For those that regularly read my site, you know that my focus is on the beginner or intermediate player and I specifically concentrate on woodsball and basic speedball, with little-to-no coverage of professional and semi-pro paintball.  For those that are more interested in upper-level tournament paintball, PaintballX3.com has a cool new site: http://www.tournament.paintballx3.com/.  It has a nice calendar of upcoming tournaments and also has a fair amount of tournament paintball news.  If your hobby consists of watching paintball as much as playing it, check out the site.

Why do paintball players need nicknames? If you go into corporate America you will meet lots of Johns, Rachels and a few Mr. Smiths or President Coopers, but you don't meet very many Mad Dogs or Big Reds. Paintballers, though, love to give themselves names that the rest of the world doesn't know about.

I'm just as guilty as anyone else - I've used the nickname "Miser" ever since I first chose a nickname to play a multiplayer computer game.  Incidentally, I chose the name from another computer game character - the ghost miser from King's Quest IV, if you remember that game.  There's nothing special about my nickname, I just liked the name as a kid and it has followed me onto the paintball field (unless I can just go as "Dave").

I realize that nicknaming might be more prevalent in the woods than on the speedball field (though speedballers do come up with creative nicknames) and it's possible that the military-esque nature of woodsball suits the military tradition of nicknames for enlisted soldiers.  I, though, have another theory:

Paintball started gaining popularity in the mid-to-late '80s.  At the same time in America, 1986 to be exact, Top Gun came out and everybody wanted to be known as Maverick or Goose or some other similar-type name.  With paintball, though, the naming game just stuck.  Then again, maybe not.

If you have a creative paintball nickname, share it in the comments and tell us the story behind it.

One thing I've come to realize is that a competition with the "best" guns doesn't mean the game is any more fun to play. The games I enjoy the best are when everybody is shooting a comparable gun. That way, when somebody does better, it's because that person won on their merits. I don't care if it's Egos and Angels, Tippmanns and Piranhas or plastic pumps, it's better when everybody is shooting comparable guns.

But, when I play a game with semi-automatics, I find that I run more, spend less time behind bunkers and generally enjoy the game more. I like the basic blowbacks because they remind me of playing the game how I learned to play it.

With the 2010 winter Olympics coming to a close, I'm reminded of  a question I posed two years ago during the 2008 Olympics: does paintball deserve a spot in the Olympics? My original thoughts on the matter haven't changed, but I'm interested in what any of you readers might think about paintball becoming an Olympic sport.  Share your thoughts in the comments.