My Favorite Team Fortress Character: The Engineer
Every person is a player, and every player has their game. Valve’s Team Fortress 2, on top of being just delightfully hilarious and fun to look at, achieves an environment that sums up nine different “Players.” Some people are spies, some people are snipers, I however, am an Engineer.
But wait, what is an Engineer? At the core of their being, the Engineer wants to spend his time creating a machine that could very well play the game for him. Why shouldn’t he? The Sentry Gun never gets tired and complains. The Sentry gun doesn’t type inane things into your team’s chat functions. A sentry gun doesn’t brag that it’s the most important player on your team, or that it was left behind to defend. All a sentry gun knows how do to murder, a job you built it to do. Basically, an engineer’s creations are his best, and only friends.
However, this can be the Engineer’s biggest weakness. Since the Engineer “needs” so little from the other players, he’ll often live in his own world. This means that he won’t get the backup he needs, and other times it means he’ll just plain forget to play the game. I can’t tell you how many times I have focused on the task at hand, building my beautiful citadel of steel, only to realize we’d either already lost, or due to some structural flaw, players were just walking around my beauties.
Okay, but am I an Engineer? Quite possibly! Are you the type of person who gets distracted easily? Does the phrase “bigger is better” excite you? Do you like killing players while laughing maniacally? Did you root for Deep Blue, but secretly wanted it to lose so that there’d be a reason he builds a better version? Do you watch movies like Terminator with ire, stating that you could build a better Skynet? Wait, what are we talking about again…
Although proud, an engineer would humbly accept being beat in fair combat, but then again, an engineer wouldn’t fight fair. They’d put their all seeing eye of doom somewhere you couldn’t reach it, and laugh manically from a very safe distance.
Likes: Order, numbers, controlled chaos, resource management, rules that only he can break.
Dislikes: Variables beyond his control, being disturbed before his work is complete, reaching some sort of cap (he should always be able to make things bigger/better), boundaries, rules that everyone can break.
John Martone is Texas based writer bent on creating odd plays. When not doing that he disassembles plot lines for the enjoyment of the internet.