While long-standing games like Terraria and RuneScape have recently embraced political messaging related to gender identity, Valve appears to have taken a different approach by removing hidden references within their largely neglected team shooter, Team Fortress 2.
After years of abandoning Team Fortress 2 with no significant updates, Valve recently revived the franchise with a retarded commercial collaboration tied to the upcoming Funko Fusion video game.
Alongside this, the game received a seasonal update for Summer 2024.
Released on July 18th, the Summer 2024 update for Team Fortress 2 adds 10 new maps, 4 new taunts, and 23 new cosmetic items available for unboxing and purchase. The event is set to run until September 15th, 2024, after which Team Fortress 2 is expected to return to its usual state of neglect.
Despite its age, having originally launched in 2007, Team Fortress 2 has stood the test of time. The game’s last major update, “Jungle Inferno,” was released in October 2017. Even with Valve’s ongoing neglect, TF2 maintains a dedicated community, with tens of thousands of players online daily, surpassing the player count of the much newer Overwatch 2.
Team Fortress 2 has always maintained a politically neutral stance, featuring a diverse roster of classes with plenty of cosmetic options for players to customize each of the game’s nine classes.
The Summer 2024 update introduced a new cosmetic item called the “Desk Engineer.”
As the name suggests, the “Desk Engineer” is a cosmetic item for the Engineer class. It gives him a “business-casual” appearance, complete with a white-collared shirt, rolled-up sleeves, a striped tie, and a set of pens in the breast pocket, making him look more like an office worker than a battlefield engineer.
The “Desk Engineer” is a community-created item, designed by a member of the Team Fortress 2 community and was accepted into the game by Valve.
Valve is known for incorporating user-submitted designs into their games, such as those found in weapon skins for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, now known as “CS2.”
However, this process has had its share of challenges, as Valve has occasionally added designs that were later found to contain copyrighted or plagiarized elements. When these issues come to light, Valve has had to either redesign the items themselves or remove them from the game entirely.
The point here is that Valve, while a powerful company, isn’t infallible. They tend to be somewhat lax in thoroughly vetting community-created content before adding it to their games. However, once any malicious activity is discovered, Valve is quick to address and rectify the situation.
A few days after the update was released, players discovered that the “Desk Engineer” cosmetic item included a hidden detail. The backside of the ID card in the breast pocket featured flags representing bisexuality or transgender identity, depending on whether the “Business Casual” or “Desk Jockey” style was equipped.
This subtle inclusion by the item’s creator was likely intended to go unnoticed by most players, but it seemed designed to bring a sense of satisfaction to its creator, knowing they had secretly added this element without Valve or the wider community noticing.
When the flags were eventually discovered, many players were upset, especially given that Team Fortress 2 had remained politically neutral until this point. The inclusion of these flags, which some saw as a nod to specific head canons like “Engi-queer” or the idea that the Engineer class might not be straight, sparked controversy among those who felt the game should avoid such political statements.
Recently, gamers have seen longstanding games like Terraria and Old School RuneScape undergo changes that remove gender-specific terms, even years after their initial release. This has been done without polling the community, as in the case of RuneScape.
Trans activists have increasingly taken to social media to promote narratives suggesting that existing characters in popular media align with their own gender identities. Instead of creating new characters who naturally embody these traits, they often reinterpret well-established ones, aiming for a sense of “validation” through these reinterpretations.
This phenomenon is often driven by motivated reasoning, a psychological concept where individuals draw conclusions that align with their desires, rather than with objective reality and canon. This leads them to project their own identities or beliefs onto characters that were never intended to reflect such traits.
Notable examples of this trend include Bridget from Guilty Gear, Naoto from Persona 4, and various other anime characters. Activists reimagine these characters as transgender, despite the original context or intent of the creators, driven by a desire to see their own identities reflected in media.
Given that the creator of the Desk Engineer cosmetic item subtly inserted identity politics into the game, Valve responded decisively. On August 15th, they released a game update that removed the controversial flags from the item, leaving the backside of the ID card completely blank.
This is seen as a significant victory for TF2‘s dedicated player base, as it prevents the game from becoming yet another casualty of modern political agendas. Like other popular multiplayer games, TF2 has a sizable audience that no doubt includes homosexual and transgender individuals, however nobody generally wants to see such figures be openly displayed during gameplay.
As a free-to-play title with a low barrier to entry, TF2 attracts a diverse player base, which has led to such influences spreading within its community.
The flag in question wasn’t actually visible during normal gameplay; players would have had to dig into the game’s texture files or use noclip to examine the character model closely to even notice it. In the grand scheme of things, nothing substantial was gained or lost by its removal, except for one individual’s attempt to subtly insert such flags into their creation as a form of digital graffiti.
Despite its removal, some activists have still expressed outrage.
Team Fortress 2, like any video game, should never be used as a vessel to push personal gender identity agendas through tokenized trinkets. The flags were deliberately hidden within the model, and their removal helps maintain the game’s consistency.
However, the fact that Valve initially overlooked this detail in the Desk Engineer’s design is concerning, as it could have led to more serious issues if other more severe hidden messages or elements were to be uncovered instead.
