A Culture Based on Fantasy and Acting Out Robert Stoller, Sigmund Freud and Heinz Kohut provide essential insights into the way contemporary entertainment lets us act out fantasies and desires. In a rundown section of downtown Boston, inside a partially abandoned building, one can find an indoor playing field for a combat simulation game known as paintball. The playing field consists of two large rooms splattered with paint on the walls and concrete floors. Free-standing wooden barriers have been placed at random in both rooms to provide players with something to hide behind when their opponents fire at them.
Players divide into two teams and take positions behind the barriers.
When a game begins, players proceed to fire at each other with their air guns in an attempt to eliminate opponents or capture something on the other team's territory. In effect, it retains the form of a battle but not the substance, offering players a reenactment that lacks the stakes or physical injury of genuine combat. There are similar indoor and indoor playing fields for paintball around the United States and a burgeoning subculture with its own tournaments and heroes. There is also a growing arsenal of air-powered guns that can be purchased by players, which parallels the fascination with real guns in the larger society. Paintball is an example of a new kind of symbolic arena that now characterizes popular culture.