Meet the Team
or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Mouse Controls
So, Team Fortress 2 is a wacky, first-person, class-based, hat-wearing simulator with elements of a shooting game. You get to choose from one of the following 9 classes:
It’s unfortunate that these videos don’t say much about the primary hat-based gameplay, focusing instead on the personalities of the team and a lot of killing. I suppose I’ll be forced to talk about that instead.
All jokes aside,Valve’s Team Fortress 2 is a popular multiplayer only, class-based, team-based FPS. The characters are all unique (aside from that they all really love killing people), carrying their personalities into battles which rarely rely solely on killing everyone on the opposing team more often than their team can kill you. Also there are hats. It’s another one of those games that I was a fan of long before I’d actually played it. (I’m still a fan, despite the fact that I’m awful.)
Before I get into the experience of playing this game, the first proper networked game I’ve played since the PS2 era, I’d like to take some time to talk around the game. See, I’d watched the above videos, along with numerous others, read the comics, and scoured the Team Fortress Wiki just taking it all in, never actually playing the game, because I never played PC games (also I couldn’t afford a console, but I heard the console version stopped getting updates). And there is a ton TF2 content, most of it not produced by Valve. There are fan videos, fan fics (natch), DeviantArt, in-jokes, jargon — there’s a whole community or, if you will, network of players and (as in my case) nonplayers connected by this game, but outside of the game.
It reminds me of the Five Nights at Freddy’s phenomenon, which also became at least as well known for reaction videos of people playing it on YouTube as for the game itself, with a sizable group of people simply trying to figure out the game’s secrets. And FNAF (pronounced Feh-Naff, not Eff-In-Ay-Eff) is not at all networked in itself. I’m also reminded of this Star Wars thing you people all love so much. Of course, it’s a multi-billion dollar toy franchise, but the thing people get excited for is the films (and sometimes games), to the point that it’s a cultural touchstone its own jargon, in-jokes, values, desires, and goals — effectively a network spawned from the work.
The point that I’m making is that it’s difficult to actually determine what makes a “networked game” actually a “networked game.” I keep mentioning Portal, but I’ve never played it (and probably never will). And it didn’t have any networked aspects that I can recall. (Aside, of course, for Steam integration or whatever. And, yes, I know, there was co-op in Portal 2, and I’m sure people have made multiplayer mods. Stop trying to be clever.) But I still feel connected to the greater player network of Portal, and TF2, and Mega Man (who will get his own, just-for-fun post later in this publication), and DMC, and numerous other online and offline games with communities that have risen up around them.
But that’s not necessarily what I’m talking about here. Specifically, I’m looking to see whether or not the knowledge that I’m networked with someone else, explicitly, will affect me, my actions, and my feelings. I’ve been playing TF2 in Practice (Mann v bots to simulate a normal battle), in Multiplayer (the primary, team v team or Mann v Mann system, generally defending or offending bases), and in the newer Mann v Machine mode (Mann v robots again, but this time collaboratively as a team. I think each experience is purposefully unique.
In Practice, which is essentially a regular match, but with only AI controlled opponents and team mates, the stakes are purposefully low. The bots were better than I was, no doubt, but death is relatively cheap in the TF2 universe and my team won most of the time. (I’m better on offense than on defense.) When I got into the game proper, however, things started to change a bit.
At first, I just ran straight out into the streets, blasting away wildly because I don’t handle mouse controls well. (Nor do I have the time or patience to figure out what’s wrong with my controller.) I got some good hits in, but I was ignoring my team, probably because I don’t usually play team games. There was a guy who kept yelling, in addition to all the noise the characters made, but I couldn’t keep up with who he was or who he was talking to. (He might also have been more than one guy.) I’d get killed and try to chase down the asshole who had killed me, helpfully aided by the closeup of my killer I was provided with upon death, hoping to see “EasyDanger got REVENGE on whateverthatguysnameis.”
TF2 really plays up the idea to make things personal, but the fact is that I quickly fell out of caring about personal revenge. I wanted the best end of match stats of course (and I even got them once!), but it’s a team game. My responsibility is to my team. So, if I’m distracting everyone, that sucks in a way that doesn’t matter to me when I’m alone.
Thinking back to The Line, dying in that game or otherwise failing didn’t register as a failure to Lugo or Adams, the protagonist’s AI-controlled partners. It was a failure to the player. At times, the player is responsible for them, but not responsible to them. Likewise, at one point, I heard Tetra Ninja say “What am I doing wrong?” when he found himself getting killed multiple times in one setting, not even really attributing his failure to the opponent that was killing him. Because there was no actual opponent killing him. From Tetra Ninja’s point of view, he was failing a task, not losing to an opponent.
In TF2, or other team-based multiplayer games, there’s a level of responsibility to the other players. My death puts me out of the action and limits the ability of my team. Which sounds an awful lot like a principle the army would want to instill into a soldier. So, already I feel differently about my ability, my confidence, and my objectives simply by virtue of having connected even a hypothetical other person on to my teammates’ avatars.
