Golden Hearts

Profound, minor heart-healing event of the day for me came when I checked up on the Official Team Fortress 2 Wiki, after I hadn’t visited for a while.

Right when I got there, this giant banner was on the front page:

I didn’t read the subtext, and only saw an smiling engineer tipping his hat to me, and the text ‘Destroy a wrench.’ So, curiosity got me, and I clicked.

Now a bit of backstory with Team Fortress 2. For those of you who don’t know, VALVe Software, creators of TF2, has always been a community-oriented game developer. Since their beginnings with the original PC Game, Half-Life, the player base on which VALVe has built an increasingly strong workforce has shown consistent dedication to the wants and requests of the community. Often, the people at VALVe adopt fan-favourite modifications (mods), or specific types of gameplay modes developed by gamers themselves within the game engine, as improved stand-alone games.

One mod, called Team Fortress from the game Quake, got interest from the managers of VALVe, who hired the modders as part of their team to create that stand-alone game, called Team Fortress Classic.

Old school and hardly remembered, it was the predecessor of the now popular PC game that is Team Fortress 2, released almost a decade later.

History brief over. Take a breather, you disinterested chump.

The point is, VALVe is one of the rare game developers out there who not only listen to their fanbase, but depend on them to shape their future products, plans, and direction to go towards. At least, from the three years I’ve played TF2, that’s the feeling I got.

That kind of mindset and company philosophy got embodied within the confines of Team Fortress 2 through the numerous ‘major updates’ released. The introduction of unlockable weapons, achievements, new maps, the dropping & crafting systems etc. The feedback was mixed, and so VALVe enacted changes. They also decided to theme them towards ‘class updates.’ In Team Fortress 2 there are nine playable classes, all with distinct and differing roles and responsibilities in-game.

The latest, and last class to get updated, was the Engineer, or the friendly guy in the banner above. As a precursor to the imminent update, making many Engineer-savvy players anxious, VALVe introduced a new countdown system, The Dropping of the Golden Wrenches. 100 versions of the mysterious melee weapon that would replace the Engineer’s normal wrench, would drop randomly to unsuspecting players, across all servers, across the world, without warning. As each day of the update ended, more wrenches dropped, until the last one would mark the release of The Engineer Update.

The Golden Wrenches, to speak in layman’s terms, were the equivalent of the Crystal Skulls, a hidden Wikileaks Video, or the missing Eighth Wonder of the World. Within the Team Fortress 2 community, they were the idols of the TF2 universe, for an extremely condensed amount of time. As VALVe released through their blog, they introduced this new item as something to marvel at, cower under those who obtained it, and worship until the day of the update. It was Zeus' thunder, God’s hand, and VALVe’s newest method in immersing their fanbase.

Believe me, I saw its effects. I had played my fair share of TF2, and I saw some wrenches drop. They were mysterious to me, something almost forbidden to my knowledge. I didn’t know of what it could do. Then I witnessed it.

Those who wielded the golden wrenches turned their enemies into frozen statues of gold, frozen in their last motion. It looked fun as hell, and by God, I wanted one.

But they went quickly, as I played, a cross-server announcement would released immediately after another wrench was randomly found somewhere across the network of servers and thousands of players. They had gone quickly.

And the Team Fortress 2 community, as with any, was not happy that some were getting more than others. It seemed the entire goal of the Golden Wrenches—to mark the coming of the last, true, ‘Class Update’, had been skewed by the player base that VALVe devotes its entire existence to. Like past events, the community was torn. The Wrench wielders were given bad community press by those who were bitter. A vocal minority, thankfully, but it struck home to the Wrench wielders. They were nothing but lucky, who could blame them for that? More importantly, who could they blame for their luck?

The fingers logically point at VALVe, but the community knows better, after various debacles, stirring controversies, and compromises made all around. If one were acquainted with the VALVe player community, you would know about the protests by a now notorious player community that had members spearheading boycotts for Left 4 Dead 2, without any knowledge of its quality of gameplay, before its release, the various update releases of TF2, facing protest blockades by outraged community members—specifically the drop system and crafting system, drawing comparisons to turning Team Fortress into a dreaded MMORPG.

