Mods can bestow aiming assistance, unlimited ammunition, or the ability to see through walls. Hackers find ways to modify the game’s protected computer code, usually to grant players more control. Often, when games lack some aspect players wish existed, hackers in the community create a modification (or mod) that allows them to add the desired feature.
Videogames let players simulate being almost anyone: a battle-hardened soldier ( Call of Duty), a boy navigating his father’s alcohol addiction ( Papo & Yo), and even a god ( Populous). But a disturbing hack involving sexual assault in Grand Theft Auto 5 (GTA5) threatens to achieve the impossible: swaying the opinion of gamers themselves. Lines of investigation were followed by the book, and gamers set up arrest enquiries so that other units could go and nick the offender, before he was booked, interviewed and a charging decision made.īarker says gamers from across the world, including the US, are often surprised by the restraint required in the British roleplaying communities, especially given the lack of guns.Are video games societal microcosms wherein deviant behaviour flourishes and spills into “real life”? Or are they just harmless fun in which nobody really gets hurt? This endless debate usually concerns violent games so much so that many are now inured to the discussion. He describes a past in-depth roleplay scenario, where uniformed police arriving at the scene of a crime handed over to other gamers taking on the role of detectives from the Criminal Investigation Department (CID). Read more: These are the best games of 2018 He says some of the details they learned early on from YouTube videos are a little dated, but it is otherwise “not a million miles away”. In real life, Barker is a response officer for the Metropolitan Police and has taken over as a sort of informal advisor to modders, hearing out their questions about the Met’s kit and processes. “The level of detail people get into in communities is quite unbelievable,” says a player who gave his name as Barker and plays in the Westminster Roleplay Community as BluePlodder. He says his hobby of photographing vehicles progressed naturally into 3D modelling them for games. Albo and his friends aim to replicate real-world policing procedures as closely as possible when they play, for example following the real-world “GOWISELY” codes to carry out stop-and-search procedures and the College of Policing’s pursuits policy for responsible car chases.Īway from his keyboard, Matthew is part of the expansive British emergency service vehicles “spotters” community, who enjoy observing and photographing emergency vehicles (like trainspotters with trains).
In these situations, some gamers play as police while others role-play criminals and victims. “When playing in a multiplayer environment, you can scale up the realism as you're interacting with other real people,” he says. But Albo says that it is playing online, in multiplayer scenarios, that gamers have taken modded roleplay to the next level.
He also runs a YouTube channel that specialises in recreating real-life policing scenarios in the game and has 27,000 subscribers.Īnyone can download LSPDFR mods and play on basic single player missions, which involve driving around the city, pulling over speeding drivers and deploying tools such as custom two-way radios, breathalysers and speed-guns. Albo estimates he has spent 4,000 hours making emergency service mods.