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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.
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.
The guy who built this house attended my LAN party last month. He brought his girlfriend. She is real, and plays games. Yes, you can have the best of both.
They want their Internet Cafe back.
-TheDawgLives suckitdown
The house won't be out of beta for at least 5 years...
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.
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.