Contested game spaces: romance modding and copyright

This article is a socio-legal study of romance modding and the ways that modding communities mediate the copyright interests of game creators and owners. Using the dialectical–relational model of discourse analysis, this article draws on evidence from mod aggregation platforms and social media forums to show how community-built concepts substitute for a, largely absent, formalised, copyright regime. Based on this data, this article illustrates three key mediations of game copyright in the modding community, namely: (1) as being bounded by the private sphere; (2) as understood in relation to the social, cultural and political context in which the work was created and is subsequently received; and (3) as an ideologically flexible cultural object, embedding temporal creative and moral values. In conclusion, this article illustrates the significance of these findings to broader policy discussions on copyright’s role in facilitating diverse and inclusive representation both within the infrastructure of creation and in the mode in which creativity is received and subsequently repurposed.