Games people play

Crouched behind a makeshift defense of scraggly wood, bullets whizzing past me, it occurred to me that I hadn’t had this much fun in a while. I’d like to pin the blame on my friend Karla, who suffers from a case of chronic ennui. “Meet at the mall again?” she’d say, as though I were forcing her to enter a prison camp and eat porridge for the next 10 years. “Why don’t we do anything new anymore?”

Which is why I was knee-deep in dirt, crawling past friends attired in vests and masks, being pelted with paint bullets that earned a bruising “ouch” each time one hit me on an uncovered part of my body.

I had wrangled over 20 friends to participate in our first ever game of paintball. Even I was tired of doing the usual movie and coffee thing. And, if attendance was any measure, so were my friends.

The hardest part wasn’t taking hits on parts of me that were prone to bruises. It was figuring out how to schedule a game that wouldn’t conflict with anyone’s plans — which is difficult when the people you play with are also the people you work with. Their schedules are about as normal as a doctor on call. Over a prolonged session of e-mail, we’d finally settled on a date.

“Wear comfortable clothing you can move in,” I’d warned my friends, “like old things you wouldn’t mind staining. Jeans and sweat pants should do.” Which probably explained why one of my friends showed up in a pair of incredibly brief yellow shorts. It proved that my definition of comfortable was far from her’s. (She went home with a lot of bruises that night. Her yellow shorts proved to be a target too easy to resist.) Even Rorie, a fashion editor who always looks polished and put-together, had it in her to show up garbed in a baseball tee and track pants.

Paintball is a simple enough game. You’re given air rifles that come with about a hundred paint bullets. For this, you pay P500, which includes the rental fee for the protective apparel you’re required to wear while within the premises of the field. The group is divided into two teams (we went old school and did a count-off) while Global Gutz (the paintball company) had safety marshalls who were there to supervise the game.

Once you’re hit, you are considered “dead” and immediately escorted off the field — until the next game, that is. It is one of the few lousy parts of paintball. That and the incredibly smelly gear. Mine smelled of musk and more than a few unbathed men. Not so charming to the olfactory senses. My friend Maureen took one sniff, said “I can’t breathe!”, tore off her mask and was instantly out of the game.

We played for almost four hours that night. At some point, I had been crawling past two bushes in attempt to get to the other team’s side and encountered my teammates Anna and Rorie whispering behind a small bamboo fence. “Who’s that crawling over there?” one of them said as I slithered by. “Some people take this too seriously.”

In the end, our team won three games out of three. I like to think it was because of my paintball prowess but it was most likely due to Anna’s boyfriend, Gec, a professional basketball player who really took a shine to the game, planning our strategy and effectively eliminating the competition.

A few months later, my friend Frank, a photographer, told me about laser tag, which he’d dubbed the “upper-class version of paintball.” “You don’t have to wear that smelly mask,” he said, wrinkling his nose, “and it’s air-conditioned.” So I sent invites via Facebook, announcing that the ’90s were back and would anyone like to revisit the era via laser tag, a game popular when I was in high school.

Only about a dozen people showed up, which goes to show that not many people feel as nostalgic about the ’90s as you’d like to think. Unlike paintball, which was pretty informal and encouraged lots of raucous catcalling, laser tag was a bit more sedate. Each game is 15 minutes long which seems like a short amount of time but by the end of the game, you’re bathed in sweat, running out of breath and wondering where your youth had gone.

The objective is to tag anyone from your opponent’s team. It took us a full game to figure that out as we tallied our scores on the screen, post-laser tag. There, displayed on the flat-screen monitor for all the world to see, was our score — how many we shot, who shot us and where. No one, apparently, had qualms about shooting each other in the back. My dismal score notwithstanding, I was ready to play in 15 minutes (we needed some down time between games to catch our breath).

By the time we’d completed our second game, we emerged from the room, bathed in sweat and huffing like we’d just completed a marathon. “Dude, if we played against kids,” one of my friends said, while delicately dabbing his dripping forehead with tissue, “we’d be screwed.”

After playing both paintball and laser tag, most people like to ask, “So what’s the final verdict?” Most prefer laser tag because of its generally hygienic nature. But I say paintball. When else do you get to shoot someone and watch some good old-fashioned orange paint splatter on their designer jeans and not have to explain yourself? At the end of the day, getting down and dirty is always more fun.

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Lazer Extreme is located at 4/F, Activity Center Wing, Market! Market! at Fort Bonifacio. Call 856-6467 or e-mail info@lazerXtreme.com.ph for more info. For paintball, call Global Gutz, with locations at Roxas Blvd. and Taguig, at 0918-9129177 for more info.