A big update to the official port of classic Doom went out today on Steam, PS5, and Xbox, running on a nifty-seeming new engine that adds Boom compatibility, opening up support for a much larger slice of the past 30 years of user-created mods. I have some potential concerns about what that, on its own, will do to the open source port ecosystem over the long term, but that's not why I'm writing this. I'm writing this because the new port adds another feature: uploading people's work without their permission and putting your name beneath it, in a massive breach of trust and violation of norms the Doom community has done its best to hold to for those 30 years.
The "Mods" menu offers you a selection of officially supported mods (brought over from the days of the previous Unity port) that were added in collaboration with the mods' creators (cool!), and then a "Browse" item that takes you to a giant chum-bucket of random shit people have uploaded, with the "Upload" item below. And you can pretty much just... upload whatever files you feel like with it? And put whatever text you want to go with it? And it goes through an approval process of some sort, but given how quickly stuff has gone up in the past couple hours, there's clearly pretty much zero vetting going on, there could already be CSAM in there, snuff, PII, whatever - and I've seen it confirmed that this community-uploaded stuff is available from at least PS5, which I have to assume violates all manner of cert and ratings guidelines, with no feasible "experience may change with online play / hentai-strewn school shooting simulator WAD from 1999" disclaimer-ing their way around it.
I don't particularly care about the copyright concerns of Nintendo or whoever, though. What I immediately saw and hated was random shithead's names beneath community works, clearly uploaded without anyone's permission. There's a "Report mod" button on each mod's page, which puts the onus on the creator, who in some cases died 20 years ago, to take that random shithead's name off or take down the work entirely if they don't (didn't previously, certainly) consent to having it distributed with this particular commercial product. And a bunch of shit that just doesn't even work! Last year's beloved breakout work MyHouse.WAD requires ZDoom-compatible features, and I didn't try downloading or running it but I'd assume it either crashes or insta-quits silently.
For historical context, pretty much every Doom WAD that's been distributed comes with a README file, and it's long been part of the boilerplate for those to have notes about distribution, something like:
Copyright / Permissions
You MAY use the graphics and sounds in your own wads as long as you give me credit in your text file and include a link to this wad. If you include your own credit sequence in your wad I would like to be mentioned there, too. For graphics listed in the credit section of this file, give credit to the respective author(s) instead of myself.
You may distribute this wad as long as you include this text file and the other files intact.
Guess what isn't included in anything downloaded from the user-uploaded chumbucket?
The comparison that immediately occurred to me was D!ZONE, a low-effort scrape of peoples' usenet/compuserve WADs burned onto CD-ROM and sold by budget publisher WizardWorks in the mid 90s. id Software realized too late that they hadn't actually stipulated that a company couldn't do this, and WizardWorks made a good bit of cash off other peoples' work. 30 years later, id has decided to do something similarly indifferent to creators' wishes.
So yeah I am madposting right now because like I said this is a massive breach of trust and a shitty thing for id/zeni to do to a community that created the phenomenon they are now monetizing. And if you see any of my work - Arcadia Demade or any of my gameplay mods1 - up there, know that it is there explicitly without my permission, which I will never give now that my trust in this company has been permanently broken. And if you're the specific person/people who signed off on the decision to add mod support in this fashion, you should feel terrible. What a bummer.
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which, much like MyHouse.WAD, require ZDoom features and just flat-out won't run.
Okay, I've slept on it, I've cooled off. And I'm still angry and stand by everything I said here. This was both an immensely shitty thing to do to the community, and opens a black hole of console-platform-holder-unfriendly copyright violations. On the latter point, it's not my inclination to be "copyright cop" on behalf of big companies but I do think it means there's absolutely no way the mod upload functionality will survive in its current form. Sony and MS corporate just don't know yet that it's happening. But they will, and it'll be an embarrassing mistake to clean up.
Even in my post last night, I took pains to focus my criticism on the mod upload functionality; let me be clear that the rest of the port seems fine (so far) and I'm sure the new episode, Legacy of Rust, is cool and I'm glad talented people got paid to Make More Doom - that's merely a continuation of the strategy from the Unity port era. The fact that I could take the Legacy of Rust WAD and open it up in GZDoom with no problems is a good initial indication that "id24" doesn't represent some new wall raised between community work and the official port. We'll see how that goes from here.
But back to the mod upload stuff. It's very disappointing to see an official rep of Night Dive respond to the confusion and concern with a massive shrug. It's also just untenable as a policy - various corporate interests are going to make them care, and it won't be for the altruistic/cultural reasons me and others are bringing up. It paints a big target on the community's back that will hurt not just Doom's but every mod community in the long run.
