"It turns out the country boy fared better, as he summed up with an anecdote that almost perfectly describes a kind of interaction I've had a few dozen times in Arc Raiders: Within about 20 minutes, I came around a big maple tree and Hayes was sitting on a rock. And I walked right up behind him and put the barrel of the gun right on his neck and said "alright, I don't wanna shoot you. Who wins?""
"According to Gaines, Paintball was an exciting game of "stealth, wood skills, and strategy [...] the idea of running through the woods, competing and symbolically surviving, those go way back into our genetic development.""
"Arc Raiders, I'm convinced, taps into similar things, lighting up a primal part of the brain that is both thrilled and terrified about entering a dangerous area to earn rewards, establish victory, and get out alive."
Charles Gaines and Hayes Noel invented paintball to settle a bet about who could better survive in the wild, a country-versus-city test of skills. The founding anecdote involves Gaines surprising Hayes by putting a gun barrel to his neck and asking who would win, sparking play that expanded into group scenarios. Participants used nonlethal but painful weaponry to practice stealth, woodcraft, and strategy as symbolic survival exercises. Those mechanics tap deep evolutionary drives for competition and survival. Arc Raiders evokes the same primal mix of thrill and terror through risk-and-reward gameplay, while removing physical pain but preserving emotional sting from losses.
Read at Kotaku
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