Team Fortress 2’s Spy – A Guilty Pleasure

The 9th installment of the Go Team! series of Team Fortress 2 class critiques has been posted at Rock, Paper, Shotgun. These sort of mini-editorials are a cute and sometimes humorous look into the depths of each of the TF2 classes. This latest (final?) installment covers the Spy class, probably one of the more controversial classes in TF’s history:

Team Fortress is a team-based game, reliant on close co-operation between a group of individuals for a common goal. Generally speaking, a team who works together towards the common goal will beat a group of individually better players who are playing individually. They may get more kills, but they’ll lose. This is heartwarming. This is also a little saccharine. Spies make things more complicated, more interesting. Your relationships with your team-mates are more sophisticated than almost any other multiplayer game, just because your team-mates… well, they may not be your team-mates. They may just be waiting for you to turn your back before sliding a blade into your back. They’re Judas to your Christ – the betrayal entirely necessary for the story to be as interesting as it is.

This often misunderstood and underused chap is favored by the laid back gamer who isn’t exactly in it for the numbers. Relying on tactics that many new (and old) TF players would consider “ethically” wrong, the spy gets the job done by getting his hands dirty – up close and personal. In the hands of the right mastermind, the Spy is ironically the most formidable class in TF2. He gets in your head. Messes with your normal game tactics. Makes you do crazy things that would otherwise be considered acute paranoia. Spies are, as RPS’s Kieron Gillen so accurately puts, “a necessarily awesome evil.” So why is it that this so called “awesome” class is so verily hated? In my mind’s eye Spies are the unbalance and chaos to a genre that typically disguises itself as order and balance. I love the spy, yet I hate him. Spies keep us on our toes. Even the more experienced and skillful TF players get lulled into their “comfortable” game mode only to be outwitted by the evil genius behind the screen laughing at them. Yes, I have cursed him oh so many times. But at the end of day when I reflect upon the misery I was bestowed, I come to a single conclusion:

“Spies a frackin’ awesome.”

Anyway, go read RPS’s psychoanalysis of TF2’s Spy. It’s quite a fun read. And if that whets your appetite, check out the 8 companion articles in the Go Team! series.