Airball. When does the hard part start?

I'm just gonna come right out and say it. I'm really loathing airball. Seriously, I'm really, honestly, hating it. It takes a lot for me to actively hate something. But you know what? I'm tired of the airball thing.

Ok, some back history. I remember when speedball was this new idea. I can show you pictures from Paintball Sports from 1990 and '91 of guys in woodland camo with Piranha Long barrels playing in a field of wooden pallets. I can remember when speedball fields were constructed out of pallets and were planted in the ground with painstaking care so the fields would be even. And I can even remember playing airball one of the first times and thinking "Well, it's not all bad."

Then I got to playing it everywhere. No, seriously. EVERYWHERE. Travel anywhere in the world, and the people want airball. I even traveled to EMR. They have some of the finest woods courses on the planet at EMR. I drove 12 hours straight to be there and play in their woods. And what did they all want to play?

Airball.

Boring, predictable, repetitive airball.

Pardon me, I could have done that at home. No, really, I can go to Walmart and BUY an airball field! $136 for three airball bunkers. Action Village has a 4 piece kit for $300. And if I do some diving around I could probably find a 5 man field for $5000 or so.

So why does everyone love airball? I think because it's so easy to master. No, really. It's a simple game. You're playing paintball on a postage stamp, there's no real sneaking around or hiding. And nobody talks or communicates outside of tournament practice, so you're basically playing a "real world" version of Halo or CS. It's like an OCD nightmare to spend a day at an indoor field with one airball course.

How predictable are airball fields? 5 on 5 games, basic stuff. Off the break it's 2-1-2. One guy makes a run for the sideline bunker that's always called a "snake" (even when it looks nothing like a snake, it's a snake. Oh it's a snake.) And depending on the layout he'll stop short or superman slide into it like he's seen in all the magazines. One guy runs for the "35" or "50" of the other side to play a dorito or cone or other bunker placed there. One guy takes each back corner bunker which is always the tallest on the field, and the last man is in the middle.

You sit in your respective spot shooting paint as fast as you can and trying to twitch faster than the other guy until someone gets hit. Then you run up your lane and "muppet mow" or "bunker foos" or "pwn noobs" or whatever term of the week you have for it. You don't play the angles; you play in a straight line. You don't run left to right outside the break, you play your lane. And heaven forbid you can't do that, I mean flanking to the side just is a horrifying thing to do.

The players, the game, the whole thing lacks any soul or imagination. It's the same thing over and over, because everyone knows very quickly what's going to happen. The few times I've had the pleasure of turning a field sideways on a team they've completely freaked out because they don't know what to do! They can't even fathom how to move more than one bunker left to right, let alone how to swing a field around.

Not that field designers have any imagination, or leeway in what they can do. These guys will make a field to event specs, and you can tell what the main goal of the event is to do. If the event is field paint only, you put low bunkers in the front and tall ones in each corner. You then also add medium-height ones in the middle back and sprinkled in the field. And add a snake. There's always a snake. Preferably near to where an audience site, they eat that stuff up.

What you have is a field designed to have paint shot on it. Movement is punished because there is nowhere to go and little cover once you get there. Except the snake, if you can somehow manage that move you can actually crawl a little.

Then you have the sponsored theme fields, like the "Spyder" field or the "JT" field. I remember one year Skyball put a big inflatable "ZAP" in the middle, standing up. It was probably the most useless bunker on the planet short of the Maginot line. Make sponsors happy, but the players shake their heads and say "WTF?"

Airball bunkers have done a few good things. Indoor fields can set up a course fast and easy now, and change up the course once in a while so the regulars have to relearn angles. You can set up a field in the middle of nowhere and play paintball, kinda like playing sandlot baseball or soccer. And I suppose that's not all bad.

But for the love of (insert deity here of your choosing) it's made the game boring. It's predictable. All people want is airball. I think it feeds a fantasy that they're actually professional players on a "real" paintball course. But playing world cup is like playing my local family fun center. I used to think it would be cool, because you could set up a field just like one at a tournament, practice the hell out of it, then be ready. Unfortunately for the game it's really done is remove any flavor from the events.

I go to the Poconos, and I want to play in the rhodies. I go to Florida, elephant grass. I go to Arizona, I want desert and gullies. I go to Wisconsin, first growth trees. Except now it's all airball. And it's all anyone wants to play. And there's no local flavor to the fields other than the drive to get there and possibly the language used at the fields. The game isn't as much standardized as much as it's sterilized.

It's like playing golf on the same course everywhere you go. If you fly to Hawaii to play golf, and you get a whole different experience than if you drive to your local public course. But what about sports like hockey or basketball? They have standard fields too, right? Well yes. But they're not all quite the same. Ask an old timer about the "dead spots" at Boston, or the "hard rims" in Chicago. Is there a reason baseball diamonds across the USA have different heights on their outfield walls? Yes, there is.

But here's the thing that gets me. Paintball wants so desperately to be an "xtreme sport". They're fighting tooth and nail to be an "xtreme" sport. But let's look at other sports in the "xtreme" category. Snowboarding. EVERY mountain is different. Skateboard street. EVERY street course is different. Halfpipe, you may have me here. But the difference between real "xtreme" sports and paintball is there is no "xtreme" sport with teams. NONE. Its individual athletes performing skills judged on technical merit and artistic impression, but that's another rant.

When they started developing the airball stuff they said they wanted to put the paintball skills into an arena to show people what they could do. So the snake was supposed to be a "low crawl" in the woods, the "cans" were trees, and so on. Over time, this has been lost. Now you have fields designed with dead spots that are unplayable filled with teams that are clueless performing a task that is mindless. It's nothing like the roots of the game, no matter how many "agg kiddiez" spend $30 on a vintage JT strap to wear with their Garanmals color-coded gear.

I can play airball with the big boys of e-guns using my SC Phantom because before getting to the field, I know what people will do. I can tell you who's going where, and what they're going to do. There's no mystery to me, because it's the same game as it was 4-8 years ago. Corners, snake, mid laydown. If you watch FPS 11 you'll SEE me hit the same pattern over and over, because there's nothing else I can really do! Corner, up the tape, angle and flank the guys planted in their starting bunkers. Shoot them about when I cross the 50, game over.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Airball is still a distraction. It's still just a way to kill time because there's so little skill in it. So why do we play it? The promise. "We'll be on TV! We'll get sponsorships from Coke and UPS! We'll get a LOT of money if we get out of the woods and play in the arenas! We'll have screaming crowds and babes!"

Arena football celebrated its 20th anniversary this year. They played their final game in Vegas in front of a sold-out crowd. By my estimation, world cup is 15 years old. It's been in the arena-only mode for the last 10. They are nowhere near what arena football was on its 10 year mark. Paintball wants the crowds. Paintball isn't getting the crowds. Paintball needs to change. A lot. And it would be SO simple to do, if people would stop playing the social game of paintball and play the sport instead.

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