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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)

#51

Post by embedding-shape »

madrox wrote: post #47

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…

> There was that one guy who was less interested in gaming than convincing you to use his DHCP server on his OpenBSD machine.

Our first LAN parties (early 2000s sometime) were organized without DHCP servers, just manually helping people setting up manually assigned IPs, explaining to them to not touch their network settings until they came home and wishing for the best, first day basically spent just setting up networking stuff and routing. 2-3 days post-LAN was spent helping people restore their modem/broadband connections once they were home again and we had ruined their network settings...

Was feasible until we hit ~100 people or so, then of course DHCP became a necessity.

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

#52

Post by embedding-shape »

pbmonster wrote: post #38

> The defining element of a LAN party, however, is the social factor. Playing a game with others in the same physical space, sometimes huddled side-by-side on the same large table, is an intimate affair. Cries of joy and frustration fill the air. That's really the major thing that made LAN parties so special. Being in the same room is so, so different than online gaming together and hanging out on discord. It also fo…

> because you're stuck together for the night. You can't just sit out a game/map if you don't like it, you can't just hop on a different voice channel and play another game with other people.

Probably depends on the size, but even our tiny LANs we had some groups preferring some games, other's preferring others, and plenty of other activities others were doing throughout the LAN. The group that managed the LAN I was familiar with was really into medieval costumes, events and roleplaying, so bunch of chainmail making, clothes making and what not going on at the same time while others play BFV or Starcraft, or people sleeping under the tables.

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

#53

Post by embedding-shape »

ramgine wrote: post #10
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…

There’s still a few large ones. LANfest and quakecon are two that come to mind. Also LAN all night.

Very long time I ago was there last time (Maybe 2006 or 2008?) but Dreamhack is still going strong and seems to still be the largest one, and even have branched out to different countries now it seems!

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

#54

Post by dotwaffle »

embedding-shape wrote: post #51
madrox wrote: post #47

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…

> There was that one guy who was less interested in gaming than convincing you to use his DHCP server on his OpenBSD machine. Our first LAN parties (early 2000s sometime) were organized without DHCP servers, just manually helping people setting up manually assigned IPs, explaining to them to not touch their network settings until they came home and wishing for the best, first day basically spent just setting up netwo…

There's an RFC for Peg DHCP! :D https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2322

While it's an April 1st RFC, I've seen this implemented at a Hackspace in Amsterdam, works very well!

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

#55

Post by embedding-shape »

Thlom wrote: post #34
alibrarydweller wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The distinction they're drawing isn't WLAN vs LAN but WAN vs LAN. Remember that in the peak days of the LAN party it was an alternative to gaming on dial-up or DSL - even if you had a good connection it was unlikely the whole game had one. A reasonable Wi-Fi connection today is miles beyond the WAN connections of Y2K.

The big LAN parties also had a fat internet connection at a time when the best you could have at home was INSD. But even more important was that everyone at the LAN shared their piracy collections over DC++ or FTP. Good times.

> that everyone at the LAN shared their piracy collections over DC++ or FTP

And that one person sharing their 100GB (virtually unheard of amount of storage at the time) archive of porn, proudly announcing themselves as a "winner" of something at the end of the party.

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

#56

Post by cbdevidal »

madrox wrote: post #47

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…

At a three person LAN party in 1998, I didn’t have an Ethernet card. The owner of the house had two phone lines. I connected my modem to one of his phone lines and dialed across the room to his dial-up server on his Win95 machine. We played Quake that way :-D A little laggy, but acceptable.

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

#57

Post by ActorNightly »

madrox wrote: post #47

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…

Im going to sound like the ultimate hipster, but the best thing about LAN parties back in the day was that video games were still very much a "geek" thing, so it attracted a certain type of person, which was fun to be around. I learned so much from people LAN parties - basic networking, IRC, torrenting, modding Half Life, little bit of music production. Video games were made for people like that, and you could tell.

Nowdays, most video games are made for the lowest common denominator of people and targeted at consoles, so the mod scene is a fraction of what it used to be, you don't meet interesting people anymore in the gaming world. So no wonder Lan parties aren't a thing anymore.

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

#58

Post by consp »

embedding-shape wrote: post #51
madrox wrote: post #47

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…

> There was that one guy who was less interested in gaming than convincing you to use his DHCP server on his OpenBSD machine. Our first LAN parties (early 2000s sometime) were organized without DHCP servers, just manually helping people setting up manually assigned IPs, explaining to them to not touch their network settings until they came home and wishing for the best, first day basically spent just setting up netwo…

First 100 then dhcp? I've been to 400 and 1000 people lanparties with ips on a clothspin (or whatever it's called in English). Works fine until someone misreads.

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

#59

Post by embedding-shape »

ActorNightly wrote: post #57
madrox wrote: post #47

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…

Im going to sound like the ultimate hipster, but the best thing about LAN parties back in the day was that video games were still very much a "geek" thing, so it attracted a certain type of person, which was fun to be around. I learned so much from people LAN parties - basic networking, IRC, torrenting, modding Half Life, little bit of music production. Video games were made for people like that, and you could tell.…

I dunno, it always felt a bit mixed to me. Of course, us who were deeply into computing and LAN parties went to the parties to play video game, nerd out and everything else, but also "popular kids" were attending with their own spots, mostly to play CS1.6 and Battlefield 1942, but in the end our parties ended up quite a mix-match of people from different walks of life, from poor families and rich families, from nerdy kids to "future sports athlete cool people", everyone just wanted to game their favorite games with others, as most of us only had modems so online-play wasn't really a thing for us.

This was early 2000s sometime, and in a really small place, less than 1000 total population, maybe that's why, but attending larger events like Dreamhack back then also seemed to attract a wide-range of different folks.

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