GamePyg’s Face and Body Overhaul

This project is a small alternate reality story that takes place over a series of snapshots of a mod listing on the modding website Nexus Mods. It’s accessed through a real mod listing on the Nexus Mods website, which leads the viewer to three more fictional webpages (each with five subpages) which further expand the story. This piece intends to explore the relationships between modding, specifically explicitly sexual texture and model editing, and the expectations and entitlements that game players often bring to games. It is attempting to identify some contemporary aspects of this relationship and take them to an extreme in a near-future sci-fi setting. What are the pleasures that stem from controlling a game with a mod, and what are the anxieties that are raised when the control is removed? This project was first released as if it were a real mod on the Nexus Mods website, where it received 10,672 views, 197 unique downloads, and 19 confused comments before this public release. As these users were thinking they were downloading some kind of titillating mod, I was hoping the inclusion of a surprise critical art piece might cause some kinds of interesting dialogues. Instead, the mod was largely treated with confusion, suspicion and dismissal. In retrospect, it should have been more clear to me that when a user is downloading a mod specifically to try to get off, they are not in the best headspace to consume experimental art.

As a part of the generation of the fictional webpages, some images and videos were created in a variety of ways. Some are direct screenshots from The Witcher 3, some are screenshots of a modded Witcher 3, and some have been generated using artbreeder, a free machine learning tool that can generate images. A small selection of sample images from the project is included in the gallery below.

To access the starting point of this project, visit this page and download the mod. You only need to read the included .pdf, you do not need to install it.

If you’d just like to view the credits instead, you can find those here.