Survey: Looking for amateur studios/modders/mod players

Hello everyone. I am starting a Master thesis of Anthropology on game modding and will most probably choose this forum as my ethnographic field.
I will not only base my analysis on the modding itself but on all that surrounds it, trying to study the phenomenon as a whole (inspired by "The worlds of Art" of Howard Becker approach if anyone knows). I'd first like to conduct preliminary interviews and take contact with some modders/mod gamers.
If anyone is interested, please either answer here, PM me on the forum or send me an email at : [email protected].

Thank you in advance.

You won't necessarily get any quick answers out of me but I'm happy to answer any questions if you want to PM me.

The rate of answer is not a problem, school year starts again in a month and a half, I just want to be able to present something with a chunk of information so that my professors understand what I am on since they don't know anything about gaming.
I will PM you soon.

I mean, I've tried hacking before... it's too difficult for me, but does that count? Cause I'd be happy to help in any way.

You're literally asking children who wouldn't be able to hack without tools doing everything for them for interviews. The majority of "hackers" here are under 15 and their hacks are objectively bad. I'd look into the SMB and Sonic hacking communities before I'd dive into the Pokemon ones.

Deokishisu said:

You're literally asking children who wouldn't be able to hack without tools doing everything for them for interviews. The majority of "hackers" here are under 15 and their hacks are objectively bad. I'd look into the SMB and Sonic hacking communities before I'd dive into the Pokemon ones.

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Translation: Interview me, I'm better than the rest of these chumps.

The very reason why I am interested in Pokemon community is because there are several profiles. I am not only looking for experts, either way I would not be searching through amateur communities.

Crizzle said:

Translation: Interview me, I'm better than the rest of these chumps.

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I'm just making sure the OP knows what he or she may be getting into. I don't want to be interviewed.

Since my Thesis will be mainly based on learning through modding, having modders that are still learning or even just begining is a good thing. It is also easier to detect the skills that are used in the process when you see people who are begining and thus do not possess them yet.

I'm not trying to learn how to mod, nor trying to show what great things modders can do. The aim is totally different.

I've had a little expireance with mapping and I have drawing skills I don't know if that can help but I'll be happy to help

Tnzn said:

Since my Thesis will be mainly based on learning through modding, having modders that are still learning or even just begining is a good thing. It is also easier to detect the skills that are used in the process when you see people who are begining and thus do not possess them yet.

I'm not trying to learn how to mod, nor trying to show what great things modders can do. The aim is totally different.

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Debatable given how many give up their ideas on here. I don't fault you for asking around on here but also it is advisable to expand to SMWCentral and the Sonic Hacking scene too, then you can also contrast the different games and the skills needed for both (story development in Pokemon for example may be found to be a priority compared to Sonic and Mario, map design in Sonic and Mario compared to Sonic, custom characters and stuff like that, the different skills and developments of them). Helps in a thesis to have many different case studies and compare based on game genre (Statistics graduate here)

(gross picture of the discipline incoming)
Anthropology has a 3 steps method. First, Ethnography, which is the observation and description of your field, then, Ethnology, which is the analysis of this field through the scope of several concepts from a variety of social and natural sciences, and then only as a last step comes anthropology which is the attempt to generalize part of your results to mankind(obviously it's a bit more complex than that). You do not start with the comparison, it only comes later in the process in order to enrich your analysis.

Also, comparisions would be more relevant if the object of the thesis was the mod rom hack game itself. What I'm interested in is in what sense modding communities form a horizontal learning network. The idea is to start with analysing this one as such. Once it's done, I can say that this modding community is (or is not) one. Then I can imagine that all large modding communities share (or not) these characteristics, depending on what led me to say so, and I can start digging into other ones to see the differences in the structure of the network. Before showing the differences between two communities, I'd have to first describe and analyze both of them deeply enough.

That another community might be a better working, better organized one or whatever is not really a matter as my goal is not to show how great learning networks modding communities are. I chose this one to begin because I will be fairly busy during the Master degree and working on a modding community which mods games I am familiar with will be easier. I plan to study other modding communities, especially the more expert ones, during my PhD thesis, if I actually get to do one.