I graduated before the internet really obviated the need for LANs. From younger friends, I heard that when the Xbox 360/PS3 came out, LAN parties slowed down, and jocks ceased interactions with nerds. But there was that brief period in the early 2000s where we existed in harmony.
Or it may be that it is cool to "nerd out" about fashion, sports, or anything not historically associated with the term nerd.
It's really not the word it used to be.
That's only useful for making an us vs them label. It's a good thing that anyone can nerd out on Dickens.
I've heard before that it's a question of degree (“prove just how much you like Dickens!”), which is kind of an uncool way to discourage intellectual curiosity. Not everyone was forged in the pale glow of monitors in their parents' basement, some have to work at it later.
Portlandia did a good bit on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EMXRAWWiBw
"The kind of things we were interested
in didn't count for much in our high school." -- pg
At other schools, I honestly think the stereotypes in movies became self-fulfilling prophecies. The terminology came from movies, and perhaps some of the division did as well.
Despite that, we had some of the best sports teams in the state, debate teams, and engineering teams. It was a culture of excellence and it was difficult to even classify geeks and jocks because so many individuals fit into both groups.
I'm not sure what this school did to get it right, but it's sad to see it not replicated many times over.
> but you need to apply to go there
It sounds to me as if the school had a filter function to sort the unmotivated (or disadvantaged) out at the gate. If your strategy is to sift though the general population to find exceptional individuals, pretty much by definition you will not be making all schools in the same manner.
I think that's why successful charter schools are so hard to replicate. For every successful charter school, there are some number N that aren't.
That said, i think the jocks were more into the "reflex" games like shooters and real time strategy. Sit them down with a slower paced game and they would riot.
Likely why we are seeing more and more online games that used to be somewhat slower paced introduce more and more "twitch" mechanics to placate the jocks.
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 computer, what a nightmare. Then eventually I think someone brought a switcher and we used the regular rj-45s.
We still talk about epic Starcraft battles, insane coop quake run throughs and the day Diablo II came out and we played 12 straight!
Usually at the end, in the early Saturday or Sunday morning we'd go get a cheap breakfast go home to get changed and meet back up at the beach to debrief last night's shenanigans.
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 :).
Then after a while a few from the 6-7 playing generals get bored, realise they don't have UT downloaded, so they head over to that guy who doesn't seem to play games but just shares files and watches movies to get the discs from him. He's happy amusing himself watching supertroopers for the 15th time and oblivious to the fact that it's 3 hours in and so far only 2 games of generals have managed to happen.
UT2K3 is huge (for the time), there's only one set of DVDs so while it's shared around the network is going slow as shit because everyone is piped into a single hub, but eventually after an hour or so the laggers manage to finish downloading and installing it.
By which time the people who started on UT2K3 are bored because they had envisaged an epic 6v6 with vehicles and instead had to settle for a fairly lame 3 man deathmatch, where one guy was so much better and couldn't help but dominate the other two.
So the linux nerds and slow installers (the games we'd be playing were published well in advance, please make sure you're bought up and fully patched) finally finish installing and then updating their installs and find that no one really wants to keep playing, but a larger game with vehicles does finally get under way.
"Starcraft is small, what about starcraft?" pipes up one unfortunate who's just suggesting that because his computer is too slow to actually run anything more modern. "Nah, but I've got WC3" someone else more helpfully says, but starcraft guy doesn't want to clear out his 2GB of pr0n to make space for that.
And this was in the days where getting ethernet working wasn't really problematic.
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.
I still miss LAN parties though...
That said, the amount of sleep and the quality of the food we eat has definitely improved in the last 15 years or so - no more fast food for all meals.
There was also always someone who would have to reformat and reinstall Windows.
Oh god that was me one time. It was at one of those larger LAN-parties with thousands of people. I remember bugging people on IRC (or whatever we used to chat) to see if anyone had an ISO of windows and a CD burner with him. Then looking around the crowd to see where exactly he was located.