On that note, there's probably some context I need to set here for those outside the community, because Doom mods have long been a glorious bastion of "remix culture": modders do regularly riff on other modders' work, and the strictly noncommercial nature of the idgames archive has long allowed it to be a kind of copyright / fair use border zone, where nobody is gonna sic MTV's lawyers on the dozens of 1994 WADs that use Beavis & Butthead samples, any more than anyone on AO3 going after Twilight fanfic authors for splicing in Doctor Who or whatever, and cribbing some sprites or sounds from Daggerfall etc is fine so long as you 1) give credit in the readme and 2) don't charge money (how would you, anyway?).
And lots of files on the idgames archive were indeed uploaded by someone besides their original creators. In a huge majority of cases though, it's been on the basis of those README clauses I mention in the post above: "if you distribute or modify this file, please include this readme". That's the critical point, for me. Creators in this community have always had a way of specifying their wishes regarding reuse, redistribution, and crediting. And that's completely done away with in this new system - context and credit are actively being removed, creator consent is disregarded. I tried downloading a few mods last night, and eg Buckethead's music (which btw is retail-only content, it was distributed only with the paid version of Romero's Sigil, and is only available elsewhere on Buckethead's bandcamp as part of albums he's asking money for) just turns into "46dc892c-22bb-4c8f-9e24-8000f53b5668.wad" - no readme, no attribution, no larger context. The person who uploaded it could just as easily have claimed it was their own music.
It's infuriating to me personally because I've always tried to be as respectful and fastidious about this as possible with my own work. The WAD Wednesday stream I did for 4 years was about celebrating random gulps of community work in as complete a context as I could present via the idgames archive: each play would start with me looking at the readme file, acknowledging and often commenting on the author's statement, making sure I was playing and presenting their work how they wanted. @wadbot likewise excerpts the readme and provides a link to the level's idgames entry. My Works of the Masters project was a considered and reverent re-framing of the original Master Levels, made in consultation with the surviving mappers - and the original readmes are all in the ZIP. My mod Mr. Friendly is positively stuffed with little scraps from old games and other media, each of which I credit in the readmes - if someone plays it and wonders, "what's that weird little sound that plays here?" they can dig and find out, and maybe they'll find out about a cool new thing. That's the thing about culture: each work lives and breathes via connections to work that came before it. And obviously, if any creator ever saw their own work in my mod and decided they didn't want it in there, my itch page for it provides a way to contact me, and I would respect any such wishes. I am best-effort accountable for what and from whom I sample.
So I think the mod upload functionality in the new port represents an erasure of community practices that have served us well for a long time. I don't think there is an ethical way for an official commercial product to have an anything-goes community chum bucket. I think that stuff has to be done explicitly outside of any commercial context, and have social norms surrounding its maintenance. We need to have border territories where fair use and sampling and remixing can continually expand and transform culture, as hip-hop and mashups and fanfic and videogame modding etc etc have done over the ages, without people getting just ripped the hell off or having their names filed off their own work. Building a machine that enables and accelerates that ripping off and filing off, and charging money for it, is an act of profound disrespect and, ultimately, destruction.
Whereas I believe deeply that culture is made of these connections to contexts and creators, and if you don't know any of that for a given work, you're being fed food they don't expect you to chew.
Linked text/media is the conceptual building block of the web. If you see something cool but you have no links to follow and no terms to search for, you're at a dead end. Every work of culture lives and breathes by its connections to other works.
And sure, for a given funny video you scroll past, maybe you don't care who made it or need any more context. But if you keep seeing the creator's name, you think, hey this person is funny, maybe I'll see what their deal is. Hiding or erasing that name prevents that.
So it's no surprise that Musk's imagined ideal world order is one where platforms rule, they have complete control over the context of any discourse, and everyone except him is just a serf toiling away to feed the platforms. This is a parasite's mindset; he's a fool and a fraud.
Thinking in terms of connections to creators also helps us imagine a better web where harmful platforms don't rule: one where you can always easily follow links, ultimately back to the original creator, see what else they've made, see who they're friends & collaborators with etc
Culture is made of, and nourished by, these connections - one art movement leading to others, ideas clashing and flourishing and fading away, some to be rediscovered decades later. So attribution isn't just "nice to have" it's the oxygen without which culture dies. Fuck elon musk
So yes, the new $10 proprietary Doom community chumbucket is some elon musk-ass bullshit, and I'm happy to hang the social stigma of that around its neck until they do something about it.
