Let’s “Trove it Up!”

When was the last time you heard Gangnam Style? Do you still remember the hype about horse ride dance?

Now, what if I told you, that I saw someone dancing the horse dance, while on a floating DDR pad, as a hulking-flamethrowing-dragon?

Yep, is that kind of game.

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A game console fortress. It’s little details like these that caught the player’s heart.

Present by the same company that develop Rift, Arche Age, and Defiance–Trion World, Trove, is a voxel based, free world exploration, sandbox, and crazy party MMO. It acts solely like MMO where you have experience, gear, crafting, and end game content. In Trove, you go through varies dungeon that spoke of the effort being put into making the colorful architecture. Simon Niedenthal talks about how
“sensory phenomena that the player encounters in the game” is what gives game life,

You have a dungeon that is practically a pirate ship, giving the player immersion and atmospheric experience.

what makes the game aesthetically pleasing, and for these intricately crafted dungeon, and the light touch of background soundtrack, I can’t agree more.

As you traverse through the maze of dungeons, you mine ores 

A type of ore in game.

and blocks along the way for future crafting. That is the second biggest portion of the game, mining and crafting. Sounds like the infamous Minecraft anyone? If you do not recall, Minecraft was a multi-platform game with pixel-like graphics; you would mine up different blocks to create anything imaginable, and occasionally you would have monsters or wild animals as company. Cube World, also another similar game in genre, while in turn giving it a classic RPG flare. In Cube world, you are also given the sandbox freedom to make objects as you please. Player are even given ability to change their weapon’s appearence in detail! However, there are speculation that team in Trion actually took the inspiration and idea from Cube World (after it went inactive for a long duration) and made it into Trove. At this point, we need to question, who really is the “author” that made Trove? Howard Becker say that a piece of (art) work is a collectively result of collaboration and every process of it is what make the piece “whole”. Perhaps this is the combined effort of both developing team. But it was simply the player’s guessing game. Ultimately, Trove is clearly owned by Trion World company.

Trove is a game that promotes creativity and social interaction, as community can share loot up to 8 person, a club system that is similar to guild system, and building. Creation, this is the whole spotlight of the game. Many of the game contents are user generated, gears, costumes, wings–yes, you can “fly” in this game! The game itself even promotes modding.

Mod: “Mario” riding a “Yoshi”

The idea of modding game is vastly different from developing a game. By taking the actual created content of an existing game, player modifies the code, texture, or various in game formula, and make it into a new content. Some of them, being heavily inspired from other sources, question the idea of true authorship, while others spokes loudly of how the creator is the true artist/author of the mod. In the case of other source inspired mod, we took these definition from several places.

Source or origin, as of a book or idea

– taken from The Free Dictionary – authorship

origin, especially with reference to an author, creator, producer, etc., of a work

– from Dictionary.com – authorship

The keywords here are idea and reference. Already, these definition are tackling mods that are other source inspired, like the one picture given above, whom the creator of the mod made the mount and costume that is inspired from the Super Mario series. What about author?

a person who starts or creates something (such as a plan or idea)

– from Merriam Webster – author

When we focus in on just the word author, the definition changed so subtly, that you almost can’t see their difference. Author is alike artist, who created the content, the art. Again we can brought up Becker’s argument as that artwork is a “joint activity of a number, often a large number, of people”, game is very much akin to that idea, as development team are often large in number, save for the cases of indie games with small team. But what about a singular content inside the game?

A piece of equipment that was designed by player.

Therein lies a question of “Who holds the authorship?” In most often case, the developing team would claim ownership via the company name, but the true authorship belongs to the creator. Who in this case is the players. Trion World advocates creativity inside Trove, allowing player created objects to have player name, as the player second-handedly signed their name. This marks the authorship of the object. Finally, we have a better answer, the artists are the player, while authorship depends on the source of idea, and ownership is the company, Trion World itself.

A player created club world, while the space is provided by Trion.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter to those who just want to play a good game. For those that would want more mod from a specific creator, it would matter so much more.