I stumbled upon this interesting post about BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic. This is a striking example of what Henry Jenkins would call participatory culture. It seems that prior to local servers coming online players in the Pacific Rim devised a way of creating unofficial “servers within servers” using the in-game guild system. By connecting on game forums prior to launch, these players were able to co-ordinate a temporary server that they could occupy until their servers went online earlier this year. They, in a sense, modded the infrastructure. As the post points out, this was a massive undertaking by players outside of the game.

You can read the story here.