These are the same friends I jumped out of plane with. They also practice martial arts. This kind of thing is right up their alley. At age 44, however, running around with a bunch of people hell bent on shooting each other with paint guns has limited appeal to me. But my friends had never done it, were hankering to give it a try, had an extra Groupon ticket, and they asked me to come along. Well, ya know, I’ll do just about anything once. So the three of us hopped in a white 1984 Camaro and drove an hour out into rural Maryland.
I hadn’t anticipated that there would be a role playing element to paintball, but it became obvious the minute we arrived. This wasn’t merely about playing a game. For most of the people involved this was also about assuming a role. I’d never seen so many civilians in camouflage this side of deer season. While participants ranged in age from childhood (10 year olds could play if a guardian signed a waiver) to middle age, they were overwhelmingly male, dressed in costume, and loaded down with props. One friend said they reminded him of Civil War reenactors. Meanwhile, we were wearing beat up old clothes that we didn’t worry about getting paint on. We clearly didn’t fit in.
It was a cold winter day, and in front of the registration office was a 50 gallon drum with a fire burning inside. Men dressed like soldiers stood around it and talked about various tactical options. We walked past them, rented equipment, and received some instructions. Then we played the game.
It is a game, of course. We were involved in the more casual Rec Ball, in which the orange-vested referees divide players up into two teams, send them out onto the course, blow a horn to start the “battle,” and then monitor the ensuing mayhem. People run ar
ound, hide behind wooden barriers, and shoot at each other. We played half-a-dozen games. Each one lasts about ten minutes or so, and is mostly utter chaos.
It turns out the paint cleans up quite easily. It’s the welts that are more lasting.
Standing around between games and casually talking to other players, I learned that many are heavily invested, both financially and emotionally. While my friends and I rented, most players own their equipment. Guns can cost hundreds of dollars. There are also sites, holsters, belts, military-style clothing, and various other equipment including the paintballs that serve as bullets. Beyond material culture, the way many of the players talked about the game and their participation in it reminded me, at least to some extent, of the way players used to talk about Dungeons and Dragons when I played it during the 1980s
There, I’ve outed myself.
As I played the paintball war games, my initial unease at this male-dominated form of violent role play began to dissipate. Everyone was remarkably well behaved. The asshole factor was near zero. And the whole endeavor was obviously a game. A not terribly interesting one, I must confess, but reasonably good fun. It was nice to run around in the fresh air on a sunny, albeit chilly Saturday afternoon. And shooting off round after round of green paint pellets did provide a minor thrill. I went with it.
And then something happened. Just as I was getting comfortable and taking the innocence of it for granted, the role playing ran headlong into the real world.
The grounds consisted of at least a half-dozen different courses. They were all essentially the same: a few acres of field with a random assortment of plywood barriers to hide behind. Among them are some nominal differences. One was wooded. One had hilly terrain. Another featured inflated plastic barriers. The referees rotated the amorphous collection of Rec Ball players through the different courses.
“Which one are we going to,” one ref might ask another.
“To the woods,” he might respond.
As we trundled off to one of our last games of the day, a ref turned to his senior partner and inquired where we were headed.
“To Iraqi village,” he said.
I was absolutely stunned.
Given the sub-culture of these particular role players, it should hardly have been a surprise. But I had innocently given myself over to the endeavor to some degree, and that typically requires the assumption of similar value systems, at least to a certain extent. So in that moment, my naivete was shattered and I hand’t seen it coming.
I’d like to say that I confronted someone and questioned the situation. But I didn’t. No one said anything. Few heard the exchange, it was a casual aside, and I doubt if anyone else even cared or thought twice. The game started a few minutes later, and the increasingly familiar chaos absorbed all my attention for ten minutes. But afterwards, I found the whole thing troubling enough that, well, for starters I felt compelled to write this article about it.
I’m not opposed to all violent role play across the board. I think that’s a simplistic and reductive approach. It depends on the situation. For example, as I mentioned in the last post, I have no problem with kids playing Cops and Robbers. Though as someone who teaches and researches American Indian history for a living, I’m probably more concerned about them playing Cowboys and Indians than the average American is. Paintball? That proved to be a very mixed bag.
There were actually some very positive aspects of the experience. For example, it’s incredibly rare these days to see dozens of people from age 10-50 genuinely interacting with each other of their own free will and more or less on an equal footing. This wasn’t a little league game where the adults direct and teach the children. This was open play in which everyone participated. Modern society is increasingly segregated by age, and I found this inter-generational setting to be quite refreshing.
But the faux-martial qualities of the whole affair were, to say the least, off-putting. And the casual intrusion of real, bloody, tragic, and imperialistic warfare, though it was in name only and an oh so brief aside, poisoned the entire experience.
It reminded me that role playing can be as complicated and impenetrable as the humans who engage in it. We hold up masks and pretend to be who we want to be. But in some ways, staring at a mask is no different than looking in a mirror. It begs the question, Who are you?