I'm so glad to have been a part of this (short) era. Video games and junk food from sunset to sunrise with a bunch of people connected by CAT5 cables! While technology makes things easier and more convenient, sometimes the effort and lack of accessibility leaves better memories.
A Lament for the LAN Party
61–70 of 161 posts
Re: A Lament for the LAN Party
#62LAN 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…
Call me crazy but as I understand it from kids today it's pretty cool to be a "nerd" today
Not really. "Nerd/geek" have expanded to include basically anyone who enjoys pop culture or has a technical skill--obviously those guys are cool, right? But the original subjects--socially awkward kids who enjoy the wrong things too much--are still left out in the cold.
Re: A Lament for the LAN Party
#63For us it was and ever shall be Age of Empires. Wololo!
Last fall some friends and I tried to set up a LAN party with Age of Mythology. The networking code on the Windows 8-compatible version was truly terrible but it was still a blast to play. Wish we could have done Empires, too!
Re: A Lament for the LAN Party
#64I had a resurgence of the LAN party while in Iraq (07/08): the internet access was sufficiently slow, so we played C&C Generals quite a bit.
Re: A Lament for the LAN Party
#65Growing up, my way to make money for the summer was playing RTS games competitively at LAN parties and regional/national tournaments - way before e-sports were a thing outside of South Korea. I met people from the internet at big LAN parties, I got introduced to the demoscene, wargames / CTFs and a whole lot of other things that shaped my career; I even ended up dating girls from that world. Is there anything equival…
Yes. Come to Defcon and/or QuakeCon in the US. There are others around the world, but I'm assuming you're in the US. It all still exists and young people are still into it. The tech scene is just huge now so this stuff is kinda considered niche / underground, but it's still definitely a thing.
Re: A Lament for the LAN Party
#66Other opinions welcome. Here's mine:
LAN parties were implementations "instant messaging", "VOIP","video conferencing" and maybe some other things I'm omitting. Before these things even had a "market".
Gamers solved all these challenges when the web was still a blatently crude hack and the internet was dog slow by today's standards.
Then they successfully and reliably pierced NAT to play games over the internet. Even when the internet was painfully slow. Before Napster, before Bittorrent, before Kazaa/Skype, etc.
Others outside of gaming seemed to be struggling with coming up with solutions for these basic but obviously valuable "services". There is a wasteland of failed/abandoned "VOIP" projects from the 90's that still boggles my mind.
Except for some well-funded research labs, gamers did it first. LAN over internet. (Ethernet frames in UDP packets.) It might be ugly to some people, but it does work.
Now, I will let you all tell me how my opinion is misinformed.
Re: A Lament for the LAN Party
#67Shameless plug. Can't speak too much for it just yet (working through sponsorships, etc), but some friends and I are setting up a 160p LAN in Chicago later this year. It's particularly neat since we're not the only ones to have similar goals. LANs are coming back ;). We also do ~monthly LANs out in Wauconda (Chicago suburbs) area if anybody's interested. Here's just some preliminary stuff we've been working on. The s…
As a fellow northern suburbanite (Grayslake), I'd love to hear about the Wauconda LAN parties.
Re: A Lament for the LAN Party
#68Board 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 checking out what is available these days.
I still miss LAN parties though...
Re: A Lament for the LAN Party
#69When I was a senior in high school, Cisco offered their NetAcademy program to a few high schools around the nation. It was a pretty sweet deal: for a relatively small price, you could earn your CCNA as an optional elective. You had to get approval to take the class; basically, the 10 of us were the most technically minded and computer literate students in the school. So, of course within a few weeks many of us were s…
Same timeframe, my highschool in Arizona was one of the first netacademy programs. Your stories sound just like my stories, isdn included. Something about that time just had this fresh, wild frontier feeling to it when it came to computers. I miss it often.
I credit so much to the head of the computer dept, and industry guy who left the industry and was teaching us kids, but kept his industry contacts. I consider him my mentor, because he taught me the power of curiosity and tinkering.
One of my favorite stories when I first started netacademy, we would do capture the flags in a big circle of routers and wires, and one day in the middle he walked over and switched physical connections and said "the rules today didnt say anything about physical security" and walked away. 16 year old mind blown.
Did you do VICA competitions too?
Re: A Lament for the LAN Party
#70When I was a senior in high school, Cisco offered their NetAcademy program to a few high schools around the nation. It was a pretty sweet deal: for a relatively small price, you could earn your CCNA as an optional elective. You had to get approval to take the class; basically, the 10 of us were the most technically minded and computer literate students in the school. So, of course within a few weeks many of us were s…
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