Under the fluorescent lights of a top-floor Lerner Health and Wellness Center basketball court, students in athletic shorts lined up on opposite walls, waiting for the referee to blow his whistle.

But instead of jerseys and pinnies, players wore light-up vests and brandished laser “blasters,” ready to become champions of GW intramural laser tag. This semester, Campus Recreation officials introduced the “sport” through its low-stakes, all-level intramural sports department, creating four leagues of between six to 17 people that participate in matches through the end of October. 

Right after the referee’s whistle, the players were off. With eight competitors sporting red or blue vest sensors to represent one of two teams, each player was granted 15 “lives,” losing one each time the opposing team’s laser hit their sensor. After a player exhausted their lives, their blasters croaked the words “game over” and stopped working.

About a dozen giant, inflatable red-and-black “bunkers” sat in the center of the court, which players ducked and hid behind as they strategically sniped their nemeses. The teams battled for as many rounds as possible within the allotted 20-minute window, with the team winning the most being crowned the day’s winner.

First-year Ethan Kim, a mechanical engineering student and captain of his team “Top Gunners,” aimed his blaster at a student whose vest was glowing blue. Normally, Kim would be on the same team as his target, but Wednesday, the team that Top Gunners was supposed to play didn’t show up, so it was a battle of friendly fire.

Kim said he received an email in September that Campus Recreation added laser tag to its official list of extracurriculars this semester and asked his friends if they wanted to join the league with him. He said he played laser tag with friends in his hometown of Auburn, Alabama, and wanted to do the same at GW.

“We had a laser tag place back home, and I would go play with my friends every once in a while,” Kim said. “So I thought it’d be fun to do it here as well.”

He said the seemingly silly game can get intense. Once, a fellow Top Gunner got overexcited during a game and rushed into the field of play “very aggressively” before running straight into a wall, he said.

He said another time, an opposing team constructed a detailed strategy with “plays drawn up like a football game” — which, unfortunately for Kim, worked to his rivals’ advantage and sparked losses for Kim and his teammates.

“They had names for all their plays,” Kim said. “It was all very strategic.”

Junior Logan Harris, a political science and finance student and a GW intramural sports supervisor, helps set up and referee laser tag games. Harris said the interim director of intramurals that began at GW at the beginning of the semester decided that the University would implement the laser tag leagues.

He said GW already owned the laser tag equipment from past events like a Senior Week game, and officials figured they should utilize it.

“We had the equipment, but we just never use it,” Harris said. “So I said, ‘Why not have IM laser tag?’”

He said laser tag players take matches as seriously as they would any other intramural sport for one simple reason: They love competition and they hate to lose.

“When the teams show up, the teams get competitive because I’ve realized doing IMs that nobody at GW likes to lose anything,” Harris said. “Once the teams end up losing all their lives, they start to get really strategic.”

He said a team of first-years once beat their opponents in five minutes, conquering six games as the other team collected repeated losses. Harris said the team’s success came from the members’ interest in video games, which taught them to coordinate and shout out calls to their teammates.

“That was pretty funny to see how much they love laser tag,” Harris said. “They took it seriously.”

Junior Joie Ruble, a marketing and political science student, said she plays for the team “Miss Ko Jones Largos,” a name brainstormed by her teammates. She said a fellow member sent an Instagram post promoting the sport to her friends’ group chat, and the group collectively decided to join the league. 

At the start of each match, Ruble and her team huddle to discuss their “battle plan” for victory, often using lingo from Fortnite like “pushing” and “knocked,” she said. Ruble said her typical gameplay involves frequent “hand signals” to her teammates, waving wildly to silently communicate her thoughts without hinting her strategies to opponents.

She said her past laser tag experience is limited to childhood birthday parties, but she and her team had a rookie advantage when they won their first-ever match Sept. 22 under the mercy rule, with their opponents failing to gain any points. 

“We mercy-ruled the other team, which basically means that we got a high score and then they got zero, so I’d say that was really fun,” Ruble said. “It was also fun because we were all just kind of learning the game and learning how to play as a team.”

She said despite strategizing, sometimes plans get thrown off course. Once, she and her team had assigned specific positions for each player, but a fellow team member ignored their plan, “full sprinted through the court” and was the first person eliminated.

Mishaps included, her team perseveres because the game conjures nostalgia for childhood memories of blasting lasers, Ruble said.

“I think it really helps us bring out our inner child,” she said. “It kind of brings us back to those days, so it’s really fun. I’m glad they offered it.”