When I started GameTruck, one of the things that was especially important to me was that the players played together. This is one of the reasons we only bring out multiplayer games for years. Later, when games like Fortnite became huge, we found a way to make those multiplayer as well. A party is about playing with your best friends. When we added Laser Tag, we focused on activities that could be played in teams. Like real life video games. We are always on the lookout for fun, safe, activities and now I am excited to share with you the latest fun celebration activity sweeping the GameTruck system: GellyBall!

GellyBall is a brilliant innovation on the water tag market. This clever little game is simple, fun, and fast paced and most of all it’s a great game to play with your friends.

Something fun for everyone

GellyBall is the latest in move and shoot team games. Think paintball without the pain and water guns without the mess. The game uses electric pistols that shoot “gelly balls”.  What is a GellyBall? A water pellet held together by surface tension and an infinitesimal amount of gel.  The pellets are 99% water. The battery powered shooters hold up to 750 pellets in their hopper and dispense pellets at a rate of 12 per second.  This means you don’t waste a lot of time reloading. Think of it as a “pixelated squirt gun”. Instead of a steady stream of “water” like a water blaster, you get better range and accuracy.  Just squeeze the trigger and you’re spraying your opponent with tiny pellets of water up to 40 feet away. When GellyBalls make contact, they burst releasing only water.  There is no mess, no stain, and they impact with more of a “Zap” than a “Sting”. 

Once players get their hands on a GellyBall gun and see how much fun it is, we find that kids and adults alike, want to play. All players are required to wear masks to  protecting their eyes and face. 

Easy to set up and clean up

A GellyBall party is fun and easy to setup. You don’t need a lot of space. Our expert staff will bring all the equipment, and plenty of GellyBalls for everyone to have enough for the entire party. The staff setup the obstacles (additional charges may apply), but they always bring the safety equipment, GellyBall guns, and plenty of Gellyballs. After a safety briefing where the players are shown how to use the equipment – they’re off! They can play last one standing, protect the president, or red vs blue. The GellyBalls make a satisfying sound as you tag out other players. And when the party is over, all the equipment goes back into the travel cases, is sanitized, and cleaned for the next party with no mess left behind. There are no paint stains, no lost plastic projectiles to sweep up, and no additional charges for ammo.

You can play indoor and outdoor

GellyBall really is flexible. Because it is essentially water in tiny amounts (each gun holds about a cup), you can play indoors or out. Of course, you don’t want to play in your house, but gymnasiums, multi-purpose rooms, and other activity-based venues are perfectly fine for GellyBall. Of course, people first tend to think of GellyBall outside, and after a year pretty much cooped up, GellyBall is a fantastic way to get your kids outside and moving. Few things do a heart good quit like seeing your kids moving about your hard with their friends having the time of their life. 

Takeaway: GellyBall is a great new fun, safe activity available from GameTruck!If there’s one thing, we do well at GameTruck, it is help people play together. GellyBall is a fantastic edition to that line up of games and activities that help players and parents make positive memories that last a lifetime. More than ever, people recognize the value of coming together to connect, play, and bond. If you want to know more about GellyBall you can find more information at GameTruck.com. Check it out, it’s already our fastest selling new offering in the history of the company.

We are entering that time of the year when the demand for GameTruck is at its peak. This year however we are seeing unprecedented demand. The idea of a private party with all your friends seems to be resonating with a lot of people. With demand so high however, it can be extremely challenging to get the time and date you want on the Calendar. But, with a little creativity and some flexibility – we can work together to make something amazing happen.

Stacey Knight, who is absolutely the queen of booking agents, is not only friendly and knowledgeable, she’s also creative and resourceful. To protect the innocent I have changed the names, but the facts of the story remain the same. Emily called looking for a party for her daughter. 

“Hi, this is Sarah’s mom. I am hoping to get onto the calendar for your outdoor LaserTag party. We need Saturday, sometime in the afternoon,” Emily told Stacey.

Stacey replies, “Happy to help; let’s take a look to see what we can do. How old are the kids?”

Emily, “Sarah is turning 13 and she’s more of a outdoor, sporty girl. But she isn’t into gaming.”

Within seconds Stacey locates the franchise closest to this parent and pulls up the calendar. Right away she sees demand is super high, the calendars are nearly full across the board. But creativity craves constraints. Stacey has an idea.

Stacey says to the mom, “Cool! Well, our LaserTag has already sold out for the afternoon times, we only have later evening around 7/7:30PM.”