Fun times.
Pat, you were a legend.
---
edit: winsock -> socket, as it was actually written for DOS, before winsock.
Futher edit: Thinking about it, the game might have been Doom and the year 1993, as I don't think Wolfenstein 3D had a multiplayer mode
For example, I still play Descent [0] competitively, along with perhaps a few hundred others off-and-on. There's a group of about 20 of us who have become really close friends in the last few years, and we try to have a big LAN party every summer. We've also had quite a few small get-togethers where a handful of people will fly or drive out for a weekend. Last month, a friend drove out from a couple states away, and joined my wife and I at my grandparent's old cabin, at 9200 feet in elevation, with no running water but with electricity, and we played a bunch of matches.
In the past, I've been to Descent LANs at such unusual locations as a hog farm and a Dominican monastery. My wife and I also took our laptops on our honeymoon and played Starcraft: Brood War in a tiny trailer next to a lake in northern Idaho.
I'm also a part of a small Christian gamers group [1], and there are regular discussions about who would be able to get together in various parts of the country this summer.
People are willing to travel to meet friends. Lugging along a computer isn't all that unusual.
[0] http://descentchampions.org/ is the competitive site
What almost everybody lugs is their preferred controller (gaming keyboard, mouse, joystick, etc.) and a good monitor.
There's a big organised LAN party here that runs three-four times a year, with space about 80 people in a big school hall, and then some friends of mine get together now and again at each other's homes. With modern kit you can just turn up, plug in, and be playing.
Our most recent LAN party was a friend's stag night, a full weekend of gaming, drinking, and general craziness. Also the first one we've done and explicitly left space to use the TV which was great fun later on once everyone was over Counterstrike.
My high school (graduated last year, but I doubt it's changed since) would host a LAN party 1-2 times per year, pulling probably 2/3 of the school.
My little brother still arranges ~10-man LAN-parties, and has now managed to get the municipality to arrange smaller LAN parties weekly.
And of course, the huge ones, like Dreamhack and The Gathering are still well and alive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X43soJt7jI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ6bzgl6vKA
Also, this is much more recent but really captures the whole LAN party spirit. It's a basically bunch of guys playing sudden-death Minecraft.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUNF3_hO_no
There are some other LAN games on their channel that are fun as well.
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 switch we have is the same as LHC's: http://imgur.com/a/BICDK
What's your approach to internet connectivity and wifi? How much power are you budgeting for?
For bandwidth, I'll be setting up an http cache server this weekend so that steam downloads (at least) can be retrieved locally as often as possible. The internet we have is 100Mb/s, which I personally think is more than plenty if managed correctly. We'd like the network and its capabilities to pretty much be as open as possible with a noticeable disclaimer that traffic can easily be intercepted and that Bad Stuff won't be tolerated. Ideally, we'd want the network to be as old school LAN-y as possible, which means that we unfortunately have to make some security compromises. We're going to place heavy restrictions on southbound traffic coming in, but northbound is going to be pretty limited. That said, we haven't set it up entirely yet, so we'll probably change a lot as we go.
We haven't really talked about wifi that much, but I've heard more and more that ubiquiti routers are incredible for the price. We'll probably buy two or three decent ones.
Ubiquiti's routers are overrated.
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.
If you ever played Descent on Kali, there's a facebook group full of your old friends: https://www.facebook.com/groups/kalikahn/
Not just times have changed. We have changed as well.
Those were the days. We would spend all night doing the LAN party and all day either hunting or paying paintball.
Andy, I'll never forget your first LAN party: showed up with 7GB porn on your 8GB hard drive and refused to delete any to make space for the games because you only had 33.6k dialup.
I owe some of my high school social life to the fact I could beat anyone there at aoe, so I made friends with some of the older kids by teaching them good builds.
Come join us at reddit.com/r/aoe2 , it's fun!
Also, right when Doom came out, I remember my dad setting it up on work computers after work, and he would play deathmatches against his coworkers Dave and Mike, and they'd let an 8-year-old me play! Such fun times.
