Talk:Laser tag

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Ok, so its been a while

wasn't it agreed that listing specific systems or arenas here was bad? now i see several just tacked in there.
and when did the article..... ya know.... get retarded?
OK heres what i think needs to happen... The article Lasertag needs to turn into a disambiguation (spelling?) page. because this attempting to cover indoor outdoor home and homebrew (three wildly different things) in one article thing is just getting retarded. the article seems to have gone far downhill since i was last here.
so lets here it peeps whaddya think....? ~whatever~

p.s. oh and triona and tag ferret what systems do you guys play?

Vandalism?

Recently an anonymous contributor added this information: "There are skeptics that debate the actual origins of Laser Tag, including Dr. Felix Nordstrom, once a managing member of the Federation of American Scientists Military Analysis Network (FAMSMAN), who later worked as a substitute teacher at the University of Mexico, gave his testimony at the United Nations in 1995 arguing for a critical update of Laser Tag's historical record." I have tagged it as ^{[citation needed]} and unless the requested reference is added within the next few days, I plan to delete this highly suspicious addition. I can find no mention on the 'net of any Dr. Felix Nordstrom nor of the University of Mexico (though there is a National Autonomous University of Mexico, aka UNAM), and the whole concept that FASMAN or the UN would give half a hoot about the history of Laser tag seems quite ludicrous. I think someone is having a go at us...

Update 06 FEB 2007: Okay, I have removed it since the anonymous contributor has not resumed contact nor made any other "contributions" since adding that.

gah?

well i guess that answers my, what the holy hell happened to this page question..... well its definately alot shorter and more to the point, but it seems the remaining bits were.. murdilated? and now why do you want to get rid of Commercial Laser Tag Systems — Preceding unsigned comment added by Whateverpt (talk • contribs) 23:26, 17 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I don't want to "get rid of" that article so much as merge it, we don't really need two articles. I took a lot of material back, I'd like to add as much as possible back, but want to do so in a way that doesn't leave it as a disorganized mess, less drastic cleanup measures hadn't worked in the past and I haven't had the time for a rewrite. - Stephanie Daugherty (Triona) - Talk - Comment - 01:48, 21 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

i disagree that the two articles don't help.. the second fufills its function quite well.. ~whatever~

Current Cleanup Tasks

Rewrite article (in progress - Stephanie Daugherty (Triona) - Talk - Comment - 19:57, 17 September 2006 (UTC))[reply]
Find a way to include a listing of notable systems.
Properly source all information.
Reinsert information from Talk:Laser tag/temp.
Merge Commercial Laser Tag Systems back in.

References

Please, please, please, please don't manually number references. Its very difficult to keep up with manual numbering, and it doesn't link between the reference and the references section when you do this. WP:CITE gives details of the various citation styles and tools available. Please use them! - Stephanie Daugherty (Triona) - Talk - Comment - 18:51, 17 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Rewriting

I've started to do a rewrite of the article, since it was getting out of hand. It's been cleanup tagged since May 2006, and its been getting steadily worse. Please help by going slow in adding material back, and by properly sourcing any material you add. This article has a lot of potential, and I'd love to see it become a featured article someday! - Stephanie Daugherty (Triona) - Talk - Comment - 19:59, 17 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Where did the categories go?--Choz 03:57, 19 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wanted: Photographs

Photographs under an acceptable license would be a huge improvement to this article. (We can't support a fair use claim here, so it has to be a free license.)

I personally would like to see at least one photo of an arena interior, a photo of a player wearing equipment indoors, and someone playing outdoors.

The interior shots will be somewhat difficult due to lighting, so if a skilled photographer wants to help that would be great! - Stephanie Daugherty (Triona) - Talk - Comment - 23:06, 17 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

We've got thousands of such photographs, however not all lasertag belongs to any one system. - whatever 03:29, 20 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Very much true, there are a lot of systems out there, and they are very different from each other. I'm still seriously hoping to try to get articles for as many systems as possible. - Stephanie Daugherty (Triona) - Talk - Comment - 01:37, 21 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

grumble. i'll play the formatting game, you do get that people delete new subjects as soon as we get them up? ~whatever~

For some reason, there is a lot of fan zealotry in the current Laser Tag scene. That is annoying, but more importantly, totally irrelevant to a good encyclopedia article. So, why doesn't everyone who has a bias put their preferences for one type of equipment or another aside, and think about this: "What kind of picture(s) would you expect to see in a Real Encyclopedia? If you are a manufacturer, arena owner, or just hardcore fan of one brand, does it look like a fair representation of what the equipment commonly looks lik? If it does, post it; if not, don't or we'll just have to find something else.

