Maybe I shouldn’t have told you about Fortress. I thought that it’d be a good starting point, to tell about differences between the most prominent sports, to tell about something that would be straightforwardly technically feasible to implement on Earth as well. Given the restrictions in, uh, social technology, it in fact doesn’t seem likely that we can play it anytime soon here. (And I no doubt misremember some details – it’s been a while since I last got to play it.)

So let me tell you about a sport that it’d be actually feasible for us to play. The name is obstacle tag. It’s what you’d expect: tag with obstacles.

Where I’m from, this is typically an indoor sport. Briefly: the play area is around 15m x 15m and there are soft cushioned wall-like obstacles all around that you have to run around or jump over. This alone makes for decent games, but usually there are some extra elements, like corner tiles for quick course-turning, foam pillar obstacles that you have to squeeze yourself through, zig-zag-like corridors, a foam pit with a few foot places here and there.

I did some internet search here, and didn’t find anything resembling the concept of “obstacle arena for playing tag”. I don’t quite understand why – this time I’m entirely certain that it would totally be feasible for someone to build this. After all, you do have plenty of wall climbing arenas, which I understand to be more expensive projects, and laser tag arenas, which are so close conceptually. Those are pretty new sports, though, so maybe this one just hasn’t been developed quite yet?

Anyways, the reason I’m bringing this up is that there’s a low-budget version of this that we could actually run ourselves. The equipment we need is a ton of cardboard boxes and small weights. We then just go outside on a sunny day, find a free place, arrange the boxes to make for an obstacle course and put weights into them to make them not fly in the wind.

There is some up-front payment to obtain a good amount of boxes, but if we can buy them with bulk-size discounts from the producer, I think a couple hundred euros would be sufficient to get it running. We can of course also use pre-existing obstacles – there’s actually a great place just outside of my apartment. There’s also a whole stream of rocks right next to that place that we could use for weights (I’m sure the rocks don’t mind if we just put them back afterwards).

Would you guys be interested in this? I obviously acknowledge that, since I’m proposing a New Activity With Economies Of Scale, I’d just buy the boxes myself, and after playing other people can then chip in if they liked it enough and feel that’s fair.

(And, I’m not sure if this goes without saying here, but the option to try the New Thing With Economies Of Scale out for the sake of it, assess you didn’t get much value out of it yourself, and then just not pay, is actually a real option you can choose and – at least where I come from – not something that consumes your social capital and gets you mean looks. Because, like, obviously you have to do that, otherwise you are raising the threshold needed for people to try the New Thing With Economies Of Scale, you are less likely to attain the critical mass, and then new things happen less!)