by Morrodict
In November 2021, Fliggerty graciously agreed to an online interview, responding to my questions while I was working on Dagovar #3. However, due to parenting and other life events, I was unable to complete Dagovar #3 at that time. Now, almost two years later, I am delighted to publish this interview on the Dagovar blog.
Thank you, Fliggerty, for your thoughtful and kind responses. It was an honor to connect with such a significant figure in the history of Morrowind modding. I really appreciate your openness and generosity.
Can you introduce yourself?
I am Cody Erekson, aka Fliggerty. I was once a well-known and prolific creator of mods for Morrowind, and an everlasting supporter of those who freely share what they create.
How did you choose your name Fliggerty?
Setting yourself apart on the internet requires a truly unique name. I learned that many years ago when I was setting up an IRC chat integration on my family website; because it was a family site we all used common first names which presented a problem using a public IRC server. While developing that I did as any good QA tester and ran it against many random names. Fliggerty originated as little more than a keyboard smash. While working on that, many of my extended family asked me who the new site member was with the odd name no one recognized. Being a prankster at heart, I never gave an answer but instead started using taglines like "The Mighty Fliggerty is coming!" Eventually, that morphed into me just using that as my gaming handle.
How did you discover Morrowind?
A new roommate moved in, my friend Chewy. As was the custom, all of the inhabitants of our apartment offered up our game and music collections to the newcomer, and his were offered likewise. This was in that weird time when blank CDs were super cheap, burners were really fast, hard drives were really expensive, and "the cloud" was still made of water vapor. So yeah, my first copy of Morrowind was one that I copied with my CD burner and cracked with a downloaded .exe (statute of limitations is long past expired.) I did know of Morrowind long before that, I had played Daggerfall a little bit and lurked the Bethesda forums, but never had the opportunity to play it. My first character was a Nord named Arreg, a battlemage. Before I knew mods were a thing, and before even Tribunal was released, Arreg had fully maxed all levels to 100 and was the toughest thing in Vvardenfell.
Are you still playing it?
No. :( I haven't for a long time. It's only been recently - since COVID really - that I've gotten back into gaming in any significant way since my kids were born and my wife got sick. Quite frankly, I have a LOT to catch up on, and the whole face of gaming is radically different than it used to be. I admire anyone these days who can stick with a single game long enough to feel the need to mod it. Also, MWSE/MGE et al never really worked on Linux, which is one reason my career got in the way of my gaming.
What is your favorite thing about the game?
The Construction Set! No, 3rd party editors! No, the community that made those 3rd party editors! I could go on and on about what drew me to Morrowind. The music over the title screen was the first piece I fell in love with. Then the open world experience - remember that was basically a brand new experience at that time! I recall joining the Thieve's Guild early in my first play through, and then starting in one corner of Balmora and thieving my way through all of the manor homes and eventually the rest of the houses. But before that, when I realized that was a possibility, I was so thrilled and yet overwhelmed because of how big the game world felt. It's the only time in a game that I resorted to keeping track of NPCs and locations with a pen and paper! It seems odd to me now though - Balmora is a place that I knew intimately and now feels very small (and empty without mods like Morrowind Comes Alive!)
Do you have some story or favorite memory of playing the game?
I don't recall the name of the first mod that I installed, but I know it added trout to the water (probably lots of other creatures too.) I started a fresh new game, worked my way through the Census and Excise Office, got some starter gear in Seyda Neen, and set off down the road to Balmora. Along the way I saw a trout in the river, and thought it'd be an easy target to practice on. I was wrong, and summarily got my a** thoroughly kicked by a trout. My roommate asked what I was screaming about, but I was too ashamed to tell him. I was hooked on mods from that moment!
Another silly little moment I remember was my roommate coming home one evening with a date. My computer was set up in the living room, next to the front door. They came in and he introduced me saying "this is Cody, he's playing Morrowind exactly as he was when I left three days ago." And I realized it was true, and felt a moment of shame. But I got over it, because Bloodmoon had just been released so I had taken a few days off! (I later took the entire week off work when Skyrim was released, so I think the Bloodmoon experience was a sort of foreshadowing.)
