It was 11 degrees and snowing outside, a paraplegic pre-teen was aggressively and rhythmically bumping his calves with the footrests of a custom wheelchair, and in the back corner of the room, a GSG-9 special forces trooper was waving what looked like an AR-15 at a woman whose T-shirt proclaimed her allegiance to a particular clan of furries and anime enthusiasts. But the fellow reading us the rules of the game on a Sunday morning in deeply rural Ohio was unfazed by any of it. “The next session will be … Domination,” he announced. “Any questions?”
There were no questions, although about 20 of the 50-some people in this airsoft arena were new to the venue, and half of them had never so much as held an airsoft rifle before, being armed with nothing but rental equipment and a positive if slightly apprehensive attitude. Because all of us knew what Domination was. Just like Team Deathmatch, Juggernaut, or Infected, Domination is a “mode” that didn’t exist in real life, until it did.
The most popular online game in America is Fortnite, a good-natured, cartoon-themed balance of building and battle in a harmless-looking, ever-changing world that appeals to 6-year-olds and frustrated parents alike. Below it you have Minecraft (of course) and the long-running Siamese twins Counter-Strike and Valorant, in which small teams of players compete for objectives that may or may not involve using weapons. These games are popular. They make money. But they have no street cred. They’re about as relevant to an angry young man in rural West Virginia, or downtown Chicago, as the first Pat Boone album.
The same cannot be said for Call of Duty, the ultra-realistic first-person shooter published by Activision. It currently engages between 8 and 10 million people per month in virtual venues from claustrophobic stacks of shipping containers on the deck of a bulk cargo ship to Al Mazrah, the 1,750-acre fictional Middle Eastern city that boasts everything from skyscrapers to ancient Babylonian caves. You can choose to play it on a multithousand-dollar gaming computer, or you can use the game console hooked up to the living room TV. Some of it is free, and the rest is cheap.
Consequently, Call of Duty, always referred to as “CoD” and pronounced like the fish, has become massively popular, especially with young men who love the military themes. You can find references to “CoD culture” on the “Hoodville” Instagram page, in the rants of SoundCloud rappers, and the graphics of customized “donks” on the Houston streets. Or you can try airsoft arenas throughout the Midwest, which have added a new twist to the game: doing it for real.
As real as you can get, of course, when the penalty for getting shot in the head is not a lovingly rendered cranial explosion but just a pimple-looking welt the day after. Airsoft, which is best thought of as a paintball game with realistic-looking weapons and a sharp painful sting from a plastic BB traveling at 350 feet per second rather than a splatter of colored oily dye from a gel-coated ball, boasts a $2 billion market growing at close to 10% a year. It’s also experiencing a new era of respectability thanks to the popularity of first-person combat video games in general and CoD in particular.
The airsoft fields and indoor arenas have been quick to capitalize on this, most notably by adapting the most popular CoD game modes from the physical world to the virtual. In games like Team Deathmatch, in which you simply keep track of who has the most kills, or Infected, in which being shot by a “zombie” turns you into a zombie yourself and the last “person” to be shot is the winner, this is fairly simple. Other game modes, however, require a bit of inventiveness.
Which brings us to Sunday’s game of Domination. Online, this is a match in which two teams of shooters attempt to control three separate points for as long as possible. Being in proximity to any of the three points for a certain amount of time turns it loyal to your team, thus forcing the other team to kill you and recapture it for themselves. Adapting this from a billion-dollar videogame franchise to a previously abandoned warehouse, the “domination points” become traffic cones into which a PVC pipe is stuck. If the blue-taped end of the pipe is visible, the blue team is getting points. Same for red.
To my surprise, the considerable diversity of CoD games was reflected in this real-life match. Women made up about a quarter of the players, as did black and Hispanic participants. “Yeah, it’s changed a lot over the last five years. Especially since COVID,” one referee noted. “They come to play the CoD rules, so we’ve changed to reflect that.”
Your humble author is not much of a “twitch gamer,” losing in close combat by younger players more than half the time, and the same was true “IRL” (in real life) as a 52-year-old trying to outrun teenagers and 20-somethings to and from the three domination points. My determination not to shoot any kids, especially the two kids in wheelchairs, lasted through perhaps four painful and precisely targeted “hits” from the aforementioned category, after which I dispensed plastic-BB violence with a generous hand.
Through no fault of mine, our team did, in fact, dominate the opposition in 20 minutes of sweating and running, after which we traded banter and anecdotes with the hated Red Team in the common room. A fit young man in what was obviously most of his uniform from a previous overseas deployment apologized for shooting me in the neck, while my son chatted with a group of “furries” who travel throughout the Midwest playing at every arena they can find. Someone’s gun was broken; tools were initially in shorter supply than advice, but the situation was rectified shortly. A chaperoning father was overcome by what the kids call “FOMO,” or fear of missing out, and ran up front to rent a gun of his own.
After 20 minutes, the head ref once again sauntered up for an announcement. “Team Deathmatch,” he called, to scattered cheers. And though I would go home from that day with a sore neck and a Predator-esque trio of burst blood vessels on my cheek, I was also a bit reassured by the whole thing. It was good fun. The “toxicity” and “hostile environment” long associated with first-person shooter video games was entirely absent from this real-life match.
Was that because we could, in fact, hurt each other a bit during the game? Was it the lack of “keyboard courage” that makes so many places online unpleasant for so many people? Or was it the joy of making new friends in a world that seems obsessed with virtualizing and monetizing every relationship? Wasn’t it great, just this once, to meet the enemy and find out that he was … us?
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Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn, New York, and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver and a former columnist for Road & Track and Hagerty magazines who writes the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.
