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The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023)

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Re: The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023)

#21

Post by lokimedes »

thes1lv3r wrote: post #18

I volunteer at a yearly LAN party called The Gathering[1] in Norway, we pull about 5000 participants each year (about 3k of which have desk spaces, the rest are day or week passes without a desk). It's some of the most fun I have each year :3 It's unfortunately lost a lot of the early 2000s charm (which ive only experienced from videos and pictures), but we try our best to keep things local and give the best experien…

I attend “The Party” in Aars, Denmark for a few years around 2000. It was at the crossroads of broadband, but got to taste the demoscene vs gamer experience. It was magnificent. There were a real festival atmosphere, and afterwards you’d declare never to attend again - that was, until the tickets were released and you somehow couldn’t help yourself.

Good times.

Re: The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023)

#22

Post by niwtsol »

physicles wrote: post #13
niwtsol wrote: post #3

Our high school computer science team did a StarCraft LAN party on a flight coming back from a coding competition. We felt like the coolest kids in the world when we did that.

We did this on a train! Also StarCraft, also a coding competition, also felt like the coolest kids in the world.

Don't you tell me the competition was in New Jersey...

Re: The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023)

#24

Post by stackghost »

geekman7473 wrote: post #7

LAN parties aren't dead! Some of us are keeping the magic alive. I throw LAN parties at my house about twice a year. The hardest part, as i've gotten older, has been scheduling. Now I need to send save-the-dates 2 months in advance, and the length is capped at about 12 hours. When I was a teenager we would go all night :) I am moderately obsessed with LAN parties, so I built a file sharing tool for LAN parties specif…

>I have on multiple occasions gone player to player, typing the IP into their address bar for them.

Sounds like you play with some serious noobs, friend.

Re: The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023)

#25

Post by Chaosvex »

hparadiz wrote: post #23

I think lan parties are set for resurgence since we're almost at the point where a small handheld can run almost any game. What killed lan parties wasn't the internets. It's having to schlep a CRT to my friend's house.

But LAN parties were probably more common during the CRT era.

I wonder how much of an impact harder to crack games has had, as well as many titles removing LAN play as a form of DRM. PC LANs were basically driven by piracy.

Re: The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023)

#26

Post by smcameron »

My own efforts in this area amount to creating the game, Space Nerds in Space[1], which is a LAN game in which everyone gathers in a room with their computers, and each computer acts as one of the stations on the bridge of a starship: navigation, weapons, science, comms, engineering, damage control, etc. Multi-bridge is supported as well, so if you can overcome the insurmountable task of gathering enough people together, you can indulge in that luxury. This is in the same genre as such games as Artemis: spaceship bridge simulator and Empty Epsilon, but with the additional hurdle that it's linux only. Good luck mustering enough spacenerds. If there are missing features, well, it's open source, so it's got that going for it, which is nice.

[1] https://smcameron.github.io/space-nerds-in-space

Re: The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023)

#27

Post by petterroea »

thes1lv3r wrote: post #18

I volunteer at a yearly LAN party called The Gathering[1] in Norway, we pull about 5000 participants each year (about 3k of which have desk spaces, the rest are day or week passes without a desk). It's some of the most fun I have each year :3 It's unfortunately lost a lot of the early 2000s charm (which ive only experienced from videos and pictures), but we try our best to keep things local and give the best experien…

It's an uncomfortable truth that even TG is failing to pull in participants lately, but LANs don't have the critical role in nerd culture they had in the 2000s. I'm happy it still exists and the board seem to be making some decent attempts at revitalising it for a modern crowd

Re: The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023)

#28

Post by hannob »

thes1lv3r wrote: post #18

I volunteer at a yearly LAN party called The Gathering[1] in Norway, we pull about 5000 participants each year (about 3k of which have desk spaces, the rest are day or week passes without a desk). It's some of the most fun I have each year :3 It's unfortunately lost a lot of the early 2000s charm (which ive only experienced from videos and pictures), but we try our best to keep things local and give the best experien…

Historic bit: in the late 90s/early 2000s there was a bit of a trend - and quite some tension - of demoscene parties getting taken over by LAN parties. I believe the Gathering used to be a demoscene party, but completely transformed into a gaming LAN party.

There were also those that tried to be both (I believe Assembly is doing both to this day) or those that kept the gaming out (Mekka/Symposium, which no longer exists, but there's been a followup party called Breakpoint, and later another followup called Revision that still exists).

Re: The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023)

#30

Post by bdavbdav »

mikepurvis wrote: post #11
geekman7473 wrote: post #7

LAN parties aren't dead! Some of us are keeping the magic alive. I throw LAN parties at my house about twice a year. The hardest part, as i've gotten older, has been scheduling. Now I need to send save-the-dates 2 months in advance, and the length is capped at about 12 hours. When I was a teenager we would go all night :) I am moderately obsessed with LAN parties, so I built a file sharing tool for LAN parties specif…

No modern LAN party discussion is complete without reference to kentonv's houses: https://kentonshouse.com/ https://lanparty.house/

I love this technically, but part of the magic was all setting up trestle tables, sitting in someone’s garage / outbuilding, and it all being a bit raw.

I vividly remember cutting a hole in the side of a Shuttle XPC case to fit the fan of a GPU someone had bought over for me at one. That was all part of the experience for me.

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