Since when are you active in the community?
I was a LONG TIME lurker on the Bethesda forums long ago. Todd Howard and the rest of the team were regulars on the forums back then, Bethesda was just a small dev company with a few titles under their belt. When I first released Vvardenfell Druglord is when I actually signed up as Fliggerty and began contributing to the forums. That was somewhere around a year after Bloodmoon was released.
Honestly, I think this question might better be asked as "since when have you been inactive in the community?" To answer that question with blunt honesty, it was when I took an arrow in the knee. That arrow, fired by Bethesda, was the Steam Workshop. Prior to the release of Skyrim, I had poured my entire soul into building a mod creation website called The Holds of Skyrim. I am still incredibly proud of what I built; I believe that I made something that could have become the ultimate collaboration center for building and distributing mods. Unfortunately, the surprise announcement of the Steam Workshop, and later an implicit endorsement of Nexus Mods by Bethesda completely killed any viability that THoS had as a useful service. I realize I am being dramatic with my retelling here, but the message I'm trying to convey is that I perceived the situation as a humiliating defeat and a crushing blow to my psyche. I know now, but didn't then, that at that time I was experiencing my first severe bout of bipolar depression. My response to that situation was to socially withdraw from the community and hide behind a facade of "busy-ness."
I've long since come to terms with having a mental illness, with understanding that my favorite possession - my brain - is flawed in a meaningful way. I have learned that depression of all varieties is incredibly common amongst software developers; my belief is that the nature of the bug report has a lot to do with that. It is very difficult to only receive a negative evaluation of your efforts time and again; praise is forgotten or overshadowed. One of the roles that I play professionally is that of a mentor; and one of the biggest efforts I make in that role is to help other developers recognize the signs of depression, differentiate between it and simple burn-out, and know how to ask for help.
It's no different in a professional corporate setting than it is in a creative online community. We have all seen modders who have dealt with criticism and technical problems in less-then-healthy ways; some fade from view forever, some explode publicly and rant and rave, while others perform a grand self-destruct and erase their posts and mods entirely. I am one of those that disappeared, and I know first-hand how much self-imposed shame goes along with doing that - not a day goes by that I don't entertain a guilty thought regarding the condition of MMH and GHF. Like with any difficult problem though, I firmly believe that the first step to solving it is to talk about it, to have an honest dialog. In that spirit, I want to take advantage of this platform that Morrodict has offered me to share a simple message: when you are stuck, when you are uncertain, when you are in a dark place, ask for help. Please ask for help. If you don't know who to ask, ask me and together we'll keep asking.
What does Morrowind community mean to you?
It means more than I can adequately express. The recent loss of Jac to COVID made that abundantly clear in my mind. I've agonized over what I wanted to say about him, how I would honor his memory, and I keep coming up short, unable to type a coherent sentence. I like to think that I'm generally good with words, that I can get across exactly what I'm trying to communicate; but in this instance I cannot.
The readers of this newsletter and I probably have vastly different ideas of what (or whom) comprises the Morrowind community. For me it will always be Bryss Phoenix approving mods and Lord Devil/Quatloos writing detailed reviews at Planet Elder Scrolls. It is trawling through Wolflore and Enmasharra's to see what the less-well-lit corners of the community are coming up with. It is begging GStaff through forum PMs for any hints or secrets that Bethesda has in store for us. It is marveling at the newly found beauty that Timeslip and LizTail gave us by extending graphics with MGE. It is building on the efforts of Aerelorn, CDCooley, Scruggs, FreshFish and so on to ENHANCE and EXTEND the capabilities of the game with MWE and MWSE. It is Fliggerty literally searching for the word "impossible" on the "officials" (our term for Bethsoft's forums) in the modding threads so he could get ideas for MWSE mods he could write. And most importantly, it will always be the first, genuine, online community I was a part of, and the progenitor of many life-long friendships, each of which I treasure immensely.