There are several types of laser tag equipment that are relevant to this article. Images of historical value showing early equipment and arena, pictures of the most common commercial and home equipment, and those of contemporary equipment, in which way the (one again, most common) equipment has changed lately, aside from current fashion sense, such as homebuilt to Milestag spec.

I will watch and try to revert deletions of legitimate contributions as best as I can figure out in wikipedia's messy backside. --Choz 03:16, 19 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What I suggest is to use the pictures of the distinct systems, for nobody could say you're preffering one or another manufacturer. Megaboss 12:42, 22 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

And for God's sake, please forget about military simulators (such as MILES system) - they have absolutely nothing to do with the current commercial systems. Megaboss 12:44, 22 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know about anyone else here, but I prefer no system over any other, in respect to this article. In fact, I am very fond of wikipedia's neutral POV. Whatever images look most arch typical are most appropriate. If that means that Bob's Laser Stuff Inc. makes the most generic, universal and plain equipment, is that really any endorsement? This is acceptable in other wikipedia articles, as well. I would recommend that we avoid "publicity shots" or pictures and captioning that would make the brand particularly obvious to a novice approaching the article. Of course, since we have no pictures, this is all a bit theoretical.

If there are several fundementally different designs in common usage, there should perhaps be illustrations of each. And if there is more than one pic, potential perception of bias can be diffused by including equipment from different vendors.

MILES is historically significant in laser tag. It has a lot to do with current commercial systems, in a fashion. Originally it was some influence on the design of equipment, and it's implementation affected the laser tag culture (for example, its name was 'borrowed' for MILEStag). Since then, MILES2000 has borrowed a lot from the developments in the private sector, and offers very similar technical features. However, since it has a page already, it seems that mention of it should be fairly brief on the main page. --Choz 06:21, 23 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Possible sources

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=%22laser+tag%22&btnG=Search

Moderating

I don't like the way the page has been "rewritten". The "old" version was much more interesting. It's a FREE encyclopedia, and - to my mind - nobody should moderate any page the way it has been done to "Laser Tag". Not the "moderator", but the READERS may decide what information is worth publishing... (Megaboss 18:04, 8 November 2006 (UTC))[reply]

I think we are a long way from any sort of revert-war, but a lot of people expect the article to follow the flow or format of any other wikipedia article, so a bit has been temporarily lopped off, as people work to make it more of a traditional document. None of that stuff is gone, AFAIK, just bookshelved into history. Feel free, to rewrite, or snip the best of the existing work, and re-integrate it into a greater article for all of us.--Choz 03:34, 19 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Two steps forward and...

I see there is an additional maintainer here. Goody!. And citations are beginning to appear. I've been superbusy and not keeping up with things on this page. It appears that some material has gone, and new stuff has appeared in places. Not certain how to deal with the layout, but new material seems to be be shove in, not necessarily near other similar existing material. Additionally, the factuality and relevance of some of the new material is suspect to me. I may be wrong, but I leave that to the powers of wikidom to decide.

"Guns" and "Arenas & Play Fields" need the most help for now.

Choz 08:11, 9 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Changed Dynamic of this Page

Pre-total reconstruction of this page, the information was about 60% indoor commercial tag and 40% outdoor tag. While I have no objection to sharing the spotlight, the page has taken an almost 100% turn towards outdoor/homebrew tag, even to the point of citing commercial manufacturers of outdoor gear for sharing in a open source standard.

There's also a link to some group called the "Youth Rocketry and Laser Tag Association." I belong to several outdoor email lists and occasionally check the more important forums. I've never heard of these guys and their 'huge membership' seems to be mostly comprised of about 20-25 kids once a summer. Our indoor facility averages 80+ players an hour on most weekends and they can't even get that many for a single event in the summer. I'm going to yank this sentence for being off topic, spammy and not relevant the industry I've been involved in for years.

I have problems with other elements, too. For instance...

"The design of indoor laser tag equipment etc., etc." goes on to quote that indoor equipment is designed to be used outdoors in a very negative light. Indoor equipment 'suffers dramatically.'

While I suppose this is true, there is no similar mention of the limitations and failures of outdoor equipment when used indoors or any of the advantages of indoor, arena equipment (real time scoring, better sensor coverage, symetrical arenas, etc.).

With all due respect, the article is beginning to take a slant that's not really fair for commercial indoor gear. The reality is, commercial, indoor laser tag facilities have a longer history (excluduing military use of MILES gear) and are simply more established. The largest outdoor hobby groups get together with 30-40 people for an event. The average commercial arena runs more players and people through their facility in an hour.

