The Boy Soldier

Our youngest went to his friend's laserstorm birthday party today in a place just on the outskirt of Amsterdam. The place, called Paintball Jungle, is the largest outdoor paintball place in Holland. With 14 fields in use, the place is very popular here and clearly busy today. No doubt many so called grown-ups are taking this game very seriously. The kids were only allowed to play the laserstorm, similar but without the paint pellets.

Apparently just recently the Dutch government changed the age limit for paintball from 12 to 18. Seems drastic but there must be strong reasons for that. Even some countries are thinking of banning the game entirely.

Last week Germany wanted to ban pintball and laser tag entirely but was overturned. The move came as part of the German government's response to the horrific school shooting in Germany recently. Paintball and violent video games came under criticism from some German officials after the massacre. Nonetheless, seemed to be an immediate European Union directive, the sport is now banned for those younger than 18 in Holland, and is generally not allowed to be played in military fatigues.

This game is popular with many of the Bruneian students studying in UK where they organise big annual events regularly involving many of the universities. But apparently the effort by some of them to establish the game back home didn't get the approval from the authority.

But for this event today, it was really just a once off and to let the kids taste the 'real' things rather than just playing and experiencing those in video games. Faris really enjoyed it and was appointed the leader of one of the team. His team however lost with a big margin of 5 to 3.

They were given the chance to try out many of the fields, each has different set-up, from plain jungle to urban warfare set-up.