I owe my entire career, and therefore my family's quality of life, to the Morrowind modding community. I don't say that to be dramatic by any means - I have literally used GHF and MMH as a resume, multiple times. I hold a leadership position in my job, and I strive to serve as a mentor to those near me; these are skills I learned by building and running Great House Fliggerty. I learned diplomacy, mutual respect, and how to delegate responsibility; importantly, I learned the wrong ways to do those things through my own blunders. The most valuable lesson I learned though was how to assemble and cultivate a skilled team. All of my success has always been due to the effort put in by those I work *with*.
Did the community change? How would you describe the community and the energy today?
Of course it has. The specifics of that I don't think I'm in a position to evaluate though - I can't compare to something I no longer know well. I don't think it's a bad thing in any way though! Frankly I am often surprised and impressed that the community still exists to the extent that it does. I always knew it was some kind of special, but this community always defies expectations!
Did you meet some of the modders or community members in real life?
Oh yes! Back in the day, Bryss Phoenix and Fliggerty went together like saltrice and marshmarrow! My wife and I had the opportunity to meet Bryss and her husband when we were invited to celebrate a life event with them, and have been close to some extent ever since. I still maintain that if someone ever organizes a TES-con within travel distance of me, I'll be the first one there cosplaying as a cliffracer.
How did you learn to mod Morrowind and what gave you the idea?
I learned through a LOT of trial and error. I've always been one to just take something apart to learn how it works. When I found that the Construction Set gave me a view to the internals of this sandbox game I was playing, my curiousity was piqued to say the least! Getting started on writing a script was easy, just copy and paste and execute it in the console. Once I had overcome that hurdle, Morrowind was my oyster. I always had a feeling like the game itself was little more than a pattern for development that the devs gave to the modding community; there are many clever scripts and effects they came up with that were only used a single time almost as if they were examples in documentation. Obviously not true, but that is how I came to view it.
It really helped that I was learning how to program at that same time. Writing scripts for my mods provided me with a wonderful school unlike anything I found elsewhere. So many of the foundational principles of software development were ingrained into me as I strove to make appealing and functional mods to share with my friends. Declaring and typing variables, state structures and control patterns, reference handling, race conditions - these are all things that were taught to me through trial and error (in an incredibly buggy engine) and reading scripts others had written. Once again, I owe my career to being a Morrowind modder.
Are you still modding, are you working on some new project?
I am not. I suppose this is the official announcement that Better Battles is, in fact, not much more than "vaporware." :D I am currently directing the effort to overhaul Morrowind Modding History. We are first going to get the current site functional, ie finish the new search engine. Following that, the entire site is being redesigned to make use of modern technologies. It will be simplified and streamlined in every way, becoming basically a pretty client interface on top of a serverless data storage. The intention behind the entire project is "longevity"; I have no desire to build another site that will degrade to the extent that MMH has. Oh, and it's going to evolve to be simply "Mod History" to allow for a much broader collection and support for any number of games.
What is your favorite mod you created?
This may be the toughest question you have asked! After giving almost no real thought to the matter, I'll give you my top three, in the order that I think of them right now.
Vvardenfell Druglord has to top the list because it was my breakthrough mod, the first one released under the authorship of Fliggerty. It was also the longest to develop; I worked on that for something like 8 months before anyone other than myself knew of its existence.
Blasphemous Revenants is perhaps the work that I am most proud of. In my mind it stands next to the greatest feats I've accomplished in my career - and I've made some pretty cool stuff! My ego has always loved the fact that for a long time a Google search for "Fliggerty" gave a top result from Bethesda's blog entitled something like "Morrowind Modding Legend Fliggerty" with a screenshot from Blasphemous Revenants. That was the closest I've come to having my 15 minutes of fame! But aside from that selfish stuff, I honestly valued Blasphemous Revenants as a community-made mod. So many of the features, quest events, graphical assets, and lore tie-ins were contributed by my friends. The [WIP] thread on the officials was locked more times than I can remember due to the max post limit. But the very best part is that we, the members of the modding community that contributed to this mod, created a piece of lore and game mechanic that carried through as our legacy into Oblivion and Skyrim both - the black(-ened) soulgem did not exist as a concept prior to its conception in one of the many [WIP] threads for Blasphemous Revenants!
