Introduction

Team Fortress Two: a first person shooter video game created by Valve in October 18th, 2007, and sold for free in the downloadable market, Steam. Team Fortress Two has been around for 14 years and shows no signs of stopping. It has been granted many awards for its influence over the gaming industry, and a TF2 Community was forged and has remained strong to this day. These awards include: "Best Artistic Design" for computers by IGN, "Best Multiplayer Experience (PC)," and "Best Artistic Direction (PC)" from 1UP.com, "Best Multiplayer Game of the Year," both on the PC and on any platform, as well as the award for "Most Unique Art Style" in GameSpy's 2007 Game of the Year awards. In the present day Steam store, the reviews on Team Fortress Two are quote, "Very Positive," in both remarks, both remarks being "recent" and "all" reviews. Valve even released the software used to make the cinematics for the game known as, Source Filmmaker, in order to allow the community to use the Team Fortress Two models, along with models from other games brought in through the Steam Workshop, a place to download Steam Community created models, maps, animations, and probably other things that I am just not remembering. The best way to showcase Source Filmmaker, in my opinion, would be to watch the "Meet the Team" series, on youtube. The "Meet the Team" series showcases all the playable characters in Team Fortress Two in nine videos, each character getting their own video (this sadly does not include the video, Meet the Sandwich, which does have its own tenth video in the series). Each video, including Meet the Sandwich, has over ten million views! Each video also has thousands of likes, and they have as many comments as Youtube will allow. Thus, it is pretty obvious that Team Fortress Two has played a role in it's and the gaming society as a hole. What effects has Tf2 had on the gaming society, including its own? That is what I want to discuss in this blog.