E-Mail This Article to a Friend All tomorrow's LAN parties Not the kinds of parties where you can meet girls BY MITCH KRPATA

Some say the internet is bringing about the end of social interaction as we know it. Emoticons are replacing body language and LiveJournals are the preferred method of heart-to-heart conversations. Doesn't anyone get together in real life anymore?

To those people, I present the LAN party. As a phenomenon, LAN parties may have peaked in the late 90s, but for a time they gave hope to millions of nerds that they might actually have a reason to leave the house on weekends. Fundamentally, LAN parties represent the logical extreme of multiplayer gaming, combining the awesome power and playability of the PC with the trash-talking, in-your-face atmosphere of a 1980s arcade.

Video game historians, who probably do not have degrees, agree that Pong was the first true video game. Its appeal lay largely in its two-player mode. Two players manipulated a crude, electronic rendering of table tennis, bouncing a white pixel back and forth across the screen between two paddles. People loved it. Feuding Southerners fought duels using Pong instead of pistols. A new industry was born.

The advent of home gaming brought multiplayer to a new level. Many games offered cooperative play, which was fun, but usually just frustrating. Case in point: Contra. You may remember playing Contra with your buddy lagging behind, trapping you on the exploding bridge in the first level or causing you to plummet off the waterfall level. God damn it, why couldn't anyone just keep up? All anyone really wanted to do was kill whoever they were playing against. Game developers took the hint, and start creating head-to-head fighting games. From there it was a short step to first-person shooters.

I don't know who invented the LAN party. Somewhere along the way, some Quake fanatic must have said to his friends, "Guys, I have an idea. Let's all bring our computers into the same room, spend six hours configuring the network, spend two hours arguing about what mod to play, play the game for maybe, maybe one hour total, and then spend the rest of the weekend downloading all the porn we can from each other's hard drives." And his friends must have responded, "Ok."

Because that's how LAN parties always went for me. Sure, the PlanetQuake Beatdowns were the stuff of legend – monthly LAN parties where upwards of 100 people showed up, some flying in from other countries. And I heard stories about people renting out function rooms to host their own mini-Beatdowns. My memories go a little something like this:

Pack up your computer. Try to fit it in the trunk of a car that's already holding two other people's computers. Get frustrated and eventually end up riding with a monitor on your lap (this may not sound so bad, but I went to at least two LAN parties that were a two hour drive away). Show up at your buddy's house to find out that no one has left you any table space. Start setting up on the floor.

You can see how these things didn't always start off so well. Maybe you've hosted a real party before. There's a lot to keep in mind. You've got to make sure everyone is comfortable, there are places to sit, the beer is cold… Now imagine adding complicated technology and subtracting basic social skills, such as remembering to introduce your guests to one another. That's a LAN party.

Even after attending a few of them, I'm amazed at how many different things go wrong. True story: in high school, my friend Bob Dylan had a LAN party with about a dozen people. Everyone was nearly set up when the power blew out. It turns out everyone had plugged their computers into the nearest available power strip. Like Sherlock following the clues, we traