The Anthropology and Culture of Team Fortress 2

Hi guys! I have an assignment for my Anthropology class where I can do whatever as long as it’s related to anthropology, so I decided I want to talk about video games and their connection to Anthropology, after learning that it’s an area of study. I was originally going to do it on MMOs, but I only know 2- Club Penguin and Toontown, and they’re both kind of dead and hard to garner stuff from right now. So instead, I’m going to be talking about one multiplayer video game I grew up playing, and that is very dear to my heart- Team Fortress 2!

To those who do not know, Team Fortress 2 is a class-based first-person shooter, developed by the Valve Corporation in 2009. There are 9 classes to pick from, ranging the double-jumping soda-drinking speedy “Scout” to the backstabbing, secretive handsome rogue “Spy”. Since its release, this game has built a massive fandom and has shaped the childhoods and post-work afternoons of millions of people. I was one of those such people! My earliest memories include begging my parents for a computer SOLELY to play this game, as it was extremely lackluster in content on console, with the game on PC having boatloads of more content. Alongside inspiring many people, due to its age, its inspired its own culture, its own in-game rituals, its own inside jokes, even its own ECONOMY if you can believe it. All of this accrued content and this entire IDENTITY that the fans have built for the game and themselves is what I love about it. For this in-depth blog post, I will talk about rituals, jokes and community, and briefly write about the economy.

In-Game Rituals, Behaviors and Jokes

Let’s start by talking about rituals. Now this may be weird to say to someone who hasn’t seen any footage of the game, but one of these in-jokes no other game has replicated since is killbinding. As the game allows you to open the developer console freely, you can rebind any key to any command, and one of them is simply “kill”, which, as you may assume, just kills you instantly. I’m going to give you an example of how this bind is used from match-to-match.

https://youtu.be/AZgUQtkPl4U?si=RD2-FZPFnWmuwgzC&t=11

To explain the video, in this clip, as you can see, the sniper is at critical health, while the player has high health. The player subsequently steals the health kit and uses a taunt, used to laugh at enemies, to instead taunt at his teammate, before they both killbind at the same time. Why? To start, when it comes to one-off funny interactions like this that are casually started and stopped, the outcome of the game does not matter. They are killbinding regardless of how it affects their team or their match outcome, because it doesn’t matter to them. Since the game is played in a 12v12 format, what every individual person does on the team doesn’t matter NEARLY as much as compared to another game like Overwatch, where it’s a 5v5 format instead. Anyways, killbinding is used to express “agony” and “comedic timing”, both at the same time. In this clip, the comedy of the low health player killbinding is that getting that med kit robbed from him is “worse than death”, and in a way showing that it’s preferable for him to just go back and wait to respawn, rather than wait for the med kit to come back. The reason people retaliate with killbinding too is… as far as I can tell, respect and for solidarity. A sort of way of expressing “I’d killbind too if I were you” or “I feel anguish for you”, or simply to jump in on the trend. While I may be just overanalyzing a funny small interaction that happens between teammates or enemies, it’s way too much of a trend to not note- it’s even acknowledged by people in the community, as noted by the meme below. if you find yourself in a server where nobody is taking the game seriously, you might see the kill feed on the top right of your game flood with death messages.

(This meme depicts two players from two enemies team meeting up, and then killbinding. Note the death messages in the top right, representing their death.)

Another notable behavior that a sub-group of people in the game/community do is “go friendly”. “Friendlies” as they’re nicknamed, are a subgroup of players who, for one reason or another, have effectively decided to stop fighting. While if you stopped playing the core gameplay of any other game, you’d probably get kicked or banned, this little corner of the fandom has been both embraced and rejected by the rest of the community- It’s a phenomenon so big that it has to be commented on! These people usually give out healing to both the enemy team and their own team (since that’s something you can do with some items), and the community consensus is to simply let them do whatever they want to do, regardless of what team they’re on. When asked about friendlies, one Reddit user says “Killing a friendly gives no advantage to my team, wastes my ammo and time (time that could be spent killing fighters), and makes the friendly sad. So I don't”. On the other side of the conversation, another remarks “I personally don't like them. If I join a server, it's because I want to play. Not run around having people spam voice commands wasting player slots”.

