The modding community within games has always been very much about participation. People either download and critique the mods or create them. Modding community’s could be considered a remixing community also. Many people will mod a game so much that it is only a shell of what it was. Thus remixes it into something new.Some mods have had such a popular fan base that they made games based off a mod. Such as Warcraft III’s mod called defense of the ancient (or dota for short) was so popular that a game studio took the concept and created a full fledged game from it called League of legends. So you could consider Leauge of legends simply a remix of warcraft 3 mod called DOTA. In the Skyrim modding community one kid did not go to college and instead created a mod for Skyrim that some would consider a add on to the game. He was able to do so with the encouragement of the modding community and advice from expert modders. So he in essence remixed skyrim’s universe to create his own vision/add on. Skyrim modding is also a great example of remixing, because many mods take things from many different media. Such as changing your sword to look like Zelda’s Master Sword from the Nintendo franchise or making the crabs in the game look like Dr.Zoydberg from futurama. There’s been a trend in recent times to give your fan base modding tools to make it easy to mod. Such as Skyrim developers giving out their creation kit or Valve giving out a version of their own called Gary’s Mod. Steam also created something called the Teamwork shop for fans to easily download mods within the client instead of traveling to the back ends of the web to get mods. A mod called DayZ also was created into a game when many people bought Arma (the game that was being modded) just to download this mod. In recent times the MMO’s of Wildstar and World Of Warcraft give their community the ability to mod the interface to the game. So one kid could remix his interface too look like it is from the 1980s while the other wants a interface too look like a tacky. Many game studios today are learning that having their game easily modifiable not only give longevity to the game, but also help the game gain a bigger fan base.While some studios, such as Nintendo, llke to keep their brand within their company and not have outside community change it to something Nintendo has not endorsed.
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brentshafer 
Because modding is such a large community with hundreds of thousands if not more fourms it promotes informal learning better than any other medium associated with gaming. You mentioned both Garry’s Mod and DayZ in you post and thesre are great examples of how informal learning can elevate you personally inside the gaming community. Rocket created DayZ for fun and for practice as he was an novice in the game development community. He was then hired by the team responsible for the ARMA series that the DayZ mod was based upon, and he is creating his own standalone DayZ game and is certainly a sucessful game developer. Modding opens up the world of creating games to a much larger audience because inexperienced people have the chance to make something of their own without the pressures/consequences of failure in the professional realm.
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This is a form of Appropriation because individuals build off of an existing games/media and create something that is unique and they learn a great deal in the process.
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you could aslo say the development of the mod is a simulation. In that Rocket had to go through the processes of real life game develpment when creating this mod. His ability was at a high enough caliber that his “simulation” when creating the game, turned out to be good enough for a real development team.
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