Some months ago I wrote about a worrying trend in modding. The modding meta was revolving increasingly around this idea that a mod could only be great if it created a rich narrative full of lengthy text, like a visual novel with extensive choose-your-own-adventure. I knew that this mindset, which had only developed recently, would work to inhibit creativity by forcing modders down a narrow road that can result in masterpieces as much as it results in disasters.
I think though that this has gotten worse. I don’t believe that the standards are necessarily too high -- just that they are too boxed in and one-dimensional. If there was ever a time that people were encouraged to ignore the fundamentals, it is right now.
Our collective standards as a community have not grown past the best of what we were pumping out a year or even two years now. We have only forced ourselves to believe this. And it does more damage on our modders than anyone else, who are increasingly under competitive pressure that exists for no good reason.
Even when we speak of Campaign Trail mods we are speaking of art. In all cases art should have realistic standards. Not every painting should be like the fresco in the Sistine Chapel. Not every film, of whatever length, should be like a Kubrick film. We can all be inspired but with the understanding that things should have proper standards. What’s happening in our own little corner is that our conscious standards have become distorted. We have lost sight of the fundamentals.
The core of Campaign Trail has always been educational. Since 2012 when Dan Bryan put the issues of that year’s election to questions and a map, since 2021 when we started to get our grubby hands on his code and write our own stories to it. Those stories don’t have to be true to convey something about our world, past or present; all good alternate histories do this.
All good mods have to do to be good is convey their information well. This standard was followed to excellence by such mods as 1972’s McGovern side or 2008. But lately our standards have changed to be more Wattpad than Dan Bryan; that you have to build this great story and shove it into the player’s throat; that the text be as long as possible! This is thankfully not an absolute standard, nor is it shared unanimously by the community. But it has become significantly more en vogue, and that’s a problem. Why? Because it completely ignores what makes Campaign Trail mods actually good, which is not their ability to be sequential stories, but instead to be an enjoyable educational (or otherwise insightful) excursion.
When you write a mod in a way that it self-indulges in its own narrative so much that it almost falls off the page, the player will spend time reading instead of understanding. And if you don’t understand what you’re reading, you will not enjoy it.
And if I didn’t mention the technological aspect of this I would be ignoring half the equation. The Campaign Trail engine, being made of Javascript, is quite malleable and we have been able to do a lot of things to specialize it for particular elections and particular circumstances. This includes Choose Your Own Adventure which executes code on certain answer choices. But like with writing, as mods begin to use more and more hax/wizardry our expectations distort the standards of the community. Suddenly every mod has to meet some kind of quota; it has to have a certain number of candidates, or a good soundtrack, or at least 25 endings, or alternate game modes. It’s important to recognize that we can make use of these new tools while being realists, because if we aren’t it’ll only shut down aspiring modders’ ambitions.
When standards close up like this, distract themselves from their roots, and begin to border on absurdity, simplicity becomes frowned upon. Not just ineffective simplicity (I raise as an example the candidate from West Virginia), but effective simplicity as well. I argue that we can take what we have learned from the past two and a half years while adhering to the core essence that was here from the start.
Just because a new approach to modding has developed does not make false what has always been true. That the fundamentals in all aspects are the true key to great modmaking. That less is often more, and conciseness is a virtue. Take, for instance, the following two questions:
Both are pivotal to their respective mods. But while one takes up perhaps the entire screen to get its point across, the other does the complete opposite. This is how negative space works; to understand the gravity of the former takes quite a bit of time. In the latter’s case, after nearly an entire mod, you get it instantly, and without many words at all.
Just because Campaign Trail modding has developed with time does not mean we must constrict our thinking; in fact, rather the opposite. Thankfully there are plenty of new modders that have created good mods that by eschewing the overambitious philosophies of some end up coming out quite well. I’d like to give some examples: FlongydOlson’s Korea mods are quite good, the same with Roniius’ mods (ie Biden 1972, Humphrey 1972, McGovern 1992). Obummer is sometimes described as a narrative modder but his work is excellent, with his concise writing being a key part of that. Everyone knows Tom, but I would like to highlight his 11 rules since they’re a good starting point for those looking to get into modding.
Over these 2 and a half years, modmaking has developed in many ways and resulted in some great works that use Campaign Trail as a way to tell more stories than Dan Bryan could’ve imagined. But that does not mean accepting bloat as just another part of the process. Our mods will be more fruitful if we create them with the quality we expect now, while cherishing the effective simplicity that made the original Campaign Trail so good for so many years. And I think it’s better if we loudly encourage aspiring modders to consider this mentality, for it will be better for them and our community as a whole. I’ve been meaning to write this for a while for this exact reason.
~ liquid astro