Also, one of the early GTAs had networked multiplayer, and I remember doing a fair bit of that when I was younger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Assembly2004-areena01.jpg
Do you happen to have any more resources about the demoscene community? It's something I've wanted to get into ever since I had my mind blown by a no-cd crack that somehow added a 9 minute high res intro video to a 25k launcher exe.
I guess I'm feeling pretty nostalgic today.
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 equivalent to the old internet cafe for kids these days? Or (active) IRC channels, for the matter.
In early high school, I played a lot of Tribes 1 (with some mod that I don't remember the name of) and Aliens vs Predator.
In later high school, CS 1.6 and Deus Ex multiplayer, still with Starcraft mixed in.
In college, it was "flavor of the month". We had a crazy file-sharing network, so the common in-dorm games switched around all the time. Warcraft 3, Counterstrike, Halflife 2-based mods, various open source FPSes, tons of Halo 2+3, and locally-hosted WoW servers are what stick in my mind.
The future ain't all bad.
Damn near broke my back, my desk and cooked my bedroom in Summer running it though. Needless to say LAN parties were hosted at my house since no way I'd be lugging that setup around!
Amazing monitor though.
So, of course within a few weeks many of us were staying after school to use the top-of-the-line (circa 1999) computer equipment to play games. :) Half Life and the various mods (particular Action Half Life [0]) were favorites. Even the teacher eventually got in on the fun.
"You shot me! If you shoot me again I'll fail you!"
A lot of times a few folks would come over to my house in the evenings because we had a blazing fast (again, circa 1999) 128k ISDN line in the house, supposedly to do "homework" but really gaming, surfing the web, playing MUDs. Sometimes we'd kick on a movie like Army of Darkness while gaming.
Such great memories and an awesome time to be alive. I still keep up with a few folks from back then but I'd love to know what happened to everyone else.
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?
Later on network cards got cheaper so we had our cards pre-installed. Still the expensive 3com cards didn't mix well with the cheapest Planet ones. (We had to keep the cheap cards on one side of the BNC part and the the others on the other side...)
Ethernet was a godsend.
A couple of years later Laptops made spontaneous LAN parties possible. I wouldn't wanna go back.
Nothing quite like those slime bombs.
Found a bit more on this impossible to search for game: http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/255131/the-internet-s-forgott...
It does depend a lot on the hackathon - many these days are very business-oriented. :(
...but there are still some where people show up just to experiment with technology - to prototype something quickly and understand whether a technical idea has potential and where the dragons are.
(These are definitely my favourite hackathons. If anyone knows of any like this around London, let me know. I'm hopeful that http://www.hackthesenses.com/ might be one!)
However, large LAN parties are far from being dead. There's Dreamhack and the like, and my alma mater runs a huge 2000+ players LAN event every year (https://lanets.ca/). It seems like it's become more of a grand event, as opposed to the couple times a year gathering with a handful of friends.
As a guy in his late 20s, it's really interesting to see how gaming has evolved and democratized itself during the past couple decades.
www.rflan.org
I remember Doom, Decent, and Aces of the Pacific were popular too.
What is a CAT9 cable?
I'm still actively using a LAN party spliced cat5e from over a decade ago, though I've properly soldered and heat-shrinked it since.
As a high school student in a religious affiliated private college prep environment, the Senior/Junior class members could be a part of a nearly "free study" computer course, contingent on acting as the school's basic IT resource. I was among a team of about 6 total, and we were very close knit. There was a 'brother' who ran the computer lab, about 30 networked PCs, and along a back wall, we had our array of about 7 machines on a separate network.
So what did we do with our unchecked, unmonitored machines?
Installed Duke Nukem 3D, natch!
When the Brother eventually noticed we were playing against each other instead of, you know, doing work related stuff, he came over and the discussion went as follows:
"Hey I don't think you guys are supposed to be playing games."
"It's okay Brother J, we wrote this one."
"Oh! Wow, that's pretty good. Okay then."
Not sure who it was who threw that Hail Mary but it landed and we couldn't believe it.
...and that, ladies and gentlemen, is but a sliver of my life that would eventually be dominated by Half-Life until finally putting down the mouse for a guitar pick once and for all.
Thomas, kudos to you for being able to play 2 different Starcraft games at the same time on battle.net and win!
- 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.
I also remember many evenings playing [Space War][1] on an IBM machine with a friend and waking up at 6am to play [Sopwith][2] before heading to school when sleeping over another friend's place.
[1]: http://hypertexthero.com/logbook/2006/06/spacewar/ [2]: http://www.sopwith.org/
My best friend and I got our first apartment when we were still in High School, which ended up turning into an almost 24/7 lan party. Friends would find space for their PC's and leave them there for weeks, dropping by to play games when they had the time. One weekend we had so many people, there were two PCs setup on the kitchen counter. Internet access? A socks proxy letting everyone share our 33.6 dialup connection.
So many hours.
* Gang Beasts, http://store.steampowered.com/app/285900/
* Nidhogg, http://store.steampowered.com/app/94400/
* Hidden in Plain Sight, http://store.steampowered.com/app/303590/
* Mario Kart Wii, non-Steam, played on www.dolphin-emu.org
- Sportsfriends, http://store.steampowered.com/app/277850/
- B.U.T.T.O.N., http://store.steampowered.com/app/92400/
- Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, http://store.steampowered.com/app/341800/
- Kalimba, http://store.steampowered.com/app/324140/
- Mount Your Friends, http://store.steampowered.com/app/296470/
- Starwhal, http://store.steampowered.com/app/263020/
* Lethal League, http://store.steampowered.com/app/261180/
* Clusterpuck 99, http://store.steampowered.com/app/337960/
- Broforce, http://store.steampowered.com/app/274190/
- Crawl, http://store.steampowered.com/app/293780/
* TowerFall Ascension, http://store.steampowered.com/app/251470/
- Monaco, http://store.steampowered.com/app/113020/
- Blur, http://store.steampowered.com/video/42640/5707
- Distance, http://store.steampowered.com/app/233610/
- Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, http://store.steampowered.com/app/212480/
* A Fistful of Gun, http://store.steampowered.com/app/229810/
- Jamestown, http://store.steampowered.com/app/94200/
- Sky Force Anniversary, http://store.steampowered.com/app/355050/
You should try Duck Game!
In-person gaming is still something special, but I don't blame people for not going to all the logistical effort when you can just sit down at home in the evening with zero pre-planning and get most of the same experience online.
Those days are long gone but so very fondly remembered.
Much easier today with laptops, haha.
But yeah, I remember the times back then, when we had to carry our PCs around town.
Always the guy with the 21" CRT that weighted a ton.
I was a cool guy when getting one of the first 17" TFTs :D
We also organised bigger events. Once a party for 500 people, with competitions and whatnot.
Yeah but now I don't do this big stuff anyore...
Steam can help--for a price.
Back in the day the first LANs I attended also took hours of preparation in the school AV lab. Still, being in person was interesting.
Consoles with split screen make it so much easier.
Nice times :)
But now I play Euro board games... JUST AS GOOD! Agricola anyone?
Thanks in advance!
For a run-of-the-mill LAN you don't need much. Make sure there's
* enough chairs
* enough tables
* enough drinks, food
* enough power outlets (know where the fuse is)
* possibility to shade the windows
* somewhere to sit and chat without necessarily gaming
* possible sleeping quarters?
And Saturday night is pizza night. No exceptions. Rock band/console multiplayer highly encouraged.
People will forget cables (power, network). Get people to bring extra joypads for the people who don't have them for when its time for a game of rocket league...
Sometimes I would be on the phone to someone while navigating around the maze trying to bounce a few stars round the corners at people - and then have to explain what the screams were in the background.
