Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Lament for the LAN Party

rockpapershotgun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 161 posts

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#101

Post by mgirdley »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #68

Board games are the LAN party now, at least for my social circle. I still meetup with the now 15 years older LAN gaming crowd. And I understand board games have been around forever but now we live on screens I think they have a more special place than 15+ years back. Plus the mechanics/quality of games coming out these days is at another level. If you think of board games as Monopoly/Risk, I would strongly suggest ch…

With most of the eurogames, I wonder why a computer isn't doing all the busy work they seem to require.

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#102

Post by vintermann »

userbinator wrote: post #77

The LAN party is still well and alive in the demoscene, in the form of demoparties which are basically LAN parties plus computer art. Some of them have become extremely large: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Assembly2004-areena01.jpg http://www.ozone3d.net/public/jegx/201308/asm2013.jpg

Demo parties even predate LAN parties, so it's no surprise they're still around when LAN is no longer much of a draw.

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#103

Post by coenhyde »

atonse wrote: post #34
NeutronBoy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the advent of broadband and routers now mean networking is literally plug and play, not spending 2-3 hours trying to either set up a DHCP server, or assign static IPs and trying to figure out why it's not working, only to find out that someone mistyped it.

I remember buying a networking kit at Best Buy in the late 90s and then with 3 of my friends spending hours just trying to get the computers to ping each other. There was also always someone who would have to reformat and reinstall Windows.

Looking back I find it hard to believe it was necessary to format and reinstall windows all the time. But I guess I haven't used Windows in about 10 years either. When everything is a black box and broken as hell there's not much you can do other than wipe the slate clean and start again.

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#104

Post by ProfChronos »

I really got emotional when I first read the article. LAN parties were that epic moment when you felt you were part of something new, we were initiating the new socialization process we are all now accustomed to. Nerds kind of disappeared in my mind

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#105

Post by holografix »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #94
holografix wrote: post #86

Oh the LAN party... Me and my mates in Rio, around '99, would carry our PC towers, monitors, and backpacks of cables, keyboards and tech paraphernalia to our one of our apartments in Ipanema and set up wherever we could. There'd be maybe 4-6 of us. We'd spend maybe 4 hours trying to get all pcs "visible" to other pcs on the Windows network. At first we used coaxial cables and T plugs with a terminator at the last com…

This reminds me so much of my own youth, except for the beach debriefing :). Especially the 4 hours trying to get all computers to "see" each other brings back memories. I remember a particularly puzzling problem where my computer and a friend's computer were unable to communicate directly, but could otherwise talk to everyone else. After half a weekend, we found out that the on-board network devices on our motherboa…

I can't imagine how you guys eventually found that out! We usually resorted to abandoning Windows Network and just hoping we could ping everyone and "see" each other's servers hosted on a computer. Often computer A and B could see C but couldn't see each other. Never ending mess of installing/removing tcp/ip and the other LAN protocols and fudging around with ip addresses etc!! Took forever but when it worked and that first game started rolling everyone was up

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#106

Post by lordnacho »

Some of my best memories are LAN parties. I've spent many times more time playing online with strangers, but it's so not the same.

- In my early days at a major chip manufacturer, they used to allow people to use the demo hardware. We'd come in on a Saturday and play Age of Empires for the entire day, on state-of-the-art machines. It's still a major talking point among that group of friends.

- The alternative history provided by Civilization games is more vivid than actual history. I still talk about the strategy of building a discrete city on Svalbard (looking forward to nukes), which my Europe-dominating friend discovered to his chagrin. Him and the other guy I was playing with were my best men.

- Another group of friends was cemented when someone's parents were out for a week, leaving the whole house to a dozen or so guys. Counterstrike and AoE seemed to balance out who got to win. Which is good, because I was getting murdered a bit too often by the younger kids.

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#107

Post by lordnacho »

holografix wrote: post #86

Oh the LAN party... Me and my mates in Rio, around '99, would carry our PC towers, monitors, and backpacks of cables, keyboards and tech paraphernalia to our one of our apartments in Ipanema and set up wherever we could. There'd be maybe 4-6 of us. We'd spend maybe 4 hours trying to get all pcs "visible" to other pcs on the Windows network. At first we used coaxial cables and T plugs with a terminator at the last com…

>>We'd spend maybe 4 hours trying to get all pcs "visible" to other pcs on the Windows network.

Me too! It was only when I did a CCNA that it occurred to me why you can't just give every machine an arbitrary IP like 1.2.3.4 and 5.6.7.8. And the mystery of what "Subnet Mask" meant caused a few facepalms as well.

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#108

Post by znpy »

Awesome timing: I am hosting a LAN party in two weeks, and I'd really love to hear as many tips and suggestion as you HNers can give me.

Thanks in advance!

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#109

Post by bootload »

honua wrote: post #85
ModernMech wrote: post #22

LAN parties were an interesting normative force at my high school. You always hear about the tension between jocks and geeks. But jocks like playing video games as much as geeks, who had the technical know-how to get networked games going. So the jocks at my high school were really interested in being friends with us nerds. We finally had something in common! Our LAN parties were this strange alternate universe where…

I always thought it was just a movie stereotype to have 'jocks', 'nerds' and 'cheer leaders'

If you read "Why Nerds Are Unpopular", [0] then look at these photos by pg, [1] and then ask yourself, "who is in the chess club?" then "who is the in the weight lifting/track team?"

    "The kind of things we were interested 
    in didn't count for much in our high school." -- pg
Having gone to HS around about the same time and a mathlete, I recognise similar dynamics, even though I was 10,000 Ml away. It's no myth.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html

[1] http://paulgraham.com/gateway.html

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#110

Post by ulrikrasmussen »

holografix wrote: post #105
ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me so much of my own youth, except for the beach debriefing :). Especially the 4 hours trying to get all computers to "see" each other brings back memories. I remember a particularly puzzling problem where my computer and a friend's computer were unable to communicate directly, but could otherwise talk to everyone else. After half a weekend, we found out that the on-board network devices on our motherboa…

I can't imagine how you guys eventually found that out! We usually resorted to abandoning Windows Network and just hoping we could ping everyone and "see" each other's servers hosted on a computer. Often computer A and B could see C but couldn't see each other. Never ending mess of installing/removing tcp/ip and the other LAN protocols and fudging around with ip addresses etc!! Took forever but when it worked and tha…

I was very fascinated by networks and network protocols back then, so often at LANs I would play around with a tool called "netXray" which could capture network packets (basically a proprietary equivalent of Wireshark).

I could spend a lot of time trying to decipher the data that games would send on the network, and I also tried to mess with my friends by replaying modified UDP packets (rarely had an effect, though). As far as I remember, I found the MAC address issue while playing around with netXray :).

Post reply on HN