's because I knew from experience that I don't like a lot of Bethesda's game design choices."
Logistically that statement makes sense, but there just seems something wrong about it. Why would you buy a game from a maker whose design choices you don't like?
The ______ Agenda
Maybe its just me, but the books in Oblivion were one of those nifty little features that you looked at one time and thought "wow they really care about the little things" and never thought about again.
Maybe he can give all of the ale bottles unique, detailed bap designs?
Well, some other people have already gotten close to that.
I may have missed this when I read the article (or it went over my head), but what graphics program does she use to create the book cover mods? I would imagine it would be something like Photoshop to create the image file itself, then another program to put the jacket cover in the right place to be read properly by the program?
Hm. Please don't get involved in any grammar or spelling mods yourself.
I know more than you drink.
While somewhat in jest, this raises some interesting issues regarding authorial intent in games which are meant to be highly moddable by the gaming community. Is there a line where we, as players, should not cross? Is it less "sacraligous" to make holesale changes in a game such as making Counter-Strike from the base of Half-Life than it is to make smaller more subtle changes to the very fabric of the game such as perhaps giving Gordan Greeman a voice? Is changing the grammar and spelling in Oblivion more "offensive" than creating your own entire quest?
Of course, one can always take the opinion that it is just a game and if people don't like the changes, they won't download and install them, so it doesn't really matter in the long run...
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Also, she's got a couple guys to help her incorporate grammer and spelling fixes for the books. If only the original designers would put so much thought into the little details...
For an encore, she's going to fix the grammar and spelling errors in Flowers_for_Algernon and The_Sound_and_the_Fury
I'm wondering if the timeline in the game along with some of the books didn't follow the timeline of grammar. I mean if one of the books is from the 16th century and translated from another language, the rules aren't going to be the same as say, the same book authored from scratch, in a your native language, and writen durring the 25th century. It could be possible the errors were to reflect translations and whatnot. Also, it wasn't until around 1600 or so before we got an english dictionary. Earler for latin and chinese but until then words could easily change thier meanings.
(side note, that why most english science was formed with latin words, It was already a defined and translated language wich ment a homo always was a homo reguardless of what we currently call them)
Actualy I'd say that women are perfect for the modding community. They have great amounts of patience and concentration, characteristics needed when doing mods.
There was actually an interesting sorta debate on this point in the community of one of the games I played, Natural-Selection. Mappers would spend lots of time making maps that they thought were aesthetically pleasing and had a certain sorta flow. But then servers took to implementing mods that would do things like advertise their server and its home website with big glowing particle signs inside the lobbies and such. This caused the mappers to hem and haw about people ruining their maps. Of course, nothing was done about it in the end, but I thought it was an interesting little back-and-forth.
One of my favorite NPCs in Oblivion was the Orc guy who sounded like a middle schooler with a thesaurus. It was great!
"The original designers did put the thought in when they purposely used poor grammar in some of the books."
"If she corrects all the grammar mistakes, then a player who reads the books will assume that everyone (who writes) in the land of Oblivion uses good grammer, which is not what the game developers intended."
Go you.
I think it is easy to say, "look I'm better than the game developers! I made this mod that changes the text to something I think suits the game, not what they thought." When you had to spend maybe a few days on a tiny morsel of the game's entire code. The Devs had to think about every single aspect of the game when devoting time to that game.
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
Jesus, as if gamers didn't look enough like shut-ins, we've got this guy plying his obsessive-compulsive disorder on geeky Oblivion fans with no lives and less social aptitude-
...It's a girl? Oh, um. It's a girl. *ahem*
I was curious to find out more about her modding project, so I asked Phoenix a few questions about what the process has been like for her.
H-Hey there. So you like video games too, huh? M-Maybe I can show you my NES game c-collection. Heh heh heh!
Rob (What, where are you going? Please don't run away!)
Huh, The books in Oblivion had bad grammer? Did anyone else miss this or is it just me?
For those who are so inclined, there's a substantial community of people interested in the geeky mechanics of antiquarian books. See, for instance, Rare Book School.
Also, you should not underestimate the l337ness of librarians -- they are all over the database world, fans of the semantic web, and friends of freedom of speech and even open source.
There's even a library webcomic.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
If only bethesda would put as much time into making the game not crash as much as it does compared to how much time modders put into it I would go back to playing it.
Clever.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Of all the silly things to complain about. :D If you like Bethesda's spelling of "pugiliists" by all means don't use my mod because it will utterly destroy your game. I am an elitist pig because I both know what that word means and that it's a typo.
I don't plan on correcting any of the errors in personal books like journals. I'd expect more care to be taken in commercial books, and lots of them just contain typos rather than the sorts of mistakes a scribe might have made. There's a difference between time pressure during development and artistic intent.
Phoenix