Denying this reality seems to be both unfair, counter to WIKI's purpose and counterproductive to anyone seeking honest information on laser tag.

(Jebock 20:20, 9 March 2007 (UTC))[reply]

I think the solution to that is more thorough referencing with inline citations. That there are several "references" in the article is somewhat misleading, as the overwhelming majority of information is not actually supported by reliable sources. Little if any information that is referenced cites Wikipedia:Independent sources, and may have potential conflict of interest issues. Many of the links seem to be more promotional than informational, to be honest. I don't know much on the subject at all, so I probably won't be able to help much to improve things, but this is how I'm seeing it. Hopefully it is of some help. Dancter 20:49, 9 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Outdoor Equipment

The note that a "citation is needed" is unneccessary. Physics will tell us that outdoor environments contain far more "noise" light than indoor environments. Sending a signal through that interference simply requires more power. The sensor's will have to be biased down to compensate for the light differential between outdoors and indoors, and as a result, require stronger signals to "break the squelch", so to speak. I'm removing the tag. CameronB 21:16, 30 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

EWoW standard document

Hi. Just to let you know what I am happy that you guys have linked my EWoW 8 bit Protocol document as a reference (If you check it, you will see that I wrote it).

However, please note that your statement that it is an open standard taken up by manufacturers (ie Zone Systems) isn't quite right.

The way it worked is as follows: 1. Zone systems created the protocol 2. Zone systems intended the protocol would be standard, and informed me of such intent 3. I created the document and published it.

So, rather than Zone Systems using an open standard, it is the other way around: They created the standard, I documented it. It is therefore now an open standard.

Dave Robinson Dangerous Oz 10:06, 2 April 2007 (UTC)Dangerous Oz[reply]

Lasertag Boxhill

When I came to this article it was tagged as not being in any categories. However, there were categores in the wiki source code. The code was being corrupted by a badly made comment (that wasn't closed. This comment included three links. Two were obviously related to laser tag, so I put them into an "External links" section. The third is the link above. It contains slang used in a tag game, however this slang is totally different to slang I've heard for Lazer Tag. I'm not sure it is important enough to include things that are only connected to one type of system. I'll leave it up to others to decide. If you want to create a "laser tag culture" section, you might want to use this as a reference.

Lazer tag/Laser Tag Merge

They're the same thing. We should merge those, too. Deletion Quality 16:56, 18 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'd tend to disagree. Laser tag (this article) is a generic term referring to the overall genre of light-gun based games, whereas Lazer Tag is the actual brand name of a specific toy line (by Worlds of Wonder) within that genre. They probably shouldn't be merged outright unless every single specific product of that nature (like Photon) is merged into the article as well - which would make it ungodly huge. I'd say it's on par with merging the Playstation 3 article directly into video games - which would clearly be a bad idea. In any case, I'd say "laser tag" and "Lazer Tag" are distinct enough to rate separate articles, even if the latter is somewhat sparce at the moment. Hossenfeffer 03:59, 6 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Hossenfeffer, and for that reason, I have removed the merge tag. "Lazer Tag" is indeed a branded version by WOW, which is now marketed by Hasbro (current iteration is "Lazer Tag: Team Ops"), whereas "laser tag" (or "lasertag") just refers to the game in general (although the single word spelling of "lazertag" can refer to it generically). Brittany Ka 18:04, 25 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Laser Skirmish

Laser Skirmish (at least in australia) is what the outdoor laser tag scene is/is called.

I'm requesting somebody with a little better wikiskills than I create a "see also" link or something.

and anybody that can add references to Outdoor laser tag third party atricles there please do so

External Links

Hi! I've noticed the user Ehheh frantically removing the link to TRUTNEE Laser Tag Portal. What's the idea of these efforts? This Laser Tag Portal is a reliable and well-known source of laser tag information and removing the link to it from "External Links" section reduces the possibility of the wiki-visitor to get the full-scale industry's information.Megaboss (talk) 10:25, 27 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I removed the link because it doesn't meet the guideline for external links on Wikipedia. Looking at the article history here, it seems that Hu12 agrees. - Ehheh (talk) 01:09, 29 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Megaboss (talk) 07:38, 29 December 2007 (UTC)Why do you guys think so? I think it is meeting the guideline requirements pretty good:[reply]

Wikipedia articles should include links to Web pages outside Wikipedia if they are relevant. Such pages could contain further research that is accurate and on-topic; information that could not be added to the article for reasons such as copyright or amount of detail (such as professional athlete statistics, movie or television credits, interview transcripts, or online textbooks); or other meaningful, relevant content that is not suitable for inclusion in an article for reasons unrelated to their reliability (such as reviews and interviews).