On the flip side, now my opponents are also presumably real people. And while I can’t say that this made me any slower to pull the trigger, or to taunt over their corpse once I’d found that button, nor did it make me any more fearful for my virtual life, I found myself much more affected by the idea that there was someone else on the other end of the connection. Maybe it wasn’t as intimate as Michael reads it to be, but it was significant.
Essentially, the bots were all monolithic to me. Sure, they occupy the different classes, but from my perspective, they were just a bunch of guys in the opposing colors, and they were all “the computer,” that same ubiquitous bastard that caused all of my failures throughout my entire game playing career. Which is interesting, when I consider how much trouble went into distinguishing at least the nine classes from one another — different voices, drastically different silhouettes, different personalities, different animations, etc. — which simply doesn’t go into most other multiplayer games. My team was also monolithic, aside from me. It was a rather solipsistic experience.
But with an enemy team comprised of other players, I found myself watching for different classes to help me determine whether the guy in my sights was the same guy who had killed me or slaughtered a teammate. The names popping up on my stream changed from humorous, yet meaningless filler (GLaDOS, Delicious Cake, and The G-Man all appeared as bots in my Practice, because Valve really wants me to shell out for that Orange Box.) to humorous, meaningful teammates and opponents (Rudoc, Sky Swordsman, and Psy were hanging out with me, among others). I knew that the when Sky Swordsman got killed, it was by Psy, and that meant something. My team mate had been killed by the enemy. Whereas GLaDOS killing The G-Man was like a joke. My computer got killed by their computer. Who cares?
Perhaps I was wrong orinally, since I couldn’t help but to distinguish between the NPCs and Avatars. Maybe simply the knowledge that there is someone else on the other end of a connection, whether I’m trying to interact with them as complete human beings or not, alters my perception of their avatar. I went looking for that Soldier-class playing Gabriel after he killed me, where I would’ve written it off in the AI’s case. Gabriel was a dude(tte?) trying to beat me, whereas GLaDOS was just running her routine.
This was really driven home for me when I started playing Mann v Machine, TF2’s co-op mode, with teams in real life and within universe fighting robot versions of the normal classes. So, in this case, I’m fighting with other humans (or at least avatars of humans indexing humans) against robots (or avatars of robots indexing robots). Further, the Machines come in large, insect-like numbers, where my Mann team had like eight guys on it. Even though they occasionally have a buffed up or giant version of the Machines comes out with them, I believe that they are generally easier to kill, the major threat being their numbers. Which I’ll get to in a sec. First, I want to talk about what happened before the match started.
We got two minutes to run around the map, stock up on supplies/upgrades, and presumably practice. That stuff didn’t take two minutes, so we were mostly just hanging out on the map. This server, at least, didn’t allow chat, so we weren’t actually talking to each other. But a couple of the guys kept running between avatars and whacking them with their melee weapons. Now, TF2 generally doesn’t have friendly fire engaged, so we couldn’t actually hurt each other. So, it appears that this was just them goofing around, perhaps in an attempt to foster a bit more camaraderie, since not everyone has access to group taunts. (Eventually we got a guy who could initiate a conga line taunt, which was fun.) It reminded me of James talking about phatic communication over the network as well as his and Michael’s conversations about what it means to be holding a gun in a game (even though, in this case, it was a whip, or a shovel, or a tube of wrapping paper). Essentially, my team was being friendly, but the only way they had to show it was to shoot me or bludgeon me. (I recognize that they could’ve simply been crazy, malevolently in denial about the lack of damage they were issuing. But when you have access to a war simulator, it seems unlikely that they would bother with the whole co-op thing. I’m open to hearing arguments, though.)
So, back to the robots. We shot them. Like, a lot. And, no, I didn’t feel bad. They looked like robots. They acted like robots. Their blowing up didn’t matter. Neither, though, did blowing up my human opponents, because that was equally inconsequential. In both cases what did matter, very much, was that we not let them win. No matter how many Machines I destroyed (note the vernacular shift), it didn’t compare to the fanfare upon completing a wave. Because my team was winning. I was a part of a team and we accomplished our goal. I cared more about winning with me team, than I did destroying the bad guys. My affects were mostly the influence my team had on me.
Though, still, I feel like I might be burying the lead here. Because there is no actual structural difference between killing, fighting, or competing against an AI opponent and a human opponent, at least once the communication has become mediated enough. Would I be able to tell whether my opponents were human or not were I not told before hand? Probably not. Not to go all brain-in-a-vat here, but it’s entirely possible (if fairly unlikely) that I never encountered another player at all. But my feelings changed because I assumed there were other people on the other ends of those avatars. And that’s what the next post is going to start off discussing. Sorry, but this is already way too long. As usual.
Lates.
-ED
