A Brief History of Team Fortress Classic and the Importance of Game Mods

The history of gaming modifications is quite extensive and one that I've been fortunate enough to participate in quite a lot over the years. Game modifications, or just more simply mods, can come in quite a large number of forms from simple texture mods to entire game overhauls where everything from mechanics to gameplay are completely changed. The only real requirement for something to be called a "mod", in my opinion, is for it to exist within the same engine as the original for which it claims to be a modification of.

A number of the mods which I have played, or modded versions of games that I've played are as follows: Team Fortress Classic, Counter-Strike, Wanted!, Sven Co-Op, Day of Defeat, Ricochet, Death Match Classic, Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto IV, DOTA, and Black Mesa.

Mods have always held great appeal to me personally because they offer a way to completely revitalize an aging game and also bring completely new and unique gameplay all for the incredibly expensive cost of zero dollars and zero cents. And that's what really makes mods so great. They're usually completely fan driven and completely free.

The final project for my CS 108, computer game design class focuses around the modification of Team Fortress and its rise to fame.

Team Fortress originally started many many years ago and was built inside of the original quake games. It used the preexisting engine to create a team-based multiplayer combat game of capture the flag with multiple unique classes each with their own special guns and grenades. This turned the traditional straightforward deathmatch multiplayer quake into a wonderful team-based game of skill and diversity with each class bringing something awesome to the table. Below is an evolution of the history of the Team Fortress mod and its classes throughout the years:

The original Team Fortress idea came from Quake and was incredibly popular

Team Fortress was quickly ported to Half-Life as Team Fortress Classic following Half-Life's release 

New high res models helped the Half-Life engine live a good long life through the Team Fortress Classic Mod

Valve immortalized the concept of Team Fortress in Team Fortress 2, the massively successful game

But over the years the concepts behind Team Fortress' success always stayed the same: fast-paced team action and distinct classes with unique skillsets that each brought something to the table to make a team successful as a unit.

I enjoyed the thrilling break-neck pace of Team Fortress Classic for many years, some even in competitive clan play and they were the most exciting years of gameplay that I've ever had.

In competitive play Team Fortress was an entirely different animal than in pub games. Competitively, each class had either defensive or offensive orientation and teams would align themselves 9v9 with 5 playing defense and 4 on offense on each team and both teams would play two 30 minute matches to see who could capture more flags than the other team across both rounds. Certain "meta" rules soon evolved such as offenses not shooting at each other (the goal in the end was to test one team's offense vs another's defense) because if the offenses shot at each other, the defense would never have anything to do inside the base as both team's offenses would just be fighting in the middle space of the map between both defenses or the "no man's land".

The game also suffered from multiple glitches in the engine and many were accepted into formal and competitive gameplay such as bunny hopping which allowed a player to exceed it's classes defined maximum speed and reach the game engine's maximum speed as displayed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_1LvSQgTWk Another very common engine glitch was known as "sharking" where users could skate across the top of a body of water in order to maintain their incoming speed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0rpJug_Hbc

To get a better idea of professional clan play in Team Fortress Classic, here are two videos of top tier players on offense and defense listed by position, player name, and class respectively.

Offense, Wheaties, Scout / Medic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho4vBRnV_vo

Defense, Reptile, Soldier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0TkPkzt5mk

But what is the point of all this besides me being entirely too nostalgic for an old game that's long dead? The point is that everything about Team Fortress since it's inception has been intended as a free addon to a game. And this free addon was so damn good it traversed its way through multiple engines until Valve finally realized how much money they could make off of the idea so they took all the core concepts of Team Fortress, made them a bit easier to learn and lowered the learning curve a bit, added hats, and voila! One of the most popular multiplayer games of our time was created. But many lacked the understand and appreciation of its backstory which is a bit sad. But to Valve's credit they managed to monetize the game in a completely new model no one had ever done before: by selling hats. As ridiculous as it sounds it allowed them to keep the game free to play and accessible to the general public just like the original mod and for that I have to give them tons of credit.

And that's why I will always support game mods and open game engines themselves every step of the way because you never know what a group of fans out there will be able to envision when they get a hold of your engine. It could just be the next Team Fortress. And that's certainly not a bad thing.

On Sexuality in Video Games And Our Preconceived Notions of It As Male Designers

To many of us it's painfully clear that there's an incredible lack of diversity among certain fields of study at a collegiate level and the three of note for this blog post happen to be: engineering, programming, and video game study & design. This manifests as classrooms generally filled with 90%+ males but it also has different effects as well on things like student clubs and also, if only subtly, our preconceived notions of what women are interested in vs. what we think women should be interested in. (hint: they should be the same)

Source: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/wmpd/2013/start.cfm

I don't think most men whose classes are filled predominantly with men would agree they prefer them that way however it is the scenario we find ourselves in frequently (again, when in the above fields of study). The question then becomes how does that affect both our view of sex and women in general? The answer is far from simple because few classes, if any, with CS 108 as the exception, even bring the topic up. And what happens with topics that don't get brought up? We reinforce our own preconceived notions of them inside our head and continue to go down paths which can be incredibly unhealthy to develop totally incorrect conclusions and hold them until correctly challenged.

Therefore it is rather enlightening to bring up this topic once and for all and not only see the ways in which a lack of femininity in both certain academic and professional settings changes our perspective on things but to also hear from women themselves who are in the minority in these settings. And this was the case with our most recent CS 108 class: we unabashedly brought up the topic of sex in video games and all the incorrect ways a male-dominated industry represents, or more accurately misrepresents, women.


We talked at length about stereotypical female characters which tend to dominate the video game industry and all the ways they are physically altered from equivalent male characters in order to stress their "femininity" as if in this incredibly complex age with multiple scales upon which to interpret one's own gender or sexuality, that giving a character a bow on their head would magically make them a "female" or "feminine". Not only is this stupid in a superficial manner and also a huge cop out by designers but it's also an insult to any women who doesn't think a character with a bow on its head is an archetypical model of them.

All the ways in which pac man developers thought a "woman" needed to be differentiated:

Source: http://n7ugc.disney.go.com/item/Golden7934/199_2gs11k6X4Tn100001004wQo0-h-9782c5-as/Pacman%20and%20Mrs.%20Pacman__600_450_q50.jpg

I think there are multiple reasons why video game designers do the ridiculous things they do in order to feminize (is that a word?) characters and none of them are good. They all stem from the fact that women just don't have enough presence in the video game industry either as players, programmers, or designers. And again, it's not like us video game playing men are sitting here wishing it was this way. It's merely the scenario we find ourselves in. But it does affect us. And the ways it affects us are quite simple: we make terrible decisions about how to represent women merely because we aren't women ourselves and we don't have enough input from them in the first place. We could hardly call ourselves experts on the incredibly complex subject of being a female. The phrase "out of sight, out of mind" comes to mind when contemplating this problem and why it exists.

The solution I feel then is two fold. Men should take a more active approach to correctly representing any character or characters in a more fair way based on sex and try not to typify them in physical, outdated, or stereotypical ways like adding bows to their heads or huge breasts to their chest but to consider that life is nearly a perfect mix of 50/50 male:female and thus women deserve not only equal representation but also equal depth when it comes to characters and their development or backstory. This isn't even purely an argument from fairness and sexual equality: shallow characters suck no matter what sex they are. I'll be sure to keep an eye out for any of these crappy characters in the future that's for sure.

I'll end with one of my more favorite female characters I've played in recent memory: Mona Sax from the Max Payne series. She's not perfect, even sexualized a bit heavily at points, but her and Max Payne, the main character, do develop a relationship based on mutual respect and acknowledgement. While Max might get more screen time as the main character, he isn't necessarily above her in any way. Mona's even using the bigger gun! She's using a desert eagle while Max's gun of choice is a 9mm Beretta:

Source: Max Payne 1. Remedy Games. http://remedygames.com/