When you read a piece of fanfiction you are not enjoying the piece of work it was based on, however it is both at once pulling from, often relying on, that original work, and also in turn can serve to inform how you relate to the original work furthering your appreciation for what was already there or shining light on interpretations that were not always obvious.

This kind of mindset can be applied to fan-content as a whole; the number of times I've seen fanart that helps bring out the emotions of the original work, emotions that were always there but just needed that new perspective for me to truly feel them, is many, and then you return to that original work and there's now just no other way for you to see it. In this way art and fanart exists in a reciprocal relationship of sorts, the latter only existing because of the former, the former gaining new depth in light of the latter.

Game modding is an instance where this all starts to get very weird. It's not hard to think of game mods as fanart that you engage with in parallel to engaging with the original work. This pushes the reciprocal relationship mentioned earlier to whole new levels, but is also really weird as, beyond a point and with enough mods applied, you start Ship of Theseusing the original work to the point where it's hard to say what it actually is you're enjoying. Is someone who is enjoying Skyrim, loaded up with a hundred different mods, enjoying Skyrim, enjoying exploring fan-content, or enjoying some whole new thing, perhaps a thing that has never actually existed before if this is the first time that exact list of mods has been applied all at once? Is this Ship still the one that Bethesda largely made, or something that lies outside the realm of any kind of clear authorial intent?

Despite enjoying many other kinds of fan-content I don't really engage with mods very much. I like my first playthrough of a game to best match the original author's intent, and I seldom replay games which means I rarely get opportunity to experiment beyond this point. Beat Saber is thus the first game that I've ever heavily messed around with mods for, and why this subject has been so on my mind since first engaging with it.

The base-game of Beat Saber is...fine. A nice spin on the rhythm game genre that takes great advantage of VR but that is really held back by its limited and uninspiring selection of songs and that has a scoring system that I don't really get on with. The moment you start modding it though the game opens up so much, endlessly replayable with the sheer variety of songs, the creativity with what is possible within the beat-maps both being thrilling in and of itself but also giving you a better appreciation of the game and songs that these mods are built upon.

Consider this rating very arbitrary then, some strange mid-point between what I think of the base-game (good-but-not-great) and the amount of joy that modded Beat Saber has given me. I can't say that my experience with whatever it is I've been playing isn't one that I had with Beat Saber exactly, but I can't say it wholly is either. Ship of Beat Saber, or something like that.