All of the ‘classic’ anthropological fieldworkers collected the artefacts of the cultures they did research on. For a long time ‘material culture’ was a big issue in anthropology, but became less and less important through time. It indeed became some sort of ‘deprecated’ subdiscipline. Only during the last years ‘material culture’ was reborn in the wake of globalization and research on commodities and consumption. Game-modding communities actually produce a lot of artefacts, therefore they possess what anthropologists call ‘material culture’, although the artefacts are almost exclusively immaterial by nature (text, program-code, applications, 3D and 2D computer-graphics [still and animated, interactive or not] sound and music).
Quite naturally a modding-community’s central, most important artefacts are game-modifications. Since the beginning of my involvement with the ↵MP-community back in 2002 I have collected every MP-mod I could get my hands on. Now finally I started to sort and catalogue the collection, and a first step is done: The ↵mp1mods-section of my website now contains an alphabetical list of my collection of modifications for the original Max Payne computergame (↵Remedy 2001). The list still is faulty, maybe some ↵MP2 mods have crept in, and there sure are double entries. I have tried to furnish download-links for every mod—I really would love to host all the mods at my server, but I guess than the university’s IT-crew will slap me around a bit with a large trout. For now 99% of the download-links lead to the matching download-page at filefront. This is because when ↵MPHQ finally went down the drain, GutBomb had the good sense to migrate its mod-database to filefront. The latter worked out to be very reliable over the years. So essentially my list is a copy of what was hosted at MPHQ back in ye olde days. I will add more download links later on, and if a mod is absolutely no more to find on the Internet, I’ll host it here—I guess.
The next step will be revising the mod-categories here at xirdalium and then create an according entry with full credits and information for every mod.
P.S.: Although the MP-modding community is a small one compared to the according communities of e.g. Quake or Unreal, the size of the list already is impressive, IMHO.