BTW: have you visited this webpage yourself? And still think it has nothing to do with laser tags? Look at the other external links you let be present at the article page, man...

Furthermore, under links that should be included, the Wiki style guide indicates:

Sites that contain neutral and accurate material that cannot be integrated into the Wikipedia article due to copyright issues, amount of detail (such as professional athlete statistics, movie or television credits, interview transcripts, or online textbooks) or other reasons.

To be honest, Trutnee is a more neutral source and comprehensive source about laser tag than any other link listed in the entire article (including references). Trutnee actually fairly covers the difference between various manufacturers, indoor and outdoor gear, the hobbyist and the commercial market. In a hobby/industry where bias is commonplace, there are really no other legitimate unbiased resources for information. Jebock (talk) 23:09, 1 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I tried to add the link back in and found out that someone had blacklisted the site preventing it from being added. This is, in a word, ridiculous. You have multiple people on here who are laser tag experts stating a reasonable case for Trutnee to be included or at least discussed. This site was blacklisted for no valid reason that I can see. Jebock (talk) 23:22, 1 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(PaulCowper (talk) 14:08, 11 January 2008 (UTC)): As a developer for a Laser Tag company I wish to point out that Trutnee.com was one of the the most reliable sources for unbiased laser tag information. How ever I do beleive that the current domain name is no longer relevant. The domain name currently points to a company with the name of 'VS Technology Group' of which seem to make no reference to Laser Tag.[reply]

(MARViN2003 (talk) 13:22, 12 January 2008 (UTC)): I just looked at trutnee.com and it contains Laser tag info just as it always has, you have to press the UK flag to change it into English.[reply]

(PaulCowper (talk) 09:26, 14 January 2008 (UTC)): Agreed the site is back to how it was. I notified Alexander last friday and now the website is the correct one. I would suggest that now that the URL is relevant to laser tag the blacklist on the domain should be lifted, Personaly i think that the action taken could have been avoided by actualy mentioning in the talk section why the url was removed, I can understand the removal of the link, but not the black listing.[reply]

Here is official notification concerning this matter (published at trutnee.com):

January, 2008: - NATIONAL DISCRIMINATION AT WIKIPEDIA. At the New Year's eve we've got bad news: TRUTNEE Laser Tag Portal had been banned and totally eliminated from Wikipedia. It's true that during the last two years the Wikipedia's article devoted to laser tag saw a lot of "editor's wars"; sometimes contributions were made by laser tag guys, some times by wiki-enthusiasts. Sometimes those contributions were accurate, sometimes - not. Everything happened. Yet, it is for the first time that such elimination took place. From this end, we see such vandalising as nothing but a case of national prejudice. Can it be that some of the "wiki-enthusiasts" currently moderating the laser tag article at Wiki are still under the influence of the last century's cold war hysteria? And knowing that Russians are trying to enrich the world laser tag industry with some information makes them feel uneasy? God knows. And may God help Wikipedia - from our side we regret further participation in this project. Here at TRUTNEE we are strictly against of any type of discrimination - there is enough space for everyone in our world! It is our principle, you know.

Megaboss (talk) 18:31, 16 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

While that's an interesting theory, I rather think it was blacklisted because it was added to only tangentially related pages, such as Hasbro, Tiger Electronics, and Worlds of Wonder (toy company). The blacklist complaints department is that way.

- Ehheh (talk) 18:41, 16 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm afraid it's not the theory; just have a look at the personal page of the person who has conducted blacklisting of trutnee.com: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hu12. Doesn't it look like pure anti-Soviet one? I mean, these picture mocking the Soviet emblem, for example. Besides, at this end I cannot see any other reasons for blacklisting trutnee.com. Megaboss (talk) 10:48, 17 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it was unfortunately clear when I found the link of the information that Trutnee had overstepped bounds in an attempt to increase their search engine rankings. It doesn't change my mind that Trutnee should/could be in this category, but it was against the rules such as they are. Jebock (talk) 16:44, 17 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Aren't Hasbro, Tiger and WOW the part of laser tag industry? Wasn't it WOW that introduced the very term 'lazer tag'? I don't think the consumer laser tag systems should be excluded from the industry, actually. Besides, according to the rules of Wikipedia a couple of certain procedures should be conducted before a page is blacklisted (including a preliminary warning). Neither was done in that case. As to the ranking... Well, I think it is well-known that placing a link at Wikipedia won't increase your page rank anymore. Thus, nobody treats it as a rank-booster. Megaboss (talk) 09:23, 18 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]