Mundane Insight into Competition and Conflict

Valve’s Team Fortress 2 is an excellent example of competition and conflict within a game environment. Valve’s design has essentially created a space that supports a variety of competitive forms. While formally the rules of the game solely ensure that opposing groups of players clash to win the game scenario, a multitude of mechanics produce additional competition.

Team Fortress 2’s scoreboard, which can be checked at any stage throughout a round, and is forced onto players during the closing stages of a round, is a major attribution to the game’s conflict encouragement. By attributing a score to specified actions, and allowing players to view their score, Valve has created score based competition. Players thrive to accumulate as many points as possible, allowing them to compare themselves against others of their class, team or simply all other players.

An additional feature of the scoreboard encourages direct competition against a specified member of a rivaling team. After being killed by a player 4 successive times without triumph, that player is marked as ‘Dominating’ you on the scoreboard, and that player receives a ‘Domination.’ This mechanic encourages ‘Dominated’ players to seek-out any players holding their ‘Domination’ and try to redeem themselves.

Furthermore, the game encourages players to compete against themselves. The game saves a list of self-attained high-scores, and alerts players if they come close to beating their previous best, or if they have beaten their previous best. By doing this for a variety of statistics, players can directly compete with their past self, or use the Steam community’s features to compete against the high-scores of their Steam friends.