Broken Windows Theory and why I don’t suck at Team Fortress 2
Grove City College did three stupid things for its students: It gave us laptops, it gave us a high-speed Internet connection, and it put a proxy server between that connection and the world. Fifteen hundred boys 18-22 had computers and no access to Internet gaming servers. So we hosted multiplayer games on campus, and we shot each other. (We also gave each other a lot of bad house music, but I digress.)
The jocks stuck to Halo, but that console game only supported a few players, and besides we had far more nerds than jocks. The computer game Counterstrike was, in my little world, the dominant multiplayer game of 2002-2006, rivaled only by other Half-Life mods like Day of Defeat (which I call “the thinking man’s Counterstrike” because sometimes I stayed alive long enough to think about who was going to kill me).
For four years I sucked at Counterstrike. I sucked hard, because I’d never owned a gaming system more advanced than a Game Boy, and I have the hand-eye coordination of a lump of lead and blood. Which is what my head became several seconds into every match.
I got a little better over the years, but senior year I still earned my callsign, “Liability,” which referred to what I was to any team. I can prove this with math: By the time I had killed 10 people, I had died 100 times, netting my team 90 points of Loser.
This is what I look like in Counterstrike:
A few months ago I bought Team Fortress 2, a multi-player game built on another Half-Life mod. The old versions of this game were done in gun-metal gray and post-apocalypse brown like every other shoot-em-up. But when Valve turned TF2 into a standalone game, they gave it a bright cartoonish look.
This is what I look like in Team Fortress 2:
Counterstrike games at my college were civil, if aggressive. But during school breaks, I’d play Counterstrike on the Internet at large, and everyone I met was an asshole. Everyone who played poorly was called an idiot, and everyone who played well was accused of hacking. Playing the game didn’t feel like work, the way long-term games like World of Warcraft feel, but some players treated it like work, and it could be emotionally draining putting up with the abuse. And like I said, I never learned how to play.
But on Team Fortress 2 the players are friendly, jokey, encouraging toward newbies. And because of that, I’m learning. I’m getting along with players. I found favorite servers that I visit often. Even when my team’s losing, we have a sense of humor about it. I just cracked up tonight during my usual 100 deaths. (Granted, now I’m able to kill one or two guys with each life.)
I partly blame my success at TF2 on the actual teamwork the game requires. Doctors heal other players, engineers defend them with sentry guns, and scouts run in and do the dirty work. Everyone does their part in a way that they couldn’t when everyone was running around in Counterstrike with the same three rifles. And maybe it’s that the game is still new, or that more casual gamers play shoot-em-ups than in 2002.
But I think mostly it’s because TF2 is so pretty.
Have you ever played Super Smash Bros? It’s awful. But I’ve seen otherwise serious gamers play it because they still get to fight but they can also get beat up by their girlfriends. These girlfriends would never touch Counterstrike, Half-Life, or Halo — not because girls aren’t good at video games, but because those games are so damn ugly. On TF2, I play with girls. And grown men. And one kid who definitely sounds six years old. We all play nice, we help each other out, and on one server no one’s allowed to swear.
And we all look gorgeous in our cartoonish outfits. Look at these characters! They are silly. They’re fun. They’re cute. And yet they run around in a game as challenging as any other multiplayer shooter that requires interpersonal skills and ingenuity.
One of the characters got upgraded recently. Now he eats a sandwich that replenishes his health. He goes “Om nom nom.”
The game-makers introduced the sandwich, as they had released all their characters, with a video. And then they explained why that video was not the epic they had promised:
The suits took issue with every brave, authority-questioning page of our Meet the Sandvich script—specifically that there were supposed “similarities” between it and the 1987 action film Predator, and more specifically that it was word for word the 1987 action film Predator.
These are men of genius.
With that much bold, unironic wit going into the game, how could anything come out but well-behaved, fun-loving players? This game repels killjoys. It puts players in a Tex Avery cartoon and the players respond accordingly. Ugly games are slums with broken windows. Pretty games are well-kept neighborhoods. And in pretty games, people quit bitching and pitch in.
Pictures from Team Abundo and Crypticommonicon
