Because the hand sanitizer makes it all right, of course

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/03/2020 (2350 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

At risk of offending everyone who is wisely self-isolating, I need to confess that my family did something stupid last weekend.

Instead of maintaining a distance of two metres from each other, we ventured out of the house en masse to engage in a fun family activity.

No, we didn’t go to the grocery store in search of toilet paper, because, all things considered, we are not complete idiots.

What we did was visit Activate Games, an “active gaming” centre located in a tidy Westwood shopping centre on Portage Avenue that bills itself as a first-of-its-kind entertainment experience in Canada.

Despite the pandemic and everything, we had an excellent reason for checking out Activate — it was my wife’s birthday and she insisted on going.

“Honey, what with everyone practising social-distancing to flatten the curve of the whole coronavirus thing, is it a good idea to go actually leave our house and hang out with a bunch of strangers who will most likely be sweating like Butterball turkeys on Thanksgiving?” is what I asked my wife, She Who Must Not Be Named.

“Yes!” is what she replied, glaring at me. “Because it’s my birthday!”

So that is exactly what we did, and any of you who have ever had a spouse in your life will hopefully understand the logic behind that decision.

Fortunately for my celebrating spouse, our visit slipped in just under the wire in the sense that Activate has now closed its doors until at least April 1 amid the ongoing health concerns that you have probably heard about.

When we arrived at the gaming centre, which opened its doors a little over a year ago, it felt kind of like we had beamed on board the Starship Enterprise. And by “we” I am referring to my wife and I, our son and his partner, Ava, and my beloved sister-in-law, Donamae, who has recently took up CrossFit and was eager to prove she is now a human fitness machine.

If I had to describe the inside of the facility — which I do, what with being a columnist — I would have to say it is “dark” in the sense that the main illumination seems to be an eerie purple glow and there are huge glowing signs above the doorways to each of the 11 gaming rooms.

“Activate is Canada’s first active gaming facility!” its promotional literature gushes. “Assemble your team and enter inside a video-game-like experience, where you become the players to physically and mentally complete challenges.”

Allow me to stress at this point that one of the main activities we engaged in — along with testing our physical and mental abilities — was slathering ourselves with the hand sanitizer at stations outside of almost every room.

Our routine involved entering a game room, playing the immersive game for the roughly two-minute time limit, then scuttling back out, at which point we and everyone else there would spritz our hands with sanitizer, then move on to the next fun-filled adventure.

The 14,000-square-foot-space contains 11 rooms, which you enter after tapping your computerized wristband on a glowing blue octagon, then reading a blurb explaining the game on a screen that tells you when you can go in.

You get a 90-minute session for $25, and play in teams of three to five people. Inside the rooms are immersive games with multiple levels wherein you shoot laser guns, crawl under laser beams, jump on or over brightly lit floor tiles, smack wall-mounted buttons, shoot basketballs, fling rubber balls at illuminated targets, stuff balls into pipes, and dangle from a climbing wall — all of which you do with retro-80s music thumping in your ears.

The other thing you do — and by “you” I mean “me” — is sweat profusely and exchange taunting insults, such as when I channelled Ivan Drago from the iconic film Rocky IV and growled at my son: “I must break you!”

I had hoped to demonstrate to my son that, despite being an aging human being who spends the vast portion of his waking hours on the couch watching sports highlights, I could still emerge victorious in a meaningless competition.

You will not be surprised to hear that did not happen. While I loved shooting targets with the laser guns — and making the “PEW! PEW!” gun noise with my lips — I was an abysmal failure when it came to the point where we had to plop down on the floor and crawl like large crabs to avoid being zapped by laser beams.

I also struggled when we had to climb on top of a small ledge and cling to a climbing wall and smack lights of different colours with our sweaty hands. When you are six-foot-four and 320 pounds, you should not devote a great deal of time to dangling from walls. Who knew?

Some of the high-tech games also challenge players to work together as teams to formulate a winning strategy. Such as in the game where you hide behind a pillar to avoid being spotted by a giant electronic eyeball, then dart out to slap letters on the wall in order to spell a specific word.

I am an excellent speller, but I move at the speed of a small jungle creature passing through the gastrointestinal system of a mature python, which means I was always the first one to get zapped, causing my teammates to roll their eyeballs in disgust.

All in all, we had an absolute blast. And even though we felt a bit worried, we learned an important lesson — spritz a little hand sanitizer, work together as a team, refuse to panic, and in the end, everything will be just fine.

I’m pretty sure there’s a message hidden in there somewhere.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca