Chapter 7: Application Outlook 313 30 games. For instance, early MUDs allowed the players to craft their own in-game elements, such as areas, monsters, and quests. 31 For some games, such as Second Life, the whole business model is built around user-created game content. As stated in the game home page: You’ll also be surrounded by the Creations of your fellow residents. Because residents retain the rights to their digital creations, they can buy, sell, and trade with other residents. The Marketplace currently supports millions of US dollars in monthly transactions. This commerce is handled with the in-world currency, the Linden dollar, which can be converted to US dollars at several thriving online currency exchanges. Essentially, in Second Life you are able to make real money in a virtual world by selling virtual assets, that is, user-created digital personal content. Virtual asset trade is indeed a trend worth keeping track of. 7.4.3 Modding By far the most common activity related to explicitly-created personal content is a phenomenon known as modding. Modding is a participa- tory practice where “game fans modify and extend offi cially released game titles with their own creations” (Laukkanen 2005). The modifi ca- tions (mods) created by the players range from skins (graphics that alter the appearance of some game elements) to total conversions (new games that are built on existing game engines, including custom graph- ics, custom audio, and custom executable code). The enormous success and maturity of modding has not been over- looked by commercial game developers, who intentionally support modding by creating mod-friendly titles. Furthermore, many develop- ers currently consider user-created content an important part of their marketing strategy. This results in the inclusion of modding tools in the game sales packages, developer-hosted support forums, and modding contents organized by the developers. Skinning, referring to altering the visual appearance of a game, is the simplest form of modding. There are two approaches for skinning: either all graphics are created from scratch (including textures), or the existing graphical elements are confi gured. Skinning from scratch 32 requires a considerable amount of work. 30 Multi-User Dungeon; usually a text-driven online computer game that includes role playing, fi ghting with enemies, and social elements. 31 http://secondlife.com/ 32 Besides games, many other kinds of applications, such as media players, also allow skinning.