Emily, is of course disappointed. She was already picturing her daughter and her friends roaming around the back yard playing LaserTag, “Oh really, darn,” She says. “I’m afraid it’ll be too late to host it!”

Drawing upon her own personal experience as a mom and a customer, Stacey shares her experience with Emily. “Not necessarily! I have girls and they LOVE our LaserTag! We’ve had a lot of birthday parties with the LaserTag.

Our favorite event was for my daughter, also named Sarah, for her Sweet 16! She has a November birthday and asked for a bonfire. So, I bought a bunch of Glow sticks, put them into a bowl & let the kids decorate themselves with the various sticks I bought just after Halloween, put together a Smore’s Table, Hot Chocolate Bar, ordered a bunch of pizza, and had beverages for the kids. The LaserTag team showed up, setup the field, and we had a GLOW PARTY! It was the best party, because it was darker and you couldn’t see the kids, but you could see these streaks of light running around.”

Emily’s ton is suddenly upbeat. Given a new vision for something memorable and unique, she’s re-energized. “Oh my gosh, I LOVE THAT!” But then she realizes it’s March. “Where am I going to find those GLOW STICKS!?”

Stacey has already pulled up a browser and is searching, “Let’s Google it real quick…here are a couple sites to check out.” She sends Emily the links. “And it looks like they have expedited shipping offered if you want them sooner!”

Emily is decisive, “Let’s do it!”

They booked the event and by all accounts had an absolutely fantastic time. 

Obviously getting our first choice is best, however some of our most memorable events have come from working with parents that are able to be creative and find times and dates that work. As we head into the busy months, experience shows that a little flexibility and creativity can make for an memorable celebration.

Lately I have had several parents reach out to me to ask me about video games, esports careers, and opportunities for their sons. Over the last fifteen years, I have learned a few things about coaching young boys, and young men but also, I have had the great privilege of working with some amazing people in the industry. It is my sincere belief that we as a nation, and a civilization will achieve our maximum potential when strong women and strong men in equal number can come together and work on solving the hard problems that face us locally and globally.

I say that because I do not believe encouragement is a zero-sum game. I believe decency and respect can be delivered in equal measure if we make those choices. Why am I saying that? Because I believe I have something to say about boys and video games, and I want to make it absolutely clear this should in no way take away from the support and momentum for girls and women to participate and play video games. In fact, what I love about esports is that we have the opportunity to create balanced, integrated, inclusive competition and programming that is open to anyone. 

Many parents are hearing about esports, and they are hearing things like some video game tournaments are filling stadiums, or one kid winning $3M in a Fortnite Tournament. They might have even heard about some schools offering college scholarships for esports. However, the number of parents who see video gaming as a viable path to college remains small, which is not surprising given that tuition assistance for competitive video games is only 4 years old.

The Trap – One Kind of Relationship for Boys

When I started GameTruck sixteen years ago, I did not see the problem as clearly as I see it today. I started GameTruck because I thought the video games in family entertainment centers were expensive and awful. I started GameTruck because I wanted to share the awesome experience, we had at the game studio with more people. But I also started it because boy’s birthday party concepts seemed to be limited to Laser Tag and Bowling. On the other hand, girls had an enormous number of party concepts to pick from. Everything from American Girl Parties to Princess Dress Up Parties and more, plus everything the boys were into like trampoline parks, and laser tag. I believed GameTruck as a concept would fill a void left by the declining pizza-arcade industry. Boys love to compete, and outside of sports they did not have many options. 

There were other factors that lead to GameTruck’s long term success, but it was that one idea: Boys love to compete. Only within the last few years have I seen that boys not only love to compete, but they are also practically only allowed to compete.

Author Robert Bly, in his book Iron John [1], wrote:

Contemporary business life allows competitive relationships only, in which the major emotions are anxiety, tension, loneliness, rivalry, and fear. 

This pressure to compete has created some interesting challenges for boys. One of them especially is the collapse in access to sports.

No New Teams

When I started GameTruck I also looked at Macro-trends. I believed that increasing parental concern of child safety, in part sparked by pictures of missing children on milk cartons scared a generation of parents into needing to know where their children were at all times[2][3]. One consequence was that team sports became the de facto way to exercise and socialize your child safely with adult supervision.

The trouble is, as demand rose, access all but collapsed. 

