Thread by @swardley

X : You mentioned Skyrim at QCon, do you play?
Me : No, I did dabble for a bit, mostly modding but I have a separate interest here.
X : And that is?
Me : The culture, the structure that has formed ... it's fascinating.

... I was somewhat negative to begin with but I have become truly impressed. I don't play the game but I do lurk around NexusMods and the community, watching how it continues to develop. There are lessons for coding in general. Especially with the whole creation club mess.

But the most fascinating part is how swathes of often unconnected individuals and teams come together and create common components extending not only individual mods but the entire system way beyond what even Bethesda must have imagined.

The smart thing of course would be to mine the meta data, find those common components and extend the game and gaming engine itself. I don't see Bethesda doing that though. I can't see Amazon on Lumberyard missing that trick.

However, it's quite clear that it is possible to create an almost perpetual game with constant improvement through the players, if focus is there. It also holds clues on how to stitch together communities in a serverless world. The Skyrim modding community is ... well, amazing.

Of course, that wasn't my early reaction to Skyrim community ... that was mostly a sight of coding horrors, but then I began to appreciate that these weren't a core of engineers, this was pure enthusiasm from all sorts of walks of life and what it has achieved is remarkable.

And there is nothing more enjoyable than being proved wrong ... it's the best way to learn. The Skyrim community opened my eyes to entirely different ways of operating. Thank you.