Team Fortress Classic and the Landscape it Spawned
The video game Team Fortress Classic has its origins as a game modification to the original Quake (1996). Valve Software, who made the hugely-popular and highly-regarded video game Half-Life, decided to hire on the original developers of the Team Fortress mod, who then developed and released Team Fortress Classic shortly after Half-Life on April 1st, 1999.
The game quickly spawned one of the largest video gaming communities of its time. A major reason for its continued success through the early part of the 21st century was its team-based play.
The game necessarily needs a group of people to function. While public servers of up to 32 individual players were possible, people started to form teams (clans) for competition in organized play very quickly in its introduction to the gaming scene . Games were scheduled by independently-organized leagues (OGL, STA, OzFortress, Wireplay, UGL, FPSJP, etc.), who would encourage games of 7 on 7, 8 on 8, and 5 on 5.
The communication medium of the community was governed by the game. TFC allowed for players to chat textually to the entire server or just to their team, and the game soon added support for voice communication via microphone. To keep in touch and organize outside the game environment, players depended on Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a prolific but extremely simplistic chat protocol, as well as message boards. With the release of VoIP programs in the early 2000s (Roger Wilco, 1999; Teamspeak, 2001; Ventrilo 2002), individuals were able to have high-quality, real-time voice conversations.
J.B. Jackson talks about country as the superset of any given vernacular landscape. If we use this definition, the early days of the Internet was the country in which the TFC community was situated. Low bandwidth connections (TFC was able to maintain real-time connections to the server using 56k connections) and lack of high-fidelity video (HLTV, a way to spectate games in real-time without having to stream video) forced participants to adopt creative ways to participate in the community.
Just listening to the first 30 seconds of the above video showed how people used to spectate these popular games. A commentator would speak on a Shoutcast server, and spectators would connect to the server, much like connecting to an Internet radio station. Spectators would also connect to the HLTV proxy through their game, allowing spectators full-control of their view throughout the game world to see 16 players go at each other in real-time.
The wide proliferation of communication media combining to create a landscape for TFC resulted in community collaborations, organized matches, and (of course) drama. One of the main community hubs, called The Catacombs (now defunct, example site from Archive), hosted a community-organized effort of collecting the ‘Plays of the Week’ (POTW). In all, 84 such compilation videos were released.
Many of them had themes to them as well, as well as community knowledge. At the end of the above video, Roy4l makes fun of a Heavy-Weapons player being suspected of wall-hacking (cheating in order to see players around corners). In terms of themes, independent ‘groups’ (e.g. Handheld Media) formed to help each other navigate the complex video codecs available in the early 2000s.
For clans to elevate their own status other than placing high in league standings, players would author video compilations of their best kills and flag captures. The most popular videos would be shared and downloaded directly (there was no YouTube or any reliable streaming service before 2004!). For many, downloading a 200MB video file was a significant time investment; it would take hours tying up the phone line at 56kbps to download a video file. Many original sites were born just to host these videos, but were short-lived because of the astronomical hosting costs in the early days (e.g. HLMP).
With the high latency of the early international Internet, the landscape of TFC was highly segregated in terms of continents. Regardless, the diversity and number of players helped to foster some rules for competitive play. An example of the extensive rulesheet for a league is available here.
A bureaucracy was set up for administering the fair play of league matches. Players were organized into clans and were prohibited from jumping from clan-to-clan week-to-week (multi-clanner) or playing for clans when they were part of another (ringer). Clan leaders were responsible for the fair play of their clan, including abstaining from cheating. If a player was found to be cheating in any circumstance, they would be barred from competition for weeks. If a clan was found to be fostering cheaters, they and their members would be barred from competition for months. This led to considerable drama that spilled over into message boards, IRC, and even video (below video has NSFW language).
J.B. Jackson says that (pg. 148):
A landscape, like a language, is the field of perpetual conflict and compromise between what is established by authority and what the vernacular insists upon preferring.
As the community was self-governing with no absolute owners, advances in gameplay techniques or exploits were quickly utilized by all players. Popular opinion generally swayed the rules adopted by the leagues. Discussion would erupt on message boards and IRC when a controversial decision was made.
Players were revered as notorious, others were seen as pioneers. Differentiation and individuality were the primary factors in the landscape.
All this without saying that the game Team Fortress Classic is an incredibly fast-paced, fun game to play. The nature of teamwork of TFC made one of the first long-standing communities around a first-person shooter and fostered relationships between individuals that persists to this day.
