Hansen 1 Chase Hansen Instructor Germain 14 November 2013 ENG 1101 Paintball: A Mini Ethnography Burn, Dead box,

Chrono, and Marker are all languages of the discourse community in which we call Paintball. A great part of Paintball is to have fun and win while shooting the opponents. Leaning out to work around an enemy and finish off the competition is challenging yet loads of fun. Players today communicate through acronyms and through modern methods such as Facebook and websites. Websites are important because it shows when a game is being held for people all around that can join the fun. Facebook has really helped in the communication because almost anyone can communicate to other players through this site. Players use these and many others to keep up to date and ready to slug it out with each other. There are universal words like fps, paint-check or words teams make up for code like Charlie or blue for certain things and objectives. Some even speak in an entirely different language in order to keep the other team guessing. Either way there is a language all players know and some that come with groups. I found that the best way to gather information about the paintball community was to be emerged in it. This started when I was a child and interested in guns, so in high school I decided that I would join a team to learn exactly what paintball was all about. I wanted to know what lingo went with the game, what skills you needed, and the rules that went along with

Hansen 2 everything. I would come to learn what equipment to pack for certain situations and what equipment to leave out to make my load lighter. All these things came with the team; the knowledge, the practice, the skills, everything. When this assignment started coming around, I realized there was still a lot I had not learned about the game and I started writing down code words, types of guns and ammunition, along with other team and game rules that have become new to the game of paintball within the last year. To investigate this new knowledge more, I enrolled myself into one of the biggest paintball scenario games in this area. Paintball has a broad common goal. The goal of paintball that has become common knowledge inside the paintball community is to make money while having fun. Paintball players try to enroll in the largest scenario game plays they can to maximize this money situation. While the main goal is this, to make money, a subsidiary goal is to have fun while playing. The second most goals in the paintball community are to build a team that communicates well with each other and can eliminate the opponent. This is very important because in order to obtain the first goal, paintball players need a cohesive team to make winning a possibility. This is where all the code words for paintball players comes into play. Paintball players tend to make code words for each team to adhere to so that other team players can not quite understand what the team is talking about out in the open. This makes it easy for the team to discuss attack tactics while in front of enemys. It is like the enemy having no sense of the attack while it is being discussed in front of them. Some of the code words that exist are Dorito, Snake, Alpha, and Rex. Dorito and snake are both code words for bunkers. There is a difference between the two being that Dorito is a bunker made in the shape of a triangle, whereas, snake is a bunker made in the shape of an L. Both of these can be used to tell team players what bunker to converge while still keeping the enemy players oblivious.

Hansen 3 Alpha and Rex are two different bases. A base is the objective for the team players hold or possess from the enemies. During the game, enemy teams try to take each base while the team who possess it tries to hold all the bases they currently have. This is important to give them code names so that the enemy still has to think about what bases the current team has. If the bases are named, it becomes easier for the team to communicate to each other which ones need to be reclaimed and which ones need to be protected. As all teams have their own lingo or code words, these are popular code words used amongst most teams. It is left up to the team to create new ones if they like or keep the ones that are popular. By keeping ones that are popular though, the team runs the risk of having lingo that the other team may know or easily catch on to. In a standard squad, there is a common threshold for players, but depending upon the situation or scenario this number could move up or down. The average team has no common threshold. It is difficult to maintain a team that is larger rather than one that is smaller. A smaller team in paintball can be more tight knit rather than one that is spread out across a game in their own state of mind. Although having more people creates more man power in winning the game, which is the ultimate goal, it turns out to be more suitable to have a smaller team. This gives them the opportunity to obtain smaller hiding grounds for team meetings during a match where they can all communicate at once rather than having a large group meeting that can easily be spotted. All these things are common rules or norms of paintball and their players. These items can be discovered by immersing ones self into the environment that they players place themselves in. In order to survive the match, one must learn how to accurately play the game.

Hansen 4 In conclusion, this community has many different options for the teams and its members. They value unity in the team and they value communication and the common goal of winning the victory. The players in paintball are very close and will protect each other as if they were in a real war situation. They must know how to react to their teammates and how to correctly interpret what they team is saying in order to win the game. Winning is key to these players but it is not the only thing they care about. The players care about their teams and how they interact to come to a common goal. The team is a family. It has its own language and love among the players that can only be gained by trust and sportsmanship.

Hansen 5 Works Cited

Metheney Consulting. "Fulda Gap Paintball Scenario @ Command Decisions Wargames Center, Taylorsville, NC." Fulda Gap Paintball Scenario @ Command Decisions Wargames Center, Taylorsville, NC. Tactical Diversions, 2009. Web. 17 Oct. 2013. <http://www.fuldagap.com/>. Real Action Paintball Inc. "T68 M249 SAW." RAP4.com Catalog M249 SAW Paintball Machine Guns. Real Action Paintball Inc, 2013. Web. 17 Oct. 2013. <http://www.rap4.com/store/paintball/t68m249-saw-c-556.html>.