Team Fortress 2 (Free)

This has been a big week for Team Fortress 2.

If you’re the lazy troll who doesn't watch the content I provide you, just know that Team Fortress 2 has gone free-to-play.

Team Fortress 2 is the first modern title to have received a perfect score of 5/5 on this blog. With most Free-to-Play titles being developed by Korean studios and subpar for U.S. centric tastes, TF2’s introduction to the free to play market comes as a breath of fresh air and continuing evidence of Valve’s innovation and genius.

Well, there is a downside to this, the servers will be flooded with noobs camping on top of teleporters, but that can be dealt with.

You can download Team Fortress 2 through Steam. Install Steam here.

Human Psychology in Team Fortress 2

One of the most important aspects of game design is the creation of a psychological state called “flow”, a mental state characterized by a sense of immersion, energy and involvement. This can be excessively difficult to achieve in multiplayer gaming and oftentimes results in the frustration of involved players. To achieve “flow” in their 2007 online shooter Team Fortress 2, the renowned Valve Corporation used a unique class-system that assigned certain abilities and limitations to playable characters, resulting in a type of interdependency between players, thus creating a complex weave of positive reinforcement loops, echoing B.F. Skinner’s theories of operant conditioning.


Before we begin, a bit of background information. B.F. Skinner was a psychologist who developed the theory of operant conditioning. Which basically held that learning and behavior modification is achieved when reinforcement or punishment is given when desired or non-desired behavior is exhibited by a subject. Positive reinforcement is when desired behavior is rewarded, thereby shaping the individual to exhibit that behavior more often. In order to make players play by the rules of a game, games must reward desired behavior exhibited by their players with points or satisfaction.

Team Fortress 2 takes a non-traditional approach towards designing its character classes to maximize the reward that players experience for playing a respective class well. While traditional shooters reward players with points for making successful kills and completing objectives, Team Fortress 2 rewards its players for exhibiting behavior concurrent with the purposes of the class that he/she may be playing. This is perfectly exemplified by the design of the Medic class. A German man with a syringe-gun and a Medi-Cannon, the Medic forces his players to rely upon the combat power of other characters and is rewarded for avoiding combat and healing allies from the back lines. Medic players receive reinforcement by acquiring points by healing damage or by healing an ally as he makes a successful kill. The ultimate objective of Medic players is to fill an “ubercharge meter” by distributing a large amount of health to allies. A player who achieves this goal is rewarded with the ability to deploy a status effect that gives him and an ally ten seconds of invincibility, a status effect that can change the course of an entire game. As a result, this fixed-ratio reinforcement schedule makes a traditionally frustrating character fun to play and achieves the goal of creating psychological “flow” in players. This approach to reinforcement can be seen in other class-designs, most notably the Engineer, which rewards players for having their utilities used by allies. This approach to the psychological minutiae of player reinforcement and “flow” extends to even the more traditional combat-classes, like the Soldier, Pyro and Sniper, each of which are designed to specialize in certain situations, thereby creating interdependency between players and forcing cooperation, giving players reinforcement for successfully fulfilling the role of their class, a type of collective “flow” is achieved.


Valve’s decision to design Team Fortress 2’s playable characters to exploit human psychological patterns of reward and reinforcement to create flow achieves a gaming nirvana sought out by all game designers. My game-professor from my time at UC Santa Cruz acknowledged that the goal of game design is to provide interactive visual stimuli to create a certain psychological/emotional response in players. To this affect, Team Fortress 2 succeeds with aplomb by basing its fundamental design on “collective flow”, an experience comparable only to sports. Other game developers have experimented with patterns of reinforcement in multiplayer gaming, most notably with Treyarch/Infinity Ward and the Call of Duty series. Call of Duty operates by an “experience-point” system, which allows players to unlock progressively stronger weapons and abilities as they play for longer stretches of time and complete special objectives. While this is effective in creating an addictive positive feedback loop (addictive being used here in the colloquial sense of the term), it creates a fundamental imbalance in gameplay as more experienced players can easily dominate new players with superior equipment and perks. As a result, the game becomes a bizarre amalgam of the frustrating and the enthralling, and for new gamers, gaming becomes a masochistic struggle to endure the assaults of skilled players in hopes of unlocking better weapons. This apparent psychological contradiction shows that game-designers have much to learn when it comes to creating “flow” without creating imbalance or frustration.


For the last five months, Team Fortress 2 has enthralled me with its masterful manipulation of operant conditioning and reinforcement. Having had to fight off the urge to play a few rounds to write this paper, I wanted to understand exactly what was bringing me back to the game so often. I concluded that the game must have had some psychological impact upon me and that its psychological design was responsible for causing me to lose countless hours to it. Drawing from what I learned about Skinner’s theories of operant conditioning and reinforcement, as well as from perusing developer commentary, I determined that the game draws its primary appeal from the design of its interdependent classes and the methods of scoring unique to each of the classes. In order to achieve this, Valve does not display a death-count on the in-game scoreboard, preventing player-humiliation. This comes in addition to a random loot-drop system and persistent player-statistics. These methods of rewarding individual achievement, combined with the psychological impact of constant positive reinforcement and collective flow, work well to make Team Fortress 2 a masterclass in multiplayer gaming.

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Team Fortress 2. Vers. 1.1.4.6. Bellevue, Washington: Valve Corporation, 2007. Computer software.
Madigan, Jamie. "The Psychology of Looting." GamePro 11 Apr. 2011: 30-43. GamePro. GamePro Media. Web. 10 May 2011. http://cdn1.gamepro.com/cdn_img/13364-GP0411_loot.pdf.
Kasschau, Richard A. Understanding Psychology. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2008. Print.

Team Fortress 2 Review

Shooters suck.

Consistently repetitive and frustrating, multiplayer shooters have come less about cooperation and more about individually unlocking new equipment and gaining levels. Subjugating their players to long stretches of annoying level-grinding amidst irritating players and tactics, these games become most enjoyable at the expense of other players. If one is having fun playing a game like Call of Duty, someone else is being frustrated because of it. A fundamental lack of balance makes it so that players that have invested the most time into playing will dominate the competition, not because they have developed the most skill, but because they have unlocked superior equipment. Thus, player development is relegated to the unethical realm of rewarding players for completing repetitive and annoying tasks.
Shooters suck. Or so I thought until I came across a game so consistently enthralling, so cooperatively challenging, so comically lighthearted, accessible and rewarding, that it not only changed my mind but restored my faith in the viability of multiplayer shooters entirely.

Overview
Team Fortress 2 is the finest multiplayer shooter I have played since the original Call of Duty. A tactical game, matches revolve around one team attempting to complete an objective, i.e. pushing a cart to a goal, attacking a base or dominating the map, while the other team attempts to prevent that goal from being accomplished.
At the core of the action are nine character classes. Each with its own unique role in the battlefield and its own strengths and weaknesses, none are useless and each play as if it were from a different game.

The three offensive classes are respectively the Scout, Soldier and Pyro. The Scout moves far faster than any other class, can double jump and can capture points twice as fast as any other class. Able to substitute his pistol for ability-enhancing sodas, he can speed through stalemates quickly into unguarded capture points, instantly turning a game around. The Soldier is equipped with a rocket launcher and can use it to launch himself high into the air. His shotgun can be swapped for a trumpet, which can give allies offensive and defensive bonuses when he takes enough damage. The Pyro is a close-range class and is most dangerous when hiding behind corners. Armed with a flamethrower and a shotgun, upgradable to a long-range flare-gun, his attacks deal fire-damage, sapping away health quickly.

Defensive classes include the Demoman, Heavy and Engineer. The Demoman is armed with a powerful grenade launcher and a remote-detonated stickybomb launcher. His grenade launcher can be used to hold back advances and kill advancing enemies and destroy buildings and the stickybombs can create dangerous traps. The Heavy, Team Fortress 2’s mascot, can instantly fortify any position with a low-recoil, rapid-fire minigun and boost his health with a variety of “sandviches”. Engineers are critical to any successful strategy and play an important support role. Capable of erecting sentry guns, ammo and health dispenser and teleporters, Engineers reinforce defensive perimeters, resupply offensive pushes and allow for the rapid and constant reinforcement of new troops.


Support roles take a gamut of classes that do not fall into any particular position. The Sniper, an Australian man, is armed with a long-range sniper rifle that charges up its power when zoomed in. The sniper rifle is swappable for a “Huntsman” bow, which sacrifices the scope in exchange for faster charge-time. The Medic is armed with a healing gun which restores health to allies in addition to a syringe gun. The only class with regenerating health, Medics play an important offensive and defensive role by building up “Ubercharges” by healing enough damage in one life. Ubercharges grant ten-seconds of invincibility and ammo regeneration to the deploying Medic and any ally. An Ubercharged Heavy can instantly break through any stalemate and destroy any fortification, turning the tide of the game in seconds. The Spy is armed with only a revolver but has the important ability of disguising himself as a member of the opposing team. A stealth-class at heart, the Spy must adapt his behavior to match that of the player that he is disguised as. While in enemy bases, a Spy can sabotage defenses by destroying Engineer buildings and backstabbing Heavies. By destroying teleporters and sentries behind enemy lines, a single Spy can turn an entire game around.

