I played paintball at DeltaForce in Cramlington with the posse from the Centre for Life on Saturday. It was interesting. There is some grainy footage of action from the day here:



I kind of imagined that paintball would be like playing Quake, Half-Life or Medal of Honor, only with an extra, athletic, physical element.

It was fun indeed, but the fields were too small to make it that different. Paint was quite expensive, and people bought a lot of it. I think many were worried about having lots left over at the end of the day, so there was a lot of digging into positions and firing shots from there. People tended to play a lot more conservatively than they do online. Also, the guns were quite unreliable, firing blanks or jamming regularly. So were the bullets. They often struck people without exploding. If they don't splat, they don't count. AND headshots didn't count! Which was really unsatisfying as I hit lots of people on the head, and it encouraged people to hide behind things even more, as they could just pop their head and gun out, and shoot with safety.

Bigger fields, with many more repetitions on the same fields, to learn the maps, and try different strategies would be better. There's no problem with headshots or equipment jamming online.