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PAINTBALL: America's Fastest Growing Sport.
On many weekends out of the year I find myself assembling gear from the trunk of my car, dressed in faded military surplus clothing to play a sport called paintball. While creeping up to a pile of fallen branches, keeping low as plastic spheres filled with goo shoot past me at two hundred miles per hour, I've never stopped to wonder why. Why do I play this game or more importantly why doesn't everyone play? The main answer among paintball players is that the sport is widely misunderstood and misrepresented. Also paintball is often equated with other negative things, like militias or the recent shooting spree that some teens video-taped themselves doing in Los Angeles. The goal of this paper is to inform anyone out there what paintball is and what is means to those who play it.

What exactly is paintball and how did anyone come up with this crazy idea?
In the late 1970's Hayes Noel and Charles Gaines were sitting around and talking, when they thought it would be fun to start some type of stalking game, as a challenge to their friends. They were wondering if attempting to survive in the woods could expose a deeply buried instinct. A friend of theirs remembered seeing a gun called a Nelspot in a farm catalog. It was an air pistol that fired paint shots to mark cattle and trees. Bob Guernsey and Hayes Noel bought some of the guns and wrote up the rules for that first game. This all occurred over several years and the first game, which they called The Survival Game, was played in 1981. This first version of the game was played in an every-man-for-himself format and dragged on for hours. The winner of the very first game of paintball won without firing a shot or ever seeing another player. I think this early form of the game is how most people perceived it. People crawling around in the bushes for hours, waiting for the chance to shoot someone.

>Paintball has changed by leaps and bounds in the short amount of time in its existence.
Games are now played using teams, usually two, making the games more organized and less confusing. Players wear brightly colored arm bands to distinguish the different teams. Tournament level teams usually wear matching clothing in addition to arm bands to distinguish themselves. Games generally have a twenty minute time limit on them to make the game faster and more intense. Players no longer need maps and compasses to find the other team, since the fields are usually no more than a few acres in size. Capture the flag is still the most widely played game. The objective is to capture the flag from the opposing teams base and return it to your base, in the given time and without being marked by paint. For a player to be marked, the paintball hitting the player must break. If the paintball bounces, it doesn't count as an elimination. Splatter, a paintball hitting something near a player and spraying paint on them, also does NOT count as a hit. The paintballs no longer are filled with paint but a mixture of soap, water and food coloring. They easily wash out of clothes and off trees and buildings. The paintball industry has also quit producing paintballs with a red-colored fill.

Several other variations are also played.
Center flag is played just like capture the flag but there is only one flag in the center of the field. The game is won by taking the flag from the center to the opposing flag station. Games can be played with medics, where certain players are given the ability to revive each player once per game. Aliens is another variation played by having a small number of players go hide on the field, and a second larger group come onto the field after giving them a head start. The first team is the aliens, the second is the humans. When an alien is eliminated, he must leave the game. When a human is marked, he must count to ten and then change sides and become an alien.

Big Games and Scenario games are also gaining in popularity.
Big Games could also be called regional games. All the players from a certain area gather at the field on the same day to play huge games. The playing fields are combined to form one large field. Here in Iowa, big games can bring in around fifty to eighty players. On the West and East coasts Big games can bring in three hundred to two thousand players. Scenario games are played over long periods of time, anywhere from six to twenty-four hours. Players who are eliminated can return to the game after sitting out for a set amount of time. Objectives for the teams often follow a plot or story line. Teams are awarded with points for rescuing hostages, capturing props hidden all over the field, or performing other tasks that follow the plot.

The biggest concern for the paintball industry is safety.
Without keeping players safe, paintball cannot grow and continue moving into the mainstream. The most important piece of safety equipment is the paintball goggles. Many people might think falsely that any old goggle will do, such as shop goggles or ski goggles. If a goggle is not designed for paintball it isn't safe. Most other goggles are designed to protect the eyes for accidents that might never happen, several hits from a paintgun can crack or destroy the lenses. Paintball goggles are designed to take many hits at high speeds over the lifetime of the lenses. The facemasks are like those used by motorcross racers to protect them from kicked up rocks. The masks protect the face, ears, and temples. Some have extended forehead and neck protection.

Most people realize that paintballers wear some kind of eye protection, but there are many layers of safety at a properly run paintball field.
Anywhere at a paintball field is considered to be one of two areas. 1) An place where you may fire your paintgun, such as the field or shooting range, 2) where you may not, like the staging area and the parking lot. Any time you are in a shooting area you must wear your paintball approved goggles and facemask. Any time your are in a non-shooting area you must have your paintgun plugged. A barrel plug is a piece of plastic that is inserted into the end of your gun, with rubber o-rings to insure a tight fit. If a player accidentally fires his paintgun, the ball will strike the plug and breaking harmlessly inside the gun. The next step would be to remove the plug and clean out the barrel.

Now earlier I said that paintballs are traveling about two hundred miles per hour. How do I know this?
And how do I know that some guy isn't shooting his gun at five hundred miles per hour? Another important piece of paintball safety equipment is the chronograph. This is very much like a radar gun used by a police officer. The chronograph clocks the paintball leaving the paintgun in feet per second. The industry standard is below three hundred feet per second, which is around two hundred miles per hour. If any paintgun is shooting above this limit it can be adjusted to shoot at lower velocities.

All the above safety rules are monitored on the field by a referee or field judge.
The ref makes sure all players keep their goggles on and plug their guns when walking off the field. He or she also performs paintchecks. A paintcheck basically means checking a player for a hit. The ref also has to watch out for cheating by players. Some players think they have to wipe off hits or turn up the velocity of their guns on the field in order to win. Tournaments are plagued with acceptable cheating; by many teams. Those players can be taken out of the game by refs or kicked off the field for the day. In tournament play those players can cost their teams penalty points and loss of respect or sponsors.

The paintballs themselves can bruise, or leave welts, but cannot cause serious physical harm.
Paint loaded bullets do exist for real guns, but firearms have never been used for paintball. The threat that some nutcase would exchange his paint for real bullets is not possible with paintball guns. Paintguns fire plastic softgells, like used in vitamins, by pushing the paintball out the barrel using high pressure gas. CO2 is the most common gas used.

I play because I enjoy the getting outside, meeting new people, and the thrill of the game itself.
For me the anticipation of a game day is like a child waiting to take a trip to Disneyland. With my busy work week and going to school in the evenings, a Sunday afternoon paintball game is one of the few chances I have to unwind. It has become something that once started I can’t see myself ever quitting. In a recent magazine article Durty Dan writes, "Although...we no longer need to hunt and kill to survive, we still NEED to hunt. The hunt is so much a part of our psyche that we have developed alternative ways to hunt. The elements of the primeval hunt are essential elements of most sports: teamwork, physical exertion, cunning, stalking, challenge, an element of danger, the kill." He also describes paintball as offering "safe danger." (McQuinn-Leger 84) The danger supplied by paintball is an ILLUSION of danger. "You spend your whole game, every second, with the subliminal threat of being taken out of the game at any time." (McQuinn-Leger 84)

The biggest barrier to new players is the cost.
Renting the gear needed to play can cost from fifteen to twenty five dollars.Which is hard to justify to new players, but the guns themselves cost several hundred dollars. Paint usually sells for around five dollars per hundred balls. Average use by a new player is around four hundred balls or twenty dollars worth. Once played, most realize paintball is worth the money. Many of the new players are teenagers, so the next barrier for them is getting their parents to allow them to play or worse have them pay for it. My parents have always been very supportive, although I always paid for everything myself.

Now some people will have read all this and still shake their heads.
They’ll say, "Why do you pretend to kill people?" or "Neo-Nazis use paintball to train themselves, that makes it wrong!" My knee-jerk response to that would be to tell the person not to form opinions biased on ignorance. I don’t PRETEND to do anything. I play a sport that has rules and objectives. People don’t come out to a field so they can pretend they are doing something completely different, they play to win. Somewhere in the world some skinhead or Militia group is using paintguns to "train" their sick "soldiers." But I’m sure skinheads like to go bowling, drink Pepsi or watch ER on Thursday nights just like you, so I don’t see how playing a sport makes me like them. And for those teens who went on a shooting spree on CNN or anyone else that uses a paintgun for vandalism, if they didn’t use a paintgun they would use something else. In fact the teens also videotaped themselves busting car windows with a baseball bat.

Paintball remains an underground alternate universe, but if it continues to get positive media exposure and people try for themselves it will live up to its title as "America’s Fastest Growing Sport."
A major sign of its growth is the formation of a profession league of paintball. It is called the National Professional Paintball League (NPPL.) It is about as well know as Professional Rugby or Woman’s boxing. Players play for prize money, but only the tops teams that are well sponsored break even on the whole deal. Some players are able to work in the industry and play on a professional team, so they are in fact making a living through paintball.

Sources:

McQuinn-Leger, Dan. "Durty Dan’s Paintball Origin's FAQ." Warpig Paintball Homepage Copyright 1996
Wightkin, Nick. "Paintball Tips For a Beginner From a Beginner." Warpig Paintball Homepage Copyright 1995
Cramp, William. "Pondering Paintball: My First Time." Action Pursuit Games Aug 95: 32.

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