Tales from a globally-ranked Team Fortress 2 Spy main
So in another life, as a carefree teenager, I got pretty good at video games.
Specifically, a game called Team Fortress 2. I played on PlayStation 3 and for one brief window in time (immortalised in a blurry photo on a long-lost Motorola Razr), I was ranked 21st globally, which dates me somewhat because nowadays if this were the case, I'd likely have attempted a career in esports, streaming, or other such nonsense. But alas, competitive gaming hadn't yet become lucrative - I truly was just doing it for the love of the game.
I was clocking so many hours that I used to play when I woke up before school, when I got home from school, would stop when my saint of a mother would tell me to go to bed... only to sneak back downstairs after my family had fallen asleep to log on with the yanks even after all my friends had logged off for the night.
I treated it like a full-time job. When my mother started to clock on to the unique creaks in the floorboards that I'd make whilst attempting to sneak back downstairs to continue playing, I would climb down the outside of our house after everyone was asleep, play until first light, and then clamber back up the side of the house again to my bedroom to catch a couple of hours of sleep before being woken up for school (only to log on for a couple of extra matches even then, much to my mother's dismay).
The amount of reps required to stay good was sickening, but I was having the time of my life. The only reason I stopped and started to become a semi-functioning member of adult society was that I discovered girls weren't just annoying, got my first girlfriend, and the rest is history.
For the uninitiated, TF2 is a "class-based shooter" - two teams (RED and BLU), nine stylised player classes. My preferred class was the Spy. And in many ways, playing the Spy class for thousands of hours actually had a big impact on my copywriting.
How, you ask?
Well, not to nerd out on you too much, but each TF2 class had different weapons and gear, different strengths and weaknesses, and so on. The Heavy class was strong and equipped with a powerful minigun, but was slow. The Medic could heal other players but lacked strong weapons to dish out damage themselves. The Scout was fast, could double jump, but had lower health... that type of thing.
The less popular classes were useless in the hands of the masses, but devastating in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing. Now, the Spy class didn't have high health, had a pistol as its main weapon that wasn't worth writing home about, but in my opinion, was the strongest class in the game for two reasons.
The first was that it had a disguise kit and an invisibility watch. You would use the invisibility watch to sneak behind enemy lines, then use the disguise kit to appear as another class on the enemy team. Now, there were many ways you could fack this up. Any team worth its salt had many methods for rooting out enemy spies - meaning most of the time, the Spy was a poor choice because an enemy team would simply check each player they encountered. If you could bump into the player in front of you, or you could set them on fire using the Spy's mortal nemesis, the Pyro class? That's an enemy Spy.
The reason this never bothered me much was that if you were smart, hyper-aware of your surroundings, knew the enemy like the back of your hand, their typical movements, specific mannerisms of each class, and where certain classes tended to congregate on each map... you could blend in seamlessly.
Which brings me to the second reason why I loved playing the Spy class. The Spy had a secondary weapon besides the main pistol - a butterfly knife, which was almost utterly useless if you attempted to stab an enemy from the front. However, if you managed to get behind an enemy? It was a one-stab kill, which made it one of the most difficult weapons to be successful with consistently... but if you knew what you were doing, you could evaporate a whole team without them knowing what hit them.
Anyway, that's enough waxing lyrical about the good old days.
If you were paying attention, there are plenty of lessons in the above story on how to get good as a copywriter.
But if you don't have the time, patience, or you read the above and just don't get it?
They do say that if you ever meet someone who was globally ranked in a video game, you should hire them immediately. Of course, I'm biased, but I'd say that's mighty fine advice.
If that sounds like a good idea to you?
Here's the link:
James Perkins