Portable Hole represented the silliness and free spirit ideals of an open-world sandbox game. Morrowind was that certainly, but adding in the Construction Set made it exponentially more-so. Bryss Pheonix and I greatly bonded over the collaborations we made. She would dream and I would innovate, and together we would create things that were both unusual and cutting-edge.
What do you think about Morrowind modding scene today?
I really just have to emphasize what I said above about the community still existing and thriving. I know it isn't all sunshine and puppies though, that there is a need for a better variety of mod hosting repositories. I'm aware that there are disputes over mod ownership and the public domain. I don't believe I have any of those answers, they are long-standing human problems. But I do know that at MMH we did establish a system of both honoring the wishes of authors and avoiding needless censorship that was generally accepted by the community; a system that was built on a principle of mutual respect and sustained through third-party moderation, inspired by well-established museum collection policies. That is exactly what we intend to continue to give to this community through the evolution of Mod History.
Can you tell us a short history of the Great House Fliggerty and how are you involved there?
I answered a personals ad that was looking for someone named Fliggerty to administrate the site. Crazy coincidence, huh? :D
GHF started out, and truly lived its life, as a playground and school for me to learn how to be a developer. Simply put, I needed a mirror to host my mods, so I built a website for that. I don't think I had any notions of Planet Elder Scrolls eventually going down or the like; it was really just a standard practice at the time to put your mods on one of large hosting sites and also mirror them at your own site. At the time I was also running a family forum website, so it made sense to me to use the same forum software for my mod site so that there was a place for comments and discussion about them. Thus GHF was launched as a community site, as opposed to simply a file hosting site. There have been several iterations since, with the site software being updated or entirely replaced multiple times.
I never ever ever expected to have a community spring up around Great House Fliggerty. By the time it was up and running I had made a few friends, and it made sense to ask them to serve as forum moderators - I moderated the forums for several of my friends, that was just the norm. I do credit the fact that I picked up the maintenance of the MWSE project for a time for bringing most of the initial traffic to my site; I was more or less providing support for all of the previously released MWSE-dependent mods made by those who came before. Everything was entirely organic, never at any time did we advertise GHF or widely promote it; we just existed in our little sphere of the internet, doing what we found enjoyable, and welcomed anybody with good intent who wished to do the same.
Can you tell us a short history of Morrowind Modding History and the current news?
Sometimes I don't think we realized how much we were living in the "wild west" of game modding back at the height of Morrowind's popularity. There wasn't ever a single source of truth when it came to finding mods for a game. There was no such thing as the Steam Workshop, and definitely not a link to a mod list inside a game's menu. I mean, prior to Morrowind, even the idea of modding a game was an underground pursuit, not an effort and community supported by the game developers themselves. I still recall the first time I finally found someone with a copy of DEU - Doom Editor Utility - on a 3.5" floppy disk (also came with a virus that nuked my DOS kernel that time.) The ability to make my own maps made me feel like a wizard, and I couldn't get enough of it. But finding mods was really tough and sketchy, and more often than not came with malware. Not to mention the dreaded 404 when you are filling out your mod list after a game reinstall. When we talk of the period in which MMH was originally built, the hallmark of the time was the sheer proliferation of sites that hosted mods. While there were a few stalwarts with large databases - PES, Nexus - the vast majority of mods were found on smaller sites. The problem with that is each site required its own maintenance and had costs, and of course over time they degraded and disappeared. The community did make a concentrated effort at one point to really support the larger sites and encourage authors to contribute to the centralization of mod distribution, with some margin of success. However, there was a point where one of those larger sites (I can't for the life of me remember the name of it) did go suddenly defunct, taking a lot of mods with it.
