Sharon Zukin describes in Chapter 1 of her book Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places the rise and fall of authenticity in Brooklyn, and occasionally mentions a similar occurrence in SoHo. I would like to take my turn and describe the rise and fall of authenticity in Defense of the Ancients (DotA).
It all started with a game called World of Warcraft (WoW) 3. This game was, and is still hugely popular. In this game there was the normal content created by its owner Blizzard, and then there was the user created content, known as modifications (or mods). Users could create and play entirely new games within WoW’s engine, and share them with other WoW players.
WoW’s mods were well supported by Blizzard, and many players participated in game creation. The first version of DotA was created by Kyle Sommer, basing it on another popular game. Many versions of DotA were created, by many different people over an extended period of time. Eventually, someone going by the name IceFrog took all the best concepts from the different DotA versions, creating the most popular DotA-type mod, called DotA Allstars. At this point, it was still in the realm of authentic artistry and creation. Chronologically, this can be compared to SoHo right before it was “discovered”.
DotA Allstars, now simply DotA, become incredibly popular; it was touted as one of the most popular mods of any game to exist. There were many worldwide tournaments of DotA, which really fired up the MOBA genre of games. A little authenticity is starting to be lost.
Valve, a very large American video game developer and owner of Steam, buys the rights to DotA and releases DotA 2 in 2013. DotA has now officially been discovered, and is in the big leagues. True to its roots, DotA 2 itself contains a free modding feature. However, unlike Blizzard, Valve does not support the creative community – at all. With every patch Valve makes to DotA 2, nearly every single mod breaks and becomes partially if not completely unplayable. DotA’s mods are the abandoned manufacturers of Williamsburg, slowly regressing and being killed off year after year.
Now, Valve may be terrible at supporting their creators, but they threw them a bone; the bone which I personally believe to be the turning point in Dota modding. Along comes the Custom Game Contest, featuring a $30,000 dollar prize for the winner. Admittedly, this contest itself really was not done in the right way. First of all, the creators were given ridiculously short notice to create a game of decent quality. Secondly, the judging of the winner was heavily biased towards game visuals instead of gameplay quality.
Regardless, hundreds if not thousands of mods were created and submitted to the contest. There was of course only one winner, but in the process, many old modders came back, partially for the contest, partially because they missed their hobby. It’s important to note that DotA modders didn’t make any significant money from their games that they spend days, weeks, or months creating [and constantly fixing due to Valve’s horrible support].
Now that all the old timers and a bunch of new timers have just created fresh new modes, they get to talking. Semi-popular YouTube channel owner and DotA 2 player/modder, owner of the popular mods MNI mode, Open Angel Arena, and Pimp My Peon, creates modding tutorials for newcomers. DotA 2 But modes start to become popular. These modes are regular Dota 2, but with a simple twist (for example, Dota 2 But You Are Broke).
Here’s where I would say you have your revitalized, chic, new, authentic DotA. Along comes Auto Chess, which grew so popular that it just recently announced a stand-alone version for mobile. Funnily enough, Auto Chess on mobile can be considered a stand-alone version of a mod of a game, that’s a mod of a game. Yikes.
And there’s the end of the DotA 2 history. I wonder what more will be in store for the future?
Links:
Valve Custom Game Contest article:
https://www.ign.com/articles/2017/09/19/valve-announces-dota-2-custom-game-contest-with-30000-prize
Baumi’s YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmxX0QwCivAbRAXvPbEid8Q
Baumi’s modding tutorials:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiQsSmexkHc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtaG2RQyxa4
Dota 2 Wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dota_2
One thought on “The Authenticity of Dota 2”
THIS IS SO UNIQUE AND I LOVE IT! This is exactly the type of post that Prof. Alonso and I wanted – it’s so much more fun (and actually reveals a lot about what students’ learn!) to read about notions of authenticity in Zukin vs. DoTA. As someone who doesn’t know anything about DoTA, it would have been helpful if you had included the way Zukin defines authenticity vs. how authenticity is conveyed in DoTa. In other words, how do the two groups define “authentic” – and do their definitions overlap? What does that suggest about the importance of authenticity to city residents and/or gamers?