I had some idea that many popular games have mods to tweak them – from small appearance changes and fan-made translations, to bigger gameplay or UI changes (and even an occasional trojan horse).

What I didn’t know was that for some games there is a whole community of modders who do one thing and one thing only: they fix bugs that the developer didn’t bother fixing.

This 1.5-hour (sic!) video by Fredrik Knudsen talks about a story of such a community for a popular game Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim:

I won’t lie: this video was a bit of a frustrating watch. The presentation is dry and takes its time. I was annoyed at Bethesda for not fixing the bugs to begin with and creating the whole mess. Also, some of the people in this story do not appear very mature, and post-Gamergate I have little patience for that kind of behaviour.

On the other hand, this covers so, so many interesting things and provoked so many thoughts:

• how hard it is to agree what a bug even is,
• how a bug fix can introduce more bugs and be an overall net negative,
• how a new distribution method for something can drastically change its nature,
• that everything, as always, boils down to communication,
• that in community- and volunteer-led projects, not spending time on governance will come back and bite you.

Not to mention these topics:

• dependencies
• change management
• centralization vs. federation
• copyright and DMCA
• version control
• volunteer burnout
• issues of trust and ego and power

If you are responsible for bug-fixing processes at a company or with a community, I am curious if you find this video valuable. I did.

The funniest moment was that drama/​debacle about a certain in-game portal was nicknamed… Gategate.

Not to mention the ending is truly poetic, and not something I expected.