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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)

#41

Post by geekman7473 »

stackghost wrote: post #24
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.

You would be surprised. Many of my guests are professional software engineers, and they still struggle with these types of things. I suspect this is downstream of how streamlined the gaming experience has become in the last 15 years. Most people are buying, downloading, installing, and launching games exclusively through launchers these days, so even the technically minded might not have the muscle memory for "the old ways." I have also had to explain to people "yeah you just click on game.exe" who then didn't know what I meant by "DOT E-X-E". It's just a sign of the times.

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

#43

Post by petterroea »

hannob wrote: post #28
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 exi…

The Gathering used to be a demoscene event! Even hosted the scene.org awards in 2011. Looking at pouet.net, quite a lot of famous demos were released there, such as:

* desert dream by kefrens in 1993

* tint by TBL(!) in 1996

* rupture by ASD in 2009

* numb res by carillon & cyberiad and fairlight

Here is a TV report from the first event in 1992: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SACVynerMhA

Also shoutout to ODD's world domination, which is somewhat of a meme in the Norwegian demoscene community: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgnBi6PuA5M

Today, the demoscene still lives in Norway albeit arguably on life support. Those that are still interested usually go to "proper demoparties". Solskogen, the old demoparty, had its last event during COVID. Black Valley is a replacement and it seems to be doing well. I was at Solskogen '17 and it was a great collection of hacker-minded people. There was also plenty of alcohol, I can understand why demosceners - an aging population, would prefer their own party to the alcohol-free The Gathering.

The Gathering currently has a mix of creative and e-sport events. I feel like the end of creative has loomed over our heads for 10 years, at least we definitely felt like a minority when I was crew back in the first half of the 2010s. But it still lives, and people still participate in the competitions!

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

#44

Post by arnoooooo »

Chaosvex wrote: post #25
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.

I have fond memories of carrying my computer and CRT monitor to LAN parties in a homemade bicycle trailer !

It was at the time of 10BASE2 ethernet... I also had a huge coaxial cable I used to hang from my window to the neighbors window over the street :P

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

#45

Post by mordae »

We always hold one at $WORK at the end of the year. I am not a fan of racing nor CS (prefer UT) so I went and made a retrogaming corner last year.

The year before that the Among Us was the highlight. I landed on imposter so many times they started ejecting me habitually. :-D

I think this year I'll finally play some AoE2 with my wife. We're going to Wololo the shit out of my colleagues. Well, mostly her. I'll just send her some tribute I guess.

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

#46

Post by mrob »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #31
madanparas wrote: post #2

The article opens by saying LAN's chief advantage was "nearly eliminating latency" and closes by saying revival is as easy as sharing your Wi-Fi password. Wi-Fi and a wired switch are not the same thing. The one thing that made LAN parties technically distinctive is the one thing the revival pitch quietly removes.

The millisecond added by Wi-Fi isn't changing the experience. Just avoid or throttle downloads while playing.

Average latency difference isn't much, but wireless's inherent sensitivity to interference makes the worst-case latency difference a lot higher. I don't want to lose a game because somebody in the vicinity turned on a poorly shielded microwave oven. If you're going to all the effort of getting everybody together in person, why not do it right and set up a wired network?

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

#47

Post by madrox »

This really doesn't capture the core element of early 2000s LAN parties. You spent hours debugging basic networking issues. There was that one guy who was less interested in gaming than convincing you to use his DHCP server on his OpenBSD machine. Everyone copying everyone else's mp3 folders on network drives. Passing around CDs to install games and the crack for it, since no game was ever owned by all.

Fun fact: you could make a Starcraft license key on the fly by randomly entering numbers and then altering the last digit until it worked. It wouldn't get you on Battle.net but it could get you to IPX.

God do I miss those days sometimes.

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

#48

Post by tosti »

The hardware people would bring was amazing.

"Here's a 24-port BaseT100 hub" "I built my computer in this flight case, may I place it atop your tower?" "The network card in my PC has an integrated switch, so we can easily reach the other end of that table"

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