As with laser tag, fencing is great if you can completely flood out the people described above with people who don't take it a bit seriously and just want to do sweet spin moves and hit stuff with swords.
Which is why my high school only offered fencing for one term and then gave up.
Also constant was every team starting the year with the captains giving a speech how it's all for fun and enjoying yourself and not taking it seriously, followed by a semester of the same captains throwing fits and hurling their masks every time they lost.
It was such retarded high school clique bullshit. Every time a member of the "captain clique" started losing, they'd call in another clique member to direct (ref) who would then start blatantly making biased, incorrect calls in favor of their buddy.
Paintball works because it hurts. There is an element of physical discomfort that compels one to not be hit and thus game play demands complex environment. Nobody gets hurt with lasers. They need to figure out how to make the lasers trigger a built in taser. Now that's a game. "Game."
Is also works because you whole body is one giant target. A hit on your shoe counts just as much as a hit on a 9 square inch spot on your chest. You can't just hold your hands over a tiny spot on your chest and be immune.
Hell, even if you did have rules for a specific 'target area' on your body that had to be hit for points, you still wouldn't want to just stand there and flail about. Even if no one's hitting your score box, that shit's still going to hurt.
This is pretty much the definition of meta-gaming. These guys aren't even playing anymore. I'll bet they're the same assholes that turn off all the items in Smash Bros and demand wavedashing matches in the blandest arenas.
I don't even know what any of that is, i'm so glad I didn't pay that much attention to smash brother levels that WEREN'T in the "adventure mode" category. That was more fun as a single player game than it ever was multiplayer.