 

Fandom Culture

Next, I ought to talk about the culture outside of the game. Fandom culture should be nothing new to anthropologists- the art of cosplaying as your favorite characters from media has gone on for a long while, since around the 90s! TF2 is no stranger to cosplays, with one of the most popular ones I’ve seen being people cosplay as Spy (one of the 9 classes) and sneaking into other cosplay communities.

(two examples of someone dressed up as spy, one wearing a Pony mask to mix in with the Brony/My Little Pony crowd, and the other wearing a furry mask to “blend” into the furry fandom.)

                A prevalent event in TF2’s fandom recently that has sort of blown my mind is that one youtuber, Shork, has somehow gotten Team Fortress 2’s voice actors to start interacting and collaborating with the fandom at large. It is utterly SHOCKING to me because it has been decades since Team Fortress 2 first launched, and even today, 18 or so after release, they still love and embrace the game they participated in the creation of, as well as loving and adoring all their fans. Here is an example of the old voice actors collaborating with Shork to dub over an animation the community made.

                Speaking of animation, animation is extremely important to the fandom. If you look up Team Fortress 2 SFM (The name of the animating program) on YouTube, you are bound to find ENDLESS pages of content made out of love from the TF2 community.

(A timeline made by a reddit user, displaying the timeline and evolution of Team Fortress 2 Animations ever since the launch of Team Fortress 2 and its animating program.)

As you can see from the timeline above, videos and animations are utterly plentiful in this community- rivaling and even surpassing the amount of fan content for WAY more popular games, even! While I don’t have much to write about without going into extreme detail about some of the animations and animators, I will link some that you are all free to watch in the Additional Resources section at the end of this blog post.

Economy and Game Longevity

Lastly, one thing that has evolved with the game ever since it got added a few years after it released is the in-game Economy. This is a very rare phenomenon that I’ve only seen one other game do, but never again. Any item in game, whether it be a hat, weapon, or taunt, can be resold by anyone who has one. How? The platform Team Fortress 2 is on, Steam, has its own “Community Marketplace” that encourages and allows the buying and reselling from other steam members. What do you think happens when users are free to buy and sell whatever they want as they please? An actual ECONOMY develops.

(This is a picture of Backpack.TF, a Team Fortress 2 Trading site that’s been active from 2012 till now!)

In Team Fortress 2, you can randomly get Crates, that you have to buy a “Key” to open, that randomly contain an item from a list, or an ESPECIALLY rare item, called an “Unusual”. Because keys are only able to be obtained through the Team Fortress 2 in-game shop, they have become the standard of trading- TF2’s equivalent to our dollar. While they don’t have access to “production”, items bought officially from team fortress 2 essentially get added to the “community stock”, adding to the total number of that item that’s out there in the community’s inventories. Just like regular economics, supply and demand adjust accordingly- rarer items, such as Unusuals, go for a higher number of keys, while common items are worth Refined Metal (TF2’s equivalent of our cents, essentially). Alongside all of this… TF2, just like the real world, can suffer economic downturns and depressions.

                As an example of this economy in action, I want to talk about a major event that happened in the community- The Crate Depression. This event, comedically nicknamed after the Great Depression, happened on July 25^th, and was the result of a TF2 Crate being bugged and producing guaranteed Unusuals every time they were opened. This caused a MAJOR influx of Unusuals into the TF2 Marketplace, as well as inflating the cost of these bugged TF2 crates.

(A meme made in 2019, humorously comparing The Crate Depression to other economic events.)

                Surprisingly, this event caused the Team Fortress 2 developers to pause their hiatus and update the community on their efforts on fixing the bug. Something I’ve yet to mention is that hiatus- If you can believe it, this game hasn’t gotten updated since 2017! Despite that, the community and the economy are still active! Well anyway, after fixing the bugged crate, everyone was able to keep their Unusuals but only the first one they unboxed was made tradable, with all the other ones being trade locked. Despite the massive commotion at the time of how this would actually affect sales, the economy eventually went back to how it was, with no sharp increase or decrease in price.

Conclusion

Team Fortress 2 is an utterly special game, a lightning in a bottle, that I don’t think a game will ever get close to replicating at all. The way the community interacted with each other and with the game, the amount of original content made, the friendships its inspired, the people I’ve met and grown closer to because of it, this game is very near and dear to me. Even without my personal ties to it, the amount of culture it has spawned and maintained within itself and onto the internet as a whole is immeasurable.

Through the in-game interactions, rituals and jokes it has inspired between people, to the culture and original media people have created with it, to the entire mini-economy it has maintained and developed within itself, Team Fortress 2 is a great example as to why anthropology is interesting- even in the places least expected, humanity, culture and society reins through.

Additional Resources:

TF2 Animations –

Live and Let Spy – this is one of the most legendary TF2 animations ever. 21 minutes of extreme animation quality, a strong plotline and fun characters.

All my Fellas – If you want a short one, this one is just one minute. This music video(?) is a bit of a mini tribute to the TF2 community, with many split seconds to very famous animations and movies, including Live and Let Spy!

Gentlebot Hell – a Music video featuring a song from Futurama. Not much to say, but this one is one of the older ones and I remember watching it as a kid! It’s about 2 minutes long.

Mmph the way you Mmph – this one is just funny. A Team Fortress 2 Parody of “Love the way you Lie”. 3 minutes long.

We Like to Party – Utterly iconic. A decade old now! 1 minute long. LOUD!!!

Heavy is Dead – 19 million views! A more recent iconic Team Fortress 2 Animation, this one can be an example as to how the Team Fortress 2 community uses perfect sentence mixing to make the TF2 characters say whatever you want them to. Could you imagine being a voice actor 18 years ago and having people sentence mix your voice from then until now? This video is 3 minutes long.

Team Fabulous 2 - This one is utterly iconic in the community- Immensely popular and beloved by all, mostly for its wackiness and quick comedy, similar to old cartoons. Unfortunately, the creator passed away in 2015, and now it is respected as one of the best TF2 animations. 17 minutes long.

Emesis Blue – Words cannot describe this one. Do you want the true utter depth of how much commitment the fandom has for this game? This is an entire ORIGINAL MOVIE, fully animated and starring TF2 characters and original voice acting. It is horror. It is scary. It is masterful. It’s a far cry, but if you have two hours to spare, I totally recommend spending them watching these video game characters get put into a very grizzly situation.

Videos and Articles relating to the Crate Depression –

How to Kill a game’s economy in 19 hours

TF2: The Crate Depression of 2019

https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=53025

Miscellaneous –

TF2 Crab Spy – a video from 16 years ago. I didn’t have space to talk about it, but this video also inspired a sub movement of “Spycrabs” – people who abused this glitch on the Spy character to make themselves look like a crab. A plush and a few cosmetics were even made based off this glitch!

TF2 voice actors live at Meet The Mercs – a 40 minute video showing the voice actors interacting with the community at a convention. You can skim through and see how widespread this community is! (Skip to 25 seconds in and you can see them form a conga line!)

Marketplace.tf – Not a video, a website, sister site to backpack.tf, in which you can buy TF2 items with real money but at the community’s price, and not Valve/Team Fortress 2’s.

Sources:

https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/o7tz5x/right_here_you_know_what_to_do/

https://sanchensky.tumblr.com/post/703153306014482432

https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/uoowqt/i_created_a_timeline_of_the_history_of_tf2/#lightbox

https://backpack.tf/

https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2shitposterclub/comments/ci3auy/well_boys_we_did_it_tf2_economy_is_no_more/