In my first blog, I said I would be talking about funny stories about living with colourblindness, and I feel that I haven’t really delivered on that promise. So today I hope to change that by talking about a game that has haunted me for years: laser tag. Whenever it was someone’s birthday party or it was a slow Sunday and we were near the arcade, I would shiver with fear.
Why are you bad at laser tag?
First off, if you don’t know what laser tag is, I want to know which rock you’ve been living under. Seriously. If you haven’t done this go out (when it’s safe to do so) and give it a try with some friends, it's good fun. Basically you shoot each other with lasers. Now, this doesn’t sound like something I would be instantly bad at, but you need teams. How do you distinguish between those teams? With different colours of course. What different colours? Red and green, naturally. Yep, the two colours that I and many others can’t see or tell the difference between.
So we would all pile into a darkroom and run around and shoot each other for 20 minutes and come back out to see our points. Always, without fail, my points would be somewhere deep in the negatives, because I was shooting my own team. When I got in that arena it wasn’t a game...it was survival. I would shoot anything that would move. It is probably the closest thing I am going to get to being in an actual warzone. See, normally in laser tag there are two teams: red and green, but when I play there are three teams: red, green, and Connor. Suffice to say I was not a popular choice at birthday parties, because everyone knew that when they had me on the team, they were going to lose.
My vengeance
A few years ago I was invited to go out and play laser tag with my friends. I arrived expecting the worst, knowing that I’d shoot everything in sight, and come dead last. But that day an angel was shining on me, because when I got there, the teams weren’t red and green. They were blue and red! Oh, happy day! So many years spent losing at laser tag and now, finally, I could prove to everyone that I could play the game! Did I win? Hell no, I still came dead last on the leaderboard, but at least I wasn’t in the negatives.
What I don’t understand is why friendly fire is a thing in laser tag. This isn’t War Simulator 2020, after all. It’s shooting 6th graders with lights. It isn’t meant to be realistic. It's meant to be fun. What kind of message is this sending to kids? It’s ok to shoot your friend? I don’t know, maybe I am just bitter.
On a more serious note, this highlights how many colour blind people can’t have the same experiences as normal sighted people, even with something fun like laser tag. I hope that one day some sort of accommodation can be made for the colourblind when doing these sorts of things. When we are all allowed back outside again I will definitely go and play some laser tag using my colour blind corrective glasses and see if that makes a difference.
Comentarios