[RimWorlder]

Fung Koo, you noted (here - http://www.sffworld.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19586&page=7)various electronic versions of paintball. If you give 'Greg Hasting's Tournament Paintball 'Maxed', you'd be getting a much better feel for the 'tactics' of a real game.

Here's a somewhat SF tie-in. After Reading Scalzi's 'Old Man's War', I was so struck by the similarity of his veterans to the cultural and psychological attitudes of paintballers that I actually asked Scalzi if he had ever played, and, if so, was he consciously modeling paintball?

His answer was no, but nevertheless, it was a very interesting looksee.

The attitude of his soldiers is 'except for total brain death, I'll be back, no matter what happens', and this models the tremendous difference in tactics between real warfare and paintball. In paintball, if a sacrifice play will win the game, no (good) player ever thinks twice about making the sacrifice.

Can you imagine a real squad sgt turning to one of his mates and saying "hey - run out in the street for a bit to draw that fire so we can get around behind them?" - knowing full well that the soldier will be dead in 15 seconds?

There are three basic formats of paintball being played these days: arena style tournament ball, woodsball tournaments and 'scenario' games.

The original format - tournaments in the woods - is only played now by die hards using 'stock' technology (pump guns as opposed to electronic semi-autos. Those semi-autos are capable of cycle rates in the 40-per-second range and firing rates of 26-30 rounds per second. SECOND. Pump guns in the hands of an artist are capable of maybe 7-8-9 rounds per second).

Current 'tournaments in the woods' are (bastardized) hybrids of scenario games and tournament play. Speedball, hyperball, arenaball are the games you see on TV, with small fields (200' x 120') and inflatable 'bunkers' of differeint colors and shapes.

Many of the scenario games (24 hour role playing) have SF themes - one of the most famous was a licensed Star Trek game featuring William Shatner as Captain Kirk commanding one of three teams. For a while there it looked like Shatner's production company was going to be producing scenario games, but for a variety of (political paintball reasons) this has not happened.

One of the industry's failures was not modifying the tournament game sufficiently to appeal to television audiences. As you noted, it looks silly and pointless. That has more to do with an inability to let you see what's really going on than actual pointlessness. I have a patent on a format that does do the above (was on TV over Thanksgiving of 2000, got excellent ratings - then got stolen by others in the industry and I didn't have the hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight it).

And that's one of the reasons I 'gafiated' from paintball and am now FIAWOL again...

[Fung Koo]

So mFPS video games are based on paintball? I always just assumed the gameplay in FPS was simply organic...

I can see the relationship. I imagine there are certain practical realities that make paintball-style warfare much easier in video game format, though. If the number of serious paintball players was compared to the number of serious FPS gamers, who do you think would be the larger group?

The inflatable bunkers on the small court arena style that you see on TV is in no way conducive to audience viewing. The play is discontinuous, the pace is too rapid to follow, the only tactics appear to be run and cover, the camera angles invariably suck, an the lighting... my god the lighting is awful... there's simply no way, as an observer, to connect emotionally with the tension of the play. It's clearly a players game, not a spectator sport.

Interesting enough, I've seen TV broadcasts of Halo tournaments (which I scoffed at the very idea of initially) but the broadcast of the gameplay is actually very engaging.

I'd love to see a low-grav/free-fall paintball tournament -- Ender's Game style.

[RimWorlder]

all of those thing you've identified as problems were addressed by my format: for example:

all bunkers were 'laydown' - meaning none higher than 4 feet tall. The layout was such that any spectator (including a camera) sitting at bleacher height (4+ feet above the playing field) could see 90%+ of the entire field. The majority of bunkers were at right angles - or close to right angles - to the spectator/camera locations, so, again, they didn't block the view - they actually enhanced it (especially when players were on opposite side of the same bunker).

Game play was not a 3 minute time frame and then game over - it was an hour long format with multiple scoring opportunities - teams scored goals, didn't just eliminate opponents. The 'flag' was advanced by each team; loss of players for penalties, and - perhaps most importantly, game stoppage to assess penalties, which resulted in potential repositioning of players/flags, depending on the penalty.

Another thing lacking in paintball tournaments is physical contact. Most spectator sports feature it (even baseball to a limited degree - but baseball compensates by constantly providing shots of one player throwing rocks at another player...)

Standard paintball rules allow NO physical contact between players. We allowed two forms: 1. bunker "slamming" and 2. an "incidental contact" rule.

Slamming is the art of hitting a bunker and bouncing an opponent out of it through rebound action of the bunker. We have tape of players flying six feet across the field as a result of slamms.

We also allowed players to jump on and over bunkers (great visuals), which necessitated the incidental contact rule. If you blindly flew over a bunker and landed on an opponent - no penalty, because it was obviously not intentional - thems the breaks.

These rules up the notch on physical requirements for playing the game successfully and provide much of the excitement of the game. You can get pretty good height bouncing off those bunkers. Good tactics too. The "Davidson Flop" has you doing a belly flop onto the top of a bunker; as you come down, you spray the other side with shots, hoping to hit the opponent there. If you do it right, the rebound throws you back behind the bunker to your side of the field. The motion is so quick and erratic that its almost impossible to hit the player performing it.

I watched a gymnast-experienced player treat the bunker like a 'horse' and slide across the entire top of a bunker (7 foot long). You could do handstands if you wanted to...

But, alas; my former sponsors wanted all the gelt for themselves; they sponsored the roll-out event of the format (PaintFest 2000) and then cut me out of the picture.

Here's a link to a short piece on the tournament that aired: http://webdog.specialopspaintball.com/video/oldschool/. scroll down to "tournaments" and its the last entry. They REALLY chopped my interview and I hardly make any sense as a result...