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Google Engineer Builds Ultimate LAN Party House
Zothecula writes "Anyone who has a attended a LAN party — where people connect their computers on one network in one location to play multiplayer games together — can tell you that they can be both very fun but also kind of a hassle. Playing games with your friends all in the same room: fun. Having to organize all your friends to each haul their usually-oversized gaming rigs to one person's house, ensuring they all have the same software, and inevitably dealing with one or more people having trouble connecting: not fun. With that in mind, it makes sense that one Google employee decided to bypass all that inconvenience and just build a house specifically for LAN parties, complete with multiple networked computers and TVs connected to game consoles."
I went to this LAN Party and everyone was wearing togas and drinking alcoholic beverages and making out and... and I didn't even see any computers anywhere. It was very strange.
Hope it has good ventilation and cooling. Nothing worse than a hot, smelly lan party.
...to have this much cash. By my standards, a LAN party is fancy when nobody's sitting on the floor.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
...I can tell you that unless everyone present is already vetted, there will still be problems. People will reconfigure controls, will bring their own peripherals and will unhook yours, will move stuff around that they have no business moving, etc.
There's a reason why arcade game consoles were the order of the day in old-school electronic arcades- there was one cord to plug them in, they were too heavy to move, and the controls were specialized to the game and fixed into place. They were a kiosk for playing games in the same way that an ATM is a kiosk for dealing with money and banks. They worked well because the user couldn't do much to screw them up.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
In the past you had classics of LAN play, like NWN1.
Now? Modern games remove the feature. Diablo 3 - yanked, so they can make you play through their servers. Same for many others. It's all about control. When games directly supported LAN play, it gave the players and the community control over their experience. It let them play without permission, and that is a thing that couldn't be allowed to stand.
LAN play was some of the funnest gaming to be had. Far, far better than trying to share a single screen on a console. But it's dying. Killed because we must ask for permission to play the games we bought.
Playing games with your friends all in the same room: fun. Having to organize all your friends to each haul their usually-oversized gaming rigs to one person's house, ensuring they all have the same software, and inevitably dealing with one or more people having trouble connecting: not fun.
Then why not just make PC games that support a shared-screen mode for a PC connected to an HDTV? Then all four players can grab gamepads, sit on a sofa, and have fun. The downsides are that 1. it wouldn't work well for certain genres, and 2. publishers would lose the opportunity to sell multiple copies to a household.
"Playing games with your friends all in the same room: fun"
What about having a girlfriend instead?
That's not a house, it's an Internet Cafe that does mind having customers sleep over. BFD.
1) People are facing a wall, not each other.
2) There's no table central to all players, where pizza resides.
3) A single-line of players means players on the ends have trouble communicating verbally.
4) There's uneven lighting across the gaming spots, and it looks like more lighting behind the players than in front of them
5) Those chairs are not comfortable enough.
/you have to consider these things if you want to keep going all weekend
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
They should put these in cafes and spread them out all over the world.
Your stove alone could use close to 6000 W when you've got it all running. It's not that huge a consumption. A dollar an hour.
No, not mine. Not anywhere near 6000W.
But I've taken measure to reduce electricity consumption in the cabin, partly by buying lower wattage appliances. Solar panels are going into the mix next year.
518 400 pixels per player [...] 960x540
This assumes that the game is in a genre for which the screen would have to be split. One genre that does not require a split is fighting games, such as Street Fighter or Super Smash Bros. Similar to fighting games are things like Bomberman and Custom Robo (does this genre have a name?). Some other games have a vertically oriented playfield, using less than about 720x1080 even in single-player mode, and splitting the screen is not disruptive. These include building block puzzle games such as Tetris, as well as rhythm games such as Dance Dance Revolution and Rock Band.
They want their Internet Cafe back.
-TheDawgLives suckitdown
my basement has been like this for years. so what?
