alt Hacker NewsIm 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.
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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.
Our biggest LAN was at our School’s gym (we had 2 or 3 smaller ones before that inside the normal building, and of course a few even smaller private ones) in 2004, I think we had ~80 people playing over 2 days, the more normal ones going home to sleep (or just being there for a single day), the full nerds having sleeping bags. It was more nerds, but we had all kinds of people (and even an oversized casemodding sponsor that probably didn’t make any money with their stand).
Fun times. But I don’t think I’d still survive a LAN like that, nowadays. Too little sleep, too much on-screen gaming, too much action, too many energy drinks. Later this year a few of the people from back then will rent a holiday house in Denmark for our modern, yet more relaxed version: A week of boardgaming ;)