Grinn's Game Archive

6th May 2012

Post with 1 note

Counter-Stoned

Having played Paintball a few times and loved it, I was intrigued by a friends’ call to organize a game of airsoft.  Airsoft is basically a team based game involving shooting people with airgun approximations of the actual thing.

When we reached the first thing that struck me was the emphasis from the airsoft owners’ side on the game being a “role-playing”, as they described it, of Counter Strike.  Teams were organized into terrorists and counter-terrorists.  Bombs were planted, hostages rescued and death-matches carried out in a flurry of plastic-pellet chaos.  Players re-spawned at their spawn-point (ok, more COD than CS) once killed and trooped on in the ensuing grind (once again, more COD than CS).

The second thing that struck me was the cloud of thick marijuana air.  The place literally reeked of pot.  When one of our guys pulled out a beer during a break between rounds the owners warned them, in the most severe voice they could muster, that if they had another sip they would not be allowed to play.  With the iron fist of airsoft law lain down in no uncertain terms, the organizer headed to a back room and replenished his degree of stoned-ness.  That back room was clearly the source of the sticky green smell, since every time the door leading to it was opened the already heavy smell of grass got reinforced.

The game took the worst parts of most FPS games I know and mashed them together in a boring mess of a real-life game whose only consolation was the reminder that our physical bodies were alive and present when one of the pellet’s hit a part of you and welted or split your skin.  The first notable casualty came from a well placed shot to an opponent’s forehead.  After the round was over he tottered into the room with a stream of blood coming down his face and a confused “this never happened in Counter-Strike” look.

The space we were playing in consisted of a building divided into a number of rooms by wood and tarp along with two narrow spaces on either side.  The field was largely uneven and one team got a decent upper hand in every round.  The rules were often convoluted enough for non-gamers to forget most of them and screw up how the game was meant to be played.  Of course the way the game was meant to be played by the organizers was not that brilliantly conceived either, having as much of a flair for game and level design as a grilled penguin. 

The size of the place, the randomly placed cover and the overall layout meant that every single game was a typical counterstrike bottle neck:  Four guys at a side of a door, one of them actually shooting and the others waiting their turn to take a pot-shot at the opposite guy at the door and three dudes waiting.  There were a few bursts of movement and excitement, but these were few and far between.  Most of the games were static affairs, resembling on rails shooters where you aim your gun and wait for an opponent to pop out from cover and hope for a shot.  Rinse, repeat.

The lack of frequent sprints to cover meant that, at least for me, the usual adrenaline rush I get in such games never kicked in resulting in a less incorporating experience than, ironically, the virtual version of the game.  That is, yesterday’s airsoft game felt more like a game I have critical distance to than most Counter-Strike sessions I’ve experienced. 

Since the space was so small, once shot, one could jog back to spawn and back again in under a minute.  This meant that the positions held by either team in the first minute or so of the game did not change much.  It also meant “dying” was only a penalty in terms of the physical pain you felt when the pellet hit you, and had only marginal effects in game terms most of the time. 

Unlike paintball, players do not have a physical mark of your hitting them unless you’ve done some visible skin-breaking.  This meant that a lot of players were not owning up to actually being shot, either because they did not feel the shot or because they simply cheated.  On top of that the speed and light colour of the pellets along with the fact most guns were somewhat erratic meant that it was not always possible to tell where your shot actually went, making it hard to call out your opponents.  The majority of the times opponents only left the field when I shot them at point blank range and could see the grin on my face or when I called them out.  Neither of those situations are conducive to a fluid and exciting game.

All in all a hugely disappointing experience that is poorly run and abysmally set-up. 

I could just hear the conversation that lead to its inception:

/puff

“yeah mann, that would be awesome!  Counterstrike with airguns!”

/puff

“yeah, so awesome!”

/puff

“Totally!”

/puff

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17th April 2012

Post

Thanks!

Just wanted to thank all the great work the grad-students in my Digital Game Theory class have done in the analysis thread of this year’s course.  I’m particularly appreciative of all the careful work you’ve put into applying my player involvement model to a variety of games.  Really great stuff guys and once again…

Thanks!

PS I re-blogged Thomas J. Papa’s blog notes on the exercise - really nice and thorough work, Thomas!

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