The Media Ethnography Of Team Fortress 2

This post was written for the university subject, BCM241.

I’m sitting at home. It’s a cold blustery night, there’s rain pouring against the window and I’m staring at my computer monitor, bored senseless and senselessly bored. And whenever I’m bored and suffering from analysis paralysis as to what I should play, watch or read next...

…I grab my keyboard and mouse and play some Team Fortress 2.

For the uninitiated, Team Fortress 2 is an online first-person shooter released by Valve Software all the way back in 2007 and it has remained a staple of online play for over a decade. The game regularly draws in 50000 concurrent players a day, and it’s no wonder - the gameplay and shooting mechanics are solid, the art style is charming and timeless, and it’s all packaged up with a level of dark humour and wit that’s distinctly “Valve-ian”…or “Valve-esque”.

But more than that, the community that plays the game and remains loyal to it have created a kind of language and mode of communication all their own, using Team Fortress 2’s built-in functionalities, and it’s a stark example of an astounding kind of virtual media ethnography.

The term 'Media ethnography’ is defined by Lotta Junnilainen and Eeva Luhtakallio as such: it’s “an approach capable of understanding context, culture, and nuance…[and] it has particular potential for studying new modes and changing contexts of communication and the complex social processes of the media society…” (2016). In the context of this article, the important bits there are ‘new modes’, ’changing contexts of communication’ and ‘social processes’, because Team Fortress 2 contains this new type of communication and ‘social order’ that I’m alluding to that develops naturally between it’s players.

Broadly, this communication can be described as follows: using voice commands and player movement to indicate an act, concept, signal or emotion. For example, using the keyboard button to crouch repeatedly is generally seen as a sign of friendliness. Some players, like any online game, abuse this of course and kill or ‘frag’ these players for easy points. But many in the community frown upon this, others don’t…and I’m not willing to throw my hat into the ring on that subject just yet. Regardless, the ‘friendly’ community of TF2, who don’t shoot anyone and wander around helping other players (even if they’re on the enemy team), is an example of a microcosm of culture that’s entirely evolved within a game that wasn’t designed to accomodate them in the first place.

Of course, there’s other kinds of communication like moving your mouse backwards and forwards to simulate your character nodding. And lest we forget ‘taunting’, where you can dance around, high-five someone - you name it, there might be a taunt for it. And yes, these sorts of online interactions are not at all unique to Team Fortress 2. But it’s a culture, a community and an ethnography that I’ve had many experiences and encounters with for many, many hours.

There’s a video by one of the game’s content creators, LazyPurple, called TF2 is a Timeless Masterpiece. In it, he goes over the many reasons why he loves the game, but there’s a part early on in the video where he describes the act of ‘group taunting’ in the game. That, at its core, it was “just a bunch of people sitting at [their] computers sharing a brief yet silly moment together” (2017). And that definitely rings true. It may only be goofy fun, but it still has emotional value and it creates connections and bonds that wouldn’t have been possible without this game or the internet.

And that’s got to count for something, right?

References:

Junnilainen, L & Luhtakallio, E 2016, ‘Media Ethnography - Major Reference Works - Wiley Online Library’, Wiley Online Library, viewed 3rd August 2019, <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118541555.wbiepc025>.

LazyPurple 2017, TF2 is a Timeless Masterpiece, online video, 17 November, LazyPurple, viewed 3rd August 2019, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuqImZKygvw>.