Well, for one I'd rather have all my 3 686 000* pixels for my gaming session
And zero pixels for the gaming sessions of the one to three other people in your living room who can't afford a gaming PC of their own. Perhaps they're still in school, not yet old enough to get a real job, and a neighbor family's kid has already signed lawn care contracts with most of the neighborhood. But then again, perhaps my viewpoint is skewed because I spent a couple years babysitting my aunt's children.
not have to fight over the least broken controller
At least in my family, recommending that visitors bring their own controller has been considered a lot more reasonable than asking them to disassemble the family's only gaming PC, take it out of the house, and buy a copy of the same game that I'm hosting.
you've seen 'em all.
What, slow news day much?
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
... the terrorists hate us?
The house won't be out of beta for at least 5 years...
This looks nothing more than a regular internet cafe made for gamers that are a dime a dozen, except it is in his house.....
so what if you get tired, you can crash on the couch.....the chairs don't even have any cup holders!!!!
Okay, this is going to come as a shock to you so sit down. Not everyone shares your opinions, and not everyone spends their money and free time exactly the way you would.
LAN Parties are largely obsolete. Gamers all now have Internet access good enough for online gaming, and with Skype they can talk to their teammates too.
"That's either incredibly asinine or the most brilliant troll I've ever read. Not sure which." -Anonymous Coward
Unless he did his own network install :)
still an updates server and streamed SC matches, a heavenly step above your standard fair.
This may be surprising to you, but this probably just means you're old now, possibly with responsibilities or a more diverse social life.
I've not done a LAN party since CounterStrike 1.6 was new. I would if I had the time, money, and people to attend. Life is too busy now that I've got responsibilities to even consider something like that.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Hi Slashdot! I updated my Blogger/G+ profile to link back to my Slashdot ID, so you can see this is actually me.
I'm a little disappointed that the submitter linked the Gizmag article instead of the original blog post -- I think a lot of Slashdotters would have found that more interesting, for some of the technical details. Although, even that post is pretty light on details. I'm working on writing a more in-depth description of how I manage the machines. In short: Hooray for PXE boot, iSCSI, and LVM snapshots.
You'd also be interested to know that I ran several successful LAN parties with all the gaming machines running Ubuntu Linux and WINE. I'd estimate 70% of games worked well (although often not perfect) with this configuration. Sadly, I have recently given in and installed Windows, though the server machine obviously still runs Linux.
Here are some pictures of the server room, which Slashdot inexplicably won't let me link as HTML: http://goo.gl/BgFpT
Here is the back-story behind how I ended up with this house.
As I said, I'll be writing some more blog posts soon with full gory technical details. I'll try submitting them as a new story when they're ready, but you can also subscribe to the blog or follow me on G+ if you're interested.
there are always people that spend waaaaayyy more time on a multiplayer, so I can't even pretend to compete
Then don't play games with shitty matchmaking. Tetris DS used an Elo-style rating (albeit centered at 5000 instead of 1600) and would usually pair you up with another player with a similar rating.
and Collen Kelly (x twit network) went to work for for Google -
True, life is indeed busy, but I am as irresponsible today as I was in the 90's. Well, okay, I've ditched the coke habit... But like I said, the guys who used to LAN party, well now we just party normal. We've all got pimped-out gaming rigs, and we're not all that interested in moving said rigs from their carefully arranged nests. And the monitors, they're big and heavy, sometimes mounted on flex arms for triple-surround EyeFinity or what-have-you. We've got our fancy gaming peripherals, be it a programmable keypad, macro-button mouse or $1500 driving cockpit.
Back in the DOS days, it was easy to pick up and go, but today high-end gaming is a very elaborate hot-rodding hobby. Do today's active LAN players keep a separate, transport-friendly PC on standby and leave the big rig at home ? That's pretty much the only way I could pull it off, and it would kind of suck because I'm used to my giant LCDs, studio-grade sound and ergonomic layout. It would take me a couple hours to teardown and rebuild my kit.
-Billco, Fnarg.com