A couple of mutual friends talked my husband and me into trying out paintball circa 2000. After we made a modest investment in equipment and gear, we learned that another friend also plays. The latter crowd (Cory and gang) are a little more hard-core b/c they play in tournaments, although they are all quite good at switching into "friendly game" mode when Cory decides to celebrate his birthday by having his friends shoot at him.
My husband was in the preliminary phases of shopping for new gear today, because my paintball gun (usually called a "marker" nowadays) failed, despite a rebuild last night. Wow, has the technology of those things evolved in the last decade!
When Dennis and I started playing, Terry's young son Alex had just graduated from a hand-me-down single shot (meaning pump action) gun to something semi-automatic. (Unfortunately, by that point he had, of necessity, become preternaturally accurate...and preternaturally stealthy.) Our guns were lower-end, but still quite serviceable: CO2-powered, gravity-fed, semi-automatic, wrench-adjusted to fire at a "friendly" 250 - 275 feet per second. (Tournament speeds, IIRC, are usually in the 300 feet per second range.)
Fast forward a couple of years, when Cory started regularly playing in tournaments and also assuming responsibility for helping his girlfriend (now wife) acquire equipment. We found ourselves up against paintball guns with hoppers that fed the paintballs with little battery-powered motors to feed the paintballs into the firing chamber.
Various commitments on both sides meant that we didn't play with (or against) Cory on the traditional birthday weekend in either 2007 and 2008. Today I wandered into Cory demo-ing the paintball gun he was using to my husband, explaining the modifications he'd made since buying it off eBay. Not only are we talking battery-powered motors, paintball guns now come with electronics and touch-screen programming. In today's play, for instance, Cory dumbed it down a bit, so that it would only go into fully automatic mode--spitting fifteen paintballs per second--after he'd hit the trigger a certain number of times within a given time-span.
I should know better, but I was a little freaked out by how much technology goes into a game. Especially when I reflect on how many centuries elapsed while arquebus gave way to matchlock, matchlock to wheel-lock, wheel-lock to flint-lock, flint-lock to machine gun.
But stepping back and looking at it from a geeky problem-solving standpoint, you can discern how problem led to solution led to problem led to solution and so on. The thought progression can be more or less summed up like:
- "Hey, my friends and I want to shoot at each other in good clean fun, but BB guns will put your eye out. Why don't we try splatball?"
- "Uh-oh, I'm the fox in this game of 'Fox and hounds.' Single-shot sucks. I need something that fires a paintball every time I pull the trigger."
- "Ugh: I can smack the trigger faster than this thing can drop paintballs. I need a motor to keep up with me."
- "Uh, oh, other people can smack the trigger faster. Going fully auto will even out the playing field."
- "Uh-oh, not everyone wants to play against the Wall O' Paint. I need a way to level the playing field for them."
Of course, you can see the downside of those advancements, can't you? For instance, batteries dying in the middle of a tournament is guaranteed to land you in a world of bruise if you don't or can't call yourself out. And let's just say that technology geared toward an obstacle course of bunkers in a clear field doesn't always slog through the woods and the occasional rain-shower as well as the "old-school" gravity-fed kind.
Oh, and one more major technological advancement: Supporting pressurized air rather than pressurized CO2. Because the CO2 of your accelerated respiration will draw quite enough mosquitoes without help from your paintball gun. That, folks, is real progress. ;-)