Some things are so big they hide in plain sight. Over the last 50 years, the power 5 conferences have not added a sports team. Let me give you an example. When I attended ASU in 1984, they had the largest single campus in the country with 19,000 students. Today, ASU boasts over 105,000 students enrolled. And do you know how many basketball, baseball, and football teams they have? 5 times the enrollment, a massive expansion in campuses. And they have one of each, the same number they had 70 years ago. Yet over the last 50 years the United States has doubled it’s population and tripled the number of kids attending college.

In our local middle school, 145 sixth grade students went out for the boys baseball team. That’s 10 children for every available slot on the team. 14 were picked. The next year, only 20 went out. According to the Aspen Institute, by January 2020, 70% of 11-year old’s will have fallen out of team sports.[4] (Unfortunately the Pandemic only made this worse [5])

Where did 125 children go?

We all know. They play video games.

What is really shocking about these numbers is how rapidly the decline happened. In 2016 the age of self-selection out of sports was 13[6] and a few years before that it was 15. 

I have spoken to parents, both friends and acquaintances that had the same experience. Their child love to play ______ (pick a sport) and at middle school a hundred kids tried out and only a few were chosen. That was the end of their participation and enjoyment in sports.

And this is the issue… if you can’t compete who are you? If the only relationship available to form friendships is rooted in competition… then what happens to your friends when you can no longer “play” together?

Online gaming creates systematic isolation to keep people safe

Even as kids fall into video games, there is another challenge. No publisher wants to introduce you through matchmaking to someone who could walk over to your house and meet you. That would be too dangerous. It is better to scramble matchups and obscure connections. Some publishers go so far as to make it practically impossible to even play with friends at all.

They work awfully hard to keep everyone anonymous to each other. But this means, to play with (i.e. compete) friends, you must already have them. However, it was Robert Bly’s quote that gave me insight into why we see so many athletes game.  Cutthroat sports competition is not all that much fun either. When you are competing with team mates to start, that is also a form of competition that can be characterized by anxiety, tension, rivalry and loneliness. 

Playing together

Hopefully, you are by now getting a sense for the scale of the problem. It was this systematic and random playing against strangers that motivated me to create GameTruck. I wanted a safe environment, at your house, where kids could play together with their friends, in person. And I believe and the science supports that play is deeply human. 

Where to go from here

I have been a huge advocate of parents playing video games with their kids. In talks I have given from New York to California, I advise parents to do two critical things.

1. Get in there and play with them. I call this building a bridge to their world.
2. Help them build a bridge from their world to their future.

Step one is easy. Jump in. Get in there and start playing. You’d be surprised what you can learn about your son’s inner life when you get them to talk with you about video games. It is kind of funny. I sat down to write about step two until I realized none of this information from my public speaking is on my blog in the context of GameTruck – so I had to “set the stage” as they say. I wanted to make the case for why I feel our sons are feeling intense isolating pressure to form relationships based in competition and the stress that is causing. Add to that the loneliness that can come from online only play and the challenge of making friends with your cohorts, and I do believe GameTruck is a small but important step in the right direction, bringing kids together with their friends to play.

But what’s next? I will start a series outlining how video game play relates to education, careers, and yes, possibly even esports. My intention is to give you resources to help you and your child make the most of their gaming, and how to avoid getting lost in it.

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References

1. ‌Bly, R. (2015). Iron John: A Book about Men (3rd edition). Da Capo Press.
2. Jin, L. (2020, December 18). The Rise and Fall of the Missing Children Milk Carton Campaign. Medium. https://medium.com/the-collector/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-missing-children-milk-carton-campaign-4e9228d34cb7
3. Ta, L. (n.d.). The missing kids milk carton campaign started in Iowa. Des Moines Register. Retrieved April 18, 2021, from https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/crime-and-courts/2017/09/04/missing-kids-milk-carton-campaign-outcome/627165001/
4. Survey: Kids Quit Most Sports By Age 11. (n.d.). The Aspen Institute Project Play. Retrieved April 18, 2021, from https://www.aspenprojectplay.org/national-youth-sport-survey/kids-quit-most-sports-by-age-11
5. Aspen Institute’s Project Play Report Shows Kids Are Losing Interest in Sports During Pandemic. (n.d.). The Aspen Institute. Retrieved April 18, 2021, from https://www.aspeninstitute.org/news/press-release/state-of-play-2020/

Miner, J. W. (n.d.). Why 70 percent of kids quit sports by age 13. Washington Post. Retrieved September 24, 2020, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/parenting/wp/2016/06/01/why-70-percent-of-kids-quit-sports-by-age-13/