Paintball is a sport, in which players compete, in teams or individually, to eliminate opponents by hitting them with pellets containing paint (referred to as a paintball) from a special gun called a paintball marker. Depending on the venue, games are played on either indoor or outdoor fields of varying size. A game field is scattered with natural or artificial terrain, which players use for strategic play.
Rules for playing paintball vary, but can include capture the flag, elimination, defending or attacking a particular point or area, or capturing objects of interest hidden in the playing area. Depending on the variant played, games can last from seconds to days.
History
In 1976, Hayes Noel, a stock trader, Bob Gurnsey, and Charles Gaines were walking home and chatting about Gaines' recent trip to Africa and his experiences hunting buffalo. Eager to recreate the adrenaline rush that came with the thrill of the hunt, and inspired by Richard Connell's The Most Dangerous Game , the two friends came up with the idea to create a game where they could stalk and hunt each other.
In the ensuing months, the friends talked about what sorts of qualities and characteristics made for a good hunter and survivalist. They were stumped, however, on how to devise a test of those skills. It wasn't until a year and a half later that George Butler, a friend of theirs, showed them a paintball gun in an agricultural catalog. The gun was a Nelspot 007 marker manufactured by the Nelson Paint Company (headquarters in Kingsford, MI). The Nelspot 007 marker had, until this time, been solely used to mark and identify trees and cattle.
Twelve players competed against each other with Nelspot 007s pistols in the first paintball game on June 27, 1981. They were: Bob Jones, a novelist and staff writer for Sports Illustrated and an experienced hunter; Ronnie Simpkins, a farmer from Alabama and a master rhino hunter; Jerome Gary, a New York film producer; Carl Sandquist, a New Hampshire contracting estimator; Ritchie White, the New Hampshire forester; Ken Barrett, a New York venturer and hunter; Joe Drinon, a stock-broker and former Golden Gloves boxer from New Hampshire; Bob Carlson, a trauma surgeon and hunter from Alabama; Lionel Atwill, a writer for Sports Afield, a hunter and a Vietnam veteran; Charles Gaines; Bob Gurnsey and Hayes Noel. The game was capture the flag on an 80 acre wooded cross-country ski area.
Thereafter, the friends devised basic rules for the game fashioned along the lines of capture the flag, and invited friends and a writer from Sports Illustrated to play. They called their game "Survival," and an article about the game was published in the June 1981 issue of Sports Illustrated . As national interest in the game steadily built, Bob Gurnsey formed a company, National Survival Game, and entered a contract with Nelson Paint Company to be the sole distributor of their paintball equipment. Thereafter, they licensed to franchisees in other states the right to sell their guns, paint, and goggles. As a result of their monopoly on equipment, they turned a profit in only six months.
The first games of paintball were very different from modern paintball games; they often threw the paintballs at each other, and Nelspot pistols were the only gun available. They used 12-gram CO 2 cartridges, held at most 10 rounds, and had to be tilted to roll the ball into the chamber and then recocked after each shot. Dedicated paintball masks had not yet been created, so players wore shop glasses that left the rest of their faces exposed. The first paintballs were oil-based and thus not water soluble; "turpentine parties" were common after a day of play. Games often lasted for hours as players stalked each other, and since each player had only a limited number of rounds, shooting was rare.
Between 1981 and 1983, rival manufacturers such as PMI began to create competing products, and it was during those years that the game took off. Paintball technology gradually developed as manufacturers added a front-mounted pump in order to make recocking easier, then replaced the 12-gram cartridges with larger air tanks, commonly referred to as "constant air". These basic innovations were later followed by gravity feed hoppers and 45-degree elbows to facilitate loading from the hopper.
Later, Nelson Paint Company of MI, Inc. spun off into two separate companies: Nelson Paint Company, which is still focused on paints; and Nelson Technologies, Inc., commonly referred to as Nelson Paintballs, which still produces paintballs today. Oil-based paintballs are still available through the Nelson Paint Company and are still used for tree marking and for veterinary purposes. Nelson's oil-based paintballs have been used to mark animals on every continent of the world, including Antarctica.
Paintball equipment
Main article: Paintball equipmentThe paintball equipment used depends on the game type, for example: woodsball, speedball, or scenarioball, and how much money someone is willing to spend on equipment. Every player however, is required to have three basic pieces of equipment:
- Paintball marker: also known as a paintball gun, this is the primary piece of equipment, used to tag an opposing player with paintballs. The paintball marker must have attached a loader or "hopper" for keeping the marker fed with ammunition, and a compressed gas bottle for propellant.
- Paintballs: The ammunition used in the marker, paintballs are spherical gelatin capsules containing primarily polyethylene glycol, other non-toxic and water-soluble substances, and dye.
- Mask: Masks are safety devices players are required to wear at all times on the field, to protect from paintballs. They completely cover the eyes, mouth, ears and nostrils of the wearer, and some masks can also feature throat guards.
Games
Basic flow
Paintball is played with a potentialy limitless variety of rules and variations, all of which are specified before the game begins. The most basic of all game rules is that players must attempt to accomplish a goal without being tagged with paintballs. When a player is tagged, they must raise their marker to indicate that they are out, and leave the playing field. Depending on the agreed upon game rules, the player may return to the field and continue playing, or is eliminated from the game completely.
Variants
Main article: Paintball variationsPaintball can be played using different variations of its basic rules, including Capture the flag and Elimination . Paintball has spawned several popular variants, including woodsball, which is played in the natural environment and spans across a large area. Conversely, the variant of speedball is played on a smaller field and has a very fast pace (with games lasting up to five minutes). Other variants include scenarioball.
Enforcement of game rules
Regulated games are overseen by referees, who patrol the course to ensure enforcement of the rules and the safety of the players. If a player is marked with paint, they will call them out, but competitors may also be expected to follow the honor code; a broken ball means elimination. There are game rules that can be enforced depending on the venue, in order to ensure safety, balance the fairness of the game or eliminate cheating.
- Minimum distance - When being tagged, depending on the distance from where the shot was fired, getting marked can feel like a firm pinch. Being marked may even leave a welt. Because of the pain associated with being hit by a paintball, commercial venues may enforce a minimum distance rule, whereby players cannot shoot an opponent if they are closer than this distance.
- Overshooting - Some fields discourage players from overshooting (also called bonus balling or lighting up ), which is to repeatedly shoot a player after they are eliminated. It is also considered overshooting if a player knew the opponent was eliminated but continued to shoot, disregarding the safety of the opposing player.
- Ramping - Ramping refers to an electronically controlled marker increasing its rate of fire (balls per second or BPS)when a player reaches a certain number of trigger pulls per second and then maintains that trigger pull speed his marker will increase its rate of fire. Ramping of rate of fire is widely prohibited at most paintball fields, however it is allowed in most tournament formats. Most of the major professional leagues modified their rules for 2008 to limit the maximum rate of fire to 13.3 balls per second versus the previous 15. For 2009, the PSP tournament series further limited the maximum rate of fire to 10 balls per second to reduce the costs of playing in a weak economy. Although it is possible for players to fire more than 13.3 BPS, doing this with ramping is disliked by some pla
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