Team Fortress 2’s fundamental class design places less emphasis on combat and marksmanship and focuses primarily on role-playing instead. Points are rewarded not only for kills, but for healing, teleporting, building destruction, kill-assisting and back-stabbing. Success in Team Fortress 2 comes not out of killing everything in sight and maximizing one’s score, but playing one’s role well, and in turn, bringing success to the team. There are no “jack-of-all trades” classes, each player must rely on the support and help of others. The fundamental design of each class makes the roles come naturally, and as a result, Team Fortress 2 is not only one of the most strategically deep tactical shooters out there, but one of the most accessible.

Team Fortress 2’s class system procures a tangible sense of camaraderie. Performing actions that turn around the course of a match are a regular occurrence for many of the classes, be it singlehandedly capturing the final point as a Scout, destroying a critical sentry as a Spy or stopping an assault as a Heavy. The careful interplay of class abilities makes for extremely well-balanced games as well as many thrilling abilities. No class can succeed without another and likewise, each class has the ability to serve the team in countless ways.

Graphics, Art and Audio
A major complaint against modern shooters is that characters are "generic" and pallete "grey, black and red". Fortunately for Team Fortress 2's sake, "gritty and intense" art is eschewed for "bright and cartoony". Utilizing the most recent version of the Source engine, the game has a distinct, semi-cell-shaded Pixar-esque art style. Characters are easily distinguished from the environment due to the color distinction between their surroundings and classes are easily distinguished by their unique silhouettes. This makes playing far easier and the lack of a radar insignificant.

Further simplifying navigation and combat is the fundamental art-direction of the environments. Each side of the map looks entirely different. The RED team's side resembles a red barn with dirt floors and industrial equipment and the BLU team's side resembles a lab with blue-tinted walls and white floors. The maps are linear, not wide open, and thus facilitate objective-based gameplay very well. The more esoteric maps, like the Halloween-themed Mann Manor, offer a nice change of pace and look fantastic.

By a large margin, Team Fortress 2's character design distinguishes it from its competitors. The distinct silhouettes, humorous voice-acting and expressive faces lend each class a vibrant personality practically unfound in any military shooter in recent memory. Wonderful character animation solidifies the personality of the characters. Each class walks with a different gait and fires his respective weapon with a real sense of power. Character taunts, which freeze the player in place to preform a short animation, are preformed by tapping the "G" key and showcase some of the finest humor and serve well to characterize each class. From the Heavy's hug of his minigun, the Demoman's mocking "flash" and the Scout's dance, the taunts are animated beautifully and serve well to make the battlefield a much more lively and dynamic environment than it otherwise would be.

Sound design in Team Fortress 2, while not groundbreaking like the game's animation, remains very well done. Weapons sound powerful and distinct, each class and weapon can be distinguished by the sounds they make. Voice acting is phenomenal in Team Fortress 2 and furthers the humor of the game, regional accents by the Australian Sniper, the Russian Heavy and the British Spy lend the characters a Street Fighter-esque humor and serve to brighten the mood of the otherwise somber genre.

As an online shooter, music is rather insignificant in Team Fortress 2. What music there is remains fun, catchy and memorable. Appearing only in the game’s main menu, the game’s funky main theme remains a true standout.

Conclusion and Support
Perhaps the best aspect of Team Fortress 2’s design is the constant support that Valve provides for it. Released with only six maps and two game-modes, Team Fortress 2 has expanded greatly since its inception, a perpetual stream of new game modes, maps and items are added through Valve’s Steam. As a result, Team Fortress 2 retains longevity and addictiveness. The addition of a microtransaction system for purchasing special items remains delicately balanced and non-intrusive on one’s full enjoyment of the game (a business model that, in other games, has served to destroy their longevity).

The most striking aspect of Valve’s neverending support for the game is that new content is provided totally free of charge. Team Fortress 2’s additional content, if it adhered to a traditional business model, would have cost the price of multiple DLC packs. The fact that the new maps and modes are provided entirely gratis distinguishes the game from its console brethren.

In all honesty, there is little to criticize about Team Fortress 2. The unique and innovative artistic direction, diverse characters, neverending support and addictive, strategic gameplay are the finest I have ever encountered. Restoring my faith in the shooter entirely, I am proud to honor Team Fortress 2 with My Back Pages' second-ever 5/5


EDIT: Team Fortress 2 has gone free-to-play, you have NO excuse not to download this. (runs fine on old computers)