That event is what directly inspired Morrowind Modding History. With the help of several others, we were able to acquire the collection of mods from that site. The database containing titles, authors, descriptions, download history, etc was never recovered, but we got a dump of the files. So I worked on putting those files into an open source file management site that I found, and then wrote a set of scripts that could parse as much of that information as possible from the readmes included in the mod archives. In all it was somewhere around 4k files, and I was able to get metadata on about half of them reliably; from there it became a manual task to find and fill in that information. Unfortunately one morning I discovered that MMH had been pwned by some script kiddie. The open source application I was using had a known vulnerability that was used to upload a shell script to my server. The good news was that it was a simple defacement, nothing more - just stupid petty vandalism. But that inspired me to create an entirely new web application from scratch, one that put security at the forefront. That's the site that we have now, and at the risk of compelling the trolls, I'll state that it's held up to 100% of attacks to date.
Since the time that MMH first launched, we have collected more than 16k Morrowind mods. Every single one of those has been extracted, scanned for malware, examined for other problems, and quarantined if necessary and repaired if possible; that same process happens to every mod uploaded. In addition, a large number of those files have been manually reveiwed by one of our volunteer Curators; countless exhaustive hours have gone into verifying metadata, testing mods for stability and bugs, fleshing out descriptions, adding screenshots, and numerous other largely thankless tasks. I can't stress enough how many man-hours the current collection at MMH represents. In addition to that, I have an archive of Oblivion mods that I scraped from Planet Elder Scrolls before it went down. Those have yet to be gone through and made available, but I do intend for that to happen once the site supports Oblivion games. That brings me to the current state of MMH. Sadly it is in a terrible state of disrepair. Nearly a decade of neglect and multiple server migrations has caused the search engine to be entirely broken. I won't even tell you of the terrible things that have been happening on the server itself! The long and short of it is that an overhaul is desperately needed. Being entirely unable to devote the necessary time to it myself, and at the urging of Drakkmore to do *something* (his infinite patience and support may be the only reason MMH is even online at this point in time to be perfectly frank!) I spent a lot of time pondering on what is to be done. Honestly there is a very persuasive part of myself and wants me to just drop it all and not look back, either to hand it over to someone else entirely or just shut it all down. I can't listen to that part though, not yet anyhow. The work and time and investment of too many people is too valuable for me to do that; thus is the burden of a curator of a valuable collection.
The answer, much as I don't want to admit it, is money. It always is, isn't it? With some funding I can outsource the time, effort, and knowledge needed to rebuild MMH. So that's what I've been working on, and making progress on! I have been working on a crazy scheme to create an NFT (non-fungible token) representation of the final release of Blasphemous Revenants; my hope is that if I time things right around the upcoming media blitz around TES6 I can ride that wave and auction that thing off for something significant. I realize it's a long shot, and unlikely to pan out, but I think it's worth trying. The more pragmatic approach that Drakkmore convinced me of was to set up a Patreon account, which I did: https://www.patreon.com/modhistory
All of the income from Patreon (and other donations I've received) are going to not only overhaul MMH, but to relaunch it as Mod History. Adding support for mods for other Elder Scrolls games is an obvious thing to do, and has been a plan of mine since the day MMH launched. It will be broader than that though - I want Mod History to be a museum of mods for any game, new or old, that has been modded in some way. So there will be the ability for a user to create a section for a new game, define sub-categories, and all that. But the primary effort is that of longevity; we are avoiding any "cutting edge gimmicks" and overly complex methods so as to prolong the life span of Mod History. Our goal is to build a simple, secure, and straight-forward hosting site that will remain as long as possible, that will serve as a point of mediation between the "big guys" (Nexus, Steam, etc) and the individual authors.
Any words you would like to communicate to the readers?
Thank you. Genuinely, thank you. For all of the shared mods, collective experiences, and wonderful conversations. Thank you for the friendships. Thank you for keeping this community alive and going. Thank you for your patience with me as I work to overcome my personal limitations in order to revitalize Mod History. And thank you for the Patreon support; I am honestly amazed and surprised every time I look at that thing - thank you for hiring a part time developer for Mod History. Thank you for reading this, for giving my fragile ego something new to inflate itself over. :) And thanks to Morrodict for the honor of asking me these wonderful questions.