Still, frantic community members obsessed with obtained the Golden Wrench crafted their entire backpacks of unlockables, leaving no duplicates for gameplay use, in a futile attempt to once again, cheat the system and beat VALVe at the game they’re trying to encourage you to play.

No one is better at Team Fortress 2 than VALVe, I’ll say that much.

The damage was done, and easily forgotten. The 100th Wrench had dropped, the update released, and the new unlockables enjoyed my masses of TF2ers. The Golden Wrench was an afterthought. Those who had it enjoyed it, and those who didn’t spoke little of it anymore, as like babies attuned to being handed a new rattle or pacifier, they were now occupied with something else.

That is until this banner showed up.

It linked to this site, about a lone Wrench Wielder who decided his luck was too much to the expense of his fellow players. He decided that, to maintain an inner respect for himself as a TF2 player, the Wrench must be destroyed, as he thought it brought too much mental stress, bad emotions, and misplaced rage to be a good thing.

I won’t go much into it, because I want you to read the site for yourself, now that I’ve given you the necessary information to absorb it with. It truly is an altruistic notion.

I think he plays Medic a lot, other than Engineer.

His name is WiNGSPANTT, and he is destroying his Wrench, #31, for charity.

No, not an in-game charity, like MMORPG’s guild halls, vendors, and for all I know, gentleman’s clubs, this was an actual charity, called Child’s Play.

A charity known in the gaming world as the people responsible for giving the gift of gaming to hospitalized children in hopes to make their stays more than hospitable, but just a bit more enjoyable. It’s a charity that works alongside some of the biggest names in the gaming industry, and as well, much like VALVe, works alongside the gamers themselves, like WiNGSPANTT.

A guy who’s taken the initiative to bridge the gap between reality and the game to make a difference. Out of all the chaos of the last class update, Child’s Play has partnered with WiNGSPANTT and the Team Fortress 2 VALVe team to give awareness to his cause.

Sacrifice a wrench, donate some money, and make a kid smile.

Who knew? The community was giving back. Giving back something real, I might add, which is rare in a virtual gaming community.

To me, this is a cause and effect case study. I’ve said previously VALVe is a community-based developer, they do things for their community in order to better their experiences playing a game VALVe made. They do it more so than most other developers.

Maybe, in some sort of space-time rift anomaly, it occurred to a community member, maybe several, maybe even most of them, that this could work both ways. Some might say I’m reading too much into it, and its just another nice guy who plays his favourite game trying to do something good for people, which in itself, is a hopeful thing.

But the fact that it spread from something normally filled with animosity, and given the emotional history of the dedicated community’s behaviour towards the developer that gives them a lot more than, dare I say, deserve—it’s still surprising to me.

A pleasant one at that. I was getting tired of the constant whining of gamers who didn’t want this weapon buff, or were pissed this one was taken away. Why was the Pyro given more DPS? How come the Heavy unlock does so little damage? These aren’t side-grades, their upgrades! I’ll admit, I haven’t been totally in tune with VALVe’s changes, but I had no right, personally, to call out on any bullshit that was going on, because I knew there wasn’t any.

I wanted to say, loud enough so the edges of the internet could hear me, ‘Just play the damn game!’ That’s all VALVe wants you to do. And when you get bored doing that, you have something to play for—achievements, unlocks, clan matches.

The beauty of fully online games is the community it produces. That’s why they are among the strongest gaming communities out of them all. People assemble naturally for a common goal, and that’s true outside of gaming too.

It’s more prevalent in real life, sure, but what about this?

Using the virtual world to benefit the actual one?

I’ll be damned if I ever would have guessed.

WiNGSPANTT has made almost $4,000 dollars in the combined efforts of the community and Child’s Play. If you can’t help out, spread the word to others for the sake of giving a good name to the gaming world, and making someone feel all tingly inside.