There are a lot of gadgets out there for Airsofters and way too many to keep up with. And because I don’t work in a shop, I don’t spend my day sitting looking through everything that gets released, so I’m not quite sure how long this offering has been out.

Now, if they’d called this something else I’d probably have looked straight past it. I’d try and hide the brand but it’s everywhere and you’d be able to Google it anyway so I’ll save myself ten minutes in MS Paint and not bother. And don’t start writing in saying I keep picking on certain people because it’s not the individuals, it’s the ideas and like 99% of real Airsoft players I’m not on this planet to say “yes that’s amazing” to and agree with everything, and I’m sure there are plenty of others who are quite happy to kiss ass and make up for it anyway but I’ll say my piece.

This, sadly, is a real product. A “CheaterCatcher”. Now, as a camera it seems pretty decent, apart from the fact it’ll shatter if something above 1.5j hits it so probably not a good idea in some places. It’s always on so you don’t miss anything. Not too bad if watching bb’s hit things is your cup of tea I guess.

But at what point did we become so obsessed with filming just to catch cheaters and waste our existence arguing about it? It’s worse than VAR in football. I’m not saying cheating doesn’t happen, it does but not to the extent that people think it does. I know YouTubers who used to sit and read site reviews deliberately looking for places that report a lot of cheating because cheating is good content and pushes your numbers up. Which is wrong really, that you want to show people outside Airsoft that what we do is lie, cheat, film each other, argue and then go home and continue it online, frantically trying to back ourselves up with grainy, slow motion, edited footage just because we can’t let it go and move on. Why waste your life away like that? IF they didn’t take the BB hit then finding out for sure the following Thursday isn’t going to change the way the game played out.

What happened to just getting out there and playing the game with your mates and enjoying it? Sure, mistakes are made but there’s no money riding on the outcome. It’s just a fun way to go play soldiers in the woods and let off some steam. If someone misses a hit, so what? No big deal. Just play on. Enjoy being part of something where you have an excuse to buy tons of cool gear and run around with guns without being shot by police.

And if you’re not sure whether a player’s being honest about getting hit, just rewatch your recordings to clear things up and deal with any unfair play.

• When? In the middle of a firefight are you going to break out your phone and rewind that footage? Do you want everyone to stop the game for five minutes while you and the marshals examine the footage before coming to a decision?

• On your lunch break, at which point the moment is gone anyway? Surely the only reason to do that is to start an argument in the car park. It’s not going to save you an hour after it happened.

• Deal with any unfair play? You won’t and it’s not your place to do it; the marshals will.

It just doesn’t make any sense.

I remember the early adopters of Airsoft YouTube videos and initially a lot of it was very good, very chill and heavily focused on the positives, and a few still make good solid content. You’ll never see Scoutthedoggie doing clickbait cheater shit for example. But once it was discovered that negative stuff travelled twice as far because people giving it a thumbs down or arguing in comments is still registered as activity, then everyone started doing it. I see newer channels almost immediately start off with “Cheater” in their titles and it’s sad to see, because there’s so much more going on during a game than that one time you think you hit someone and they didn’t take it. But in society today everyone likes to feel like a victim, so there are people who will spend their week editing videos to show everyone how unfairly treated they were by someone not taking a bb hit, like we care, with video titles like “Airsoft Karen Accuses Me of Cheating (INSTANT KARMA)“. It’s like watching little kids in school desperately running to teacher to whine about everything that’s happening to them; at some point they’re just going to have to learn to deal with it. It’s a bit like the ones who run around saying “they’re trying to ban me/this” when in reality, nobody did and nobody gave a shit.

And interestingly, despite the massive boost in game day cameras on every Picatinny and MOLLE surface going, with tens of thousands of copycat YouTube channels, cheating still happens. You running a camera doesn’t discourage or stop anything at all. All these videos are doing nothing to help marshals and site owners combat the problem. If anything, it’s on the rise and it’s almost as if we’ve created such a fuss over it that it’s become a normal part of the game day experience, and it shouldn’t be.

This unfortunately named product proves that.

Now, if they’d called it a ClipCam, then yeah fair play. Looks like a decent product. Probably has some uses, like good shots or manoeuvres.