“There is no community quite like the Bethesda games community and I mean that in the best way,” Kenneth Vigue, founder of the charity initiative Fallout For Hope and creator of CHAD: A Fallout 76 Podcast tells me.
“Since the early days of modding, while so many companies really don’t want you playing around under the hood, Bethesda Game Studios has really encouraged and embraced modding. [It creates] worldspaces and tell a story of their own… and then they do the remarkable thing and say, ‘here! Go make it your own!’”
In Vigue’s estimation, the community that this has spawned “acts more like a family – [exhibiting] all the complex dynamics that come with that – than any gaming community I’ve ever seen.” While having members of a gaming community come together to support each other in specific instances, isn’t unique to the Bethesda community, what Vigue and the rest of the team behind Fallout For Hope have been able to do with the initiative over its relatievly short life so far has been particularly impressive.
Through work like teaming up with legendary Elder Scrolls and Fallout voice actor Wes Johnson to raise just over $50,000 for the Alzheimer’s Association’s The Longest Day Campaign, the campaign – and the various members of the community that’ve chipped in to help it – has raised over $600,000 for various causes since the end of 2020. Its latest project, C3 – shorthand for Community Creations Con – is just as ambitious. It’s a virtual showcase, set to take place on Twitch across February 2 and 3, that’ll see a bunch of the Bethesda community’s best known modders and modding teams – including those behind huge projects like Fallout: London and Skyblivion – show off some of their latest work in aid of the Make A Wish Foundation.
Vigue credits modder Damanding/Crayonkit and his partner Mouses Online for coming up with the idea for a yearly event like C3. “Mouses Online sadly passed away unexpectedly and we’re dedicating this event to her memory,” he explains, “They had reached out to me and Fallout For Hope to help organise a community-led virtual convention, similar to the amazing work that the team behind Creation ModCon, which is more focused on Elder Scrolls titles, [do], but do it far broader in terms of [including] Fallout games and Starfield.”
As someone who has been helping organise community events for a number of years now, both as part of Fallout For Hope and in official collaboration with Bethesda Game Studios on QuakeCon and some of Fallout 76’s content launches, Vigue was ideally placed to help make this vision a reality. “The idea of C3 was to bring together modders of Bethesda Games – specifically Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Fallout 4 and Starfield – to not just share and celebrate their mod and Creations with the community, but also more collaboratively lift up and support one another,” he outlines.
“Modders create no differently than any game dev, often hyper-focused in individual silos within their own teams and communities, and while some of the large-scale mods have volunteers who communicate outward as they develop, there’s a whole community who live and breathe the same language, love these games, but don’t get a chance to work together, share knowledge, and inspire one another.”
So, work began on putting together an event which could mirror these desires. “The first step was really defining what C3 would stand for as an idea, how a virtual expo would work and what charitable cause would be a good fit for the community to give back to,” Vigue reveals. “I learned a lot working on the few virtual QuakeCons during the pandemic shutdown that really helped in planning out how we’d structure the event,” he continues, “We decided on a two-day ‘raid train’ style event on Twitch, with each modder or mod team streaming to their own channel or being hosted by a streamer, before the audience is passed on to the next stage and showcase.”
Both Vigue and his “indispensable right arm”, Fallout For Hope Managing Director PedernalesFalls, have a sizeable pool of expertise and experience to draw on in terms of turning event theory into event practice. “A lot of [the] ‘pre-production’ of events of this scale starts with people, not just modders or mod teams [who’re there to] fill the event,” he explains, “but also coordinating with sponsors and partners to help with things like stream giveaways and most importantly [building] awareness to let the community even know about we’re doing.”
“Even though this event is 100% community created, planned, and executed, both Bethesda Game Studios and Nexus Mods also joined us to lend their support with giveaways and awareness,” he adds. “The schedule juggling of the 26 different showcases raiding from one into the other is always the most complex part…it’s just a lot of moving parts to account for.”
Aside from that, Vigue and his team will also very much have their fingers crossed that they won’t encounter any unforeseen hiccups once C3 actually gets going on Friday. “Particularly for live events there [are] always things beyond your control like acts of nature, internet outages, guests [being] late to panels, etc,” he muses, “Over the years I’ve learned that you must hope for the best and plan for the impossible as best you can.”
No matter what it ends up taking to stick the landing with this first iteration of C3, Vigue is hoping it’ll accomplish something a little different to the events he’s helped put on so far. “With Fallout For Hope, I wanted that event to represent what gaming can be and what a community can achieve when we put aside all of that to join hands all over the world and unify behind a shared faith in doing something for others that we can’t do for ourselves,” he explains.
“Where Fallout For Hope is focused on [being] a celebration of the games we love to play, C3 is meant [to] be a celebration of the fact that WE can make the games we love to play and hope others will love as well. Sometimes that’s something as simple as weapons and armour, and sometimes it’s an entirely new world space and overhaul of the original game.”
Judging by the attendees announced to this point, if you tune into C3 later this week, you’ll get to see exactly that kind of range in terms of creations, all put together by different people who’re united by one thing – they’re part of a gaming community that’s like no other.