With the conclusion of the editorial series about “Honor, Sportsmanship and Teamplay” we sat down with the author of the series, Teatime, to ask him a few questions about this particular matter. The Fort: Teatime, what spawned the idea of creating this lengthy series of editorials about “Honor, Sportsmanship and Teamplay”? Teatime: Well, those are the values the Fort is dedicated to. This dedication goes back to the old Fort, for a long time called “Fort Bundy”, from which I inherited the (...)

I gave you a lengthy exposé of what I think Honor is (or should be) and why I consider it to be important and worth aspiring to. But it’s probably high time I adapt that to the world of online gaming in a way which is less abstract. Though I assume I have to overcome an obstacle here. Honor as a concept for conducting oneself in the real world, for having values and principles and for standing in for those, is hopefully comprehensible and recommendable. In the world of the internet such a (...)

Honor. Such a quaint and somewhat almost archaic term which one would rather associate with a samurai movie or a Star Trek episode dealing with Klingons. But what has honor to do with online games like TF2? Before I will try to address that let’s take a moment and discuss: What is honor in the first place? The term is problematic enough. Dictionaries have a number of different definitions for the word depending on the context. [1] There is honor as something a person defines for himself (...)

Okay, time to move on to the other aspect of sportsmanship: Conduct. While my statements in the previous article about fairness were - I hope - objective and comprehensible we are entering now more controversial territory, discussing conduct, attitude and respect. This does concern the way people play the game as well as how they treat each other. People playing a pub game are basically trying to have an enjoyable time. Many want to do so with a certain degree of competitiveness, while (...)

Bad enough you should work as a team, now I also expect you to think beyond that? Most certainly! Let me start by quoting a definition of sportsmanship (Wikipedia): Sportsmanship is conformance to the rules, spirit, and etiquette of sport. More grandly, it may be considered the ethos of sport. It is interesting that the motivation for sport is often an elusive element. Sportsmanship expresses an aspiration or ethos that the activity will be enjoyed for its own sake, with proper (...)

Remember my example from the first Teamplay-Editorial with a bunch of people meeting on a Sunday afternoon to play a friendly game of soccer? Now imagine those people would split up into two teams and the players would run onto the field and start the game without any consultation or coordination who was doing what. Could be quite a chaotic game, don’t you think? What if on one team no one would play the goal? What if everybody would decide to play defense and nobody would attack? What if (...)

It may appear silly to discuss a term like teamplay for a game like Team Fortress, doesn’t it? But does having half of a server’s population sporting the same colors automatically make a team? Not really. The idea of teamplay constitutes for all members of a team work to together to achieve a certain goal set by the creator of the current map. On a CTF-map the goal is to steal and cap the enemy flag (sorry, intelligence ), on a CP-map it is to capture a set of capture points, on a PL-map it (...)