The image above can't capture it, but when this was taken, someone in-game was blasting the musical theme from Pokemon. Basically, Team Fortress 2 has gone from "shooting game" to "dress up your character as cute as possible then run around dancing and showing him off." Fighting still occurs, but many of the servers now play like a Miss Hipster America fashion competition. What is the reason behind Team Fortress 2's Charlie Sheen-like descent into madness? The answer is "hats."
Hats were first introduced to Team Fortress 2 in mid-2009. Although people couldn't customize or trade their hats back then, everyone still appreciated the ability to look pretty. See, Team Fortress 2 does something cool when a player gets killed: It zooms the dead player's screen from their corpse to the player that killed them. This means that if you dress right and make a kill, the other player not only has to endure the humiliation of dying, but also the embarrassment of seeing that their assassin is dressed in a pink beret, wearing Kanye West glasses, or disguised as a cow.
So, players immediately took to donning whatever random hats they were given, and killing each other as much as possible. Everybody was getting killed enough, but they weren't looking pretty enough. So another update got released, called "Mann-Conomy." This added the option for players to build and trade their own hats, and customize them with a variety of different paints. The Mann-Conomy update represents the dividing line between "original" Team Fortress 2 and "let's all share mass hysteria" Team Fortress 2.
The new-and-improved Team Fortress 2 immediately polarized gamers into two groups: One group wanted to actually play the game, and the other group wanted to play dolly dress-up. The other day, my good friend sent me a note asking for a bunch of girly clothes. I had most of the items, so I opened up Team Fortress 2 and offered her a trade, before I realized that I had mistakenly received a message that was meant for her bridesmaids and involved actual clothes.
What's important to remember is, with a few small exceptions, hats serve no functional purpose in the game. In fact, since hats make the player more visible to the enemy, it could be argued that hats make your odds slightly worse. This didn't matter to the dolly dress-up players; what mattered to them was running around so that everyone could see their newly painted outfit before they got blown up. Although many people objected to this new type of "gameplay," Valve made lots of money selling hats, so they weren't about to stop.
They even made a jar of pee that you can throw at people.
Let's get something straight, in case I haven't been clear: Hats have made Team Fortress 2 players go insane. That's the only explanation for the prices being asked and paid for a hat. Keep in mind that this game only costs a one-time fee of $15.
Hat sales threads do brisk business selling rare hats and items for between $2 and $200. Rumors are flying that hats have been sold for over $700. Team Fortress 2 players are lucky enough to watch a modern version of Tulip Mania unfolding. Tulip Mania was a period in the early 17th century when speculators went nuts for Dutch tulips. At the height of its popularity, a single tulip could fetch 10 times a worker's healthy annual salary. Like the hats of Team Fortress 2, nothing about these tulips was special or magical; their sole value was for cosmetic and resale purposes.
How does this happen? Think of a pyramid investment scheme: The top people sell things to their "downlines," who mark up the prices and sell the same objects to the people working below them. It works great for everyone, except the last people in the chain (the bottom floor of the pyramid). These people lose everything. Someone is going to end up paying hundreds of dollars for a Team Fortress 2 hat that they won't be able to resell.
This is just a simple overview of how the Team Fortress 2 hat economy is progressing -- someone trained in economics could provide a much more detailed analysis of the situation. But then they'd have to accept the fact that people are trading children's dolls in a shooting game.
I am not exaggerating about the children's dolls -- people are actually trading teddy bears.
Have these changes been for the good of the game or not? Well, from a viability standpoint, the financial successes brought by hat sales have allowed Valve to pay close attention to making new features and maps. It is extraordinarily rare for a game to enjoy such a lengthy content-delivery process, and the exceptional content truly shines. But how about from a gameplay standpoint? Have the updates been good or bad? This is the hot topic that's caused many purists to abandon the game. I can only speak in terms of my own opinion: Team Fortress 2 is my favorite video game of all time. I love the slapstick humor. The other day, I was a sniper, and I had a slow-moving soldier in my sights. I was about to squeeze the trigger when an enemy scout ran behind the soldier and spray-painted an image on the wall. The image was so offensive that I forgot about shooting the soldier, who soon took me down. Now that's advanced strategy!
Certainly, the game has been exceptionally enjoyable from the beginning, and it's understandable that people would get upset at changes after playing the same game for two years. However, we have so many fun first-person shooters to choose from, but only one lets you disguise as an enemy, stab that enemy, then teabag the corpse while said enemy is forced to watch helplessly. So, it's no surprise that I support any update that increases the comedy factor of the game (which at this point is every single update). Even though finding an actual fighting match requires sifting through dozens of trade servers and games full of bots, Team Fortress 2 still remains one of the most original and amusing games ever.
Evan Hoovler also writes for Playboy's The Smoking Jacket and SyFy's Blastr. He co-wrote the National Lampoon book "Pimp It Yourself," and he wants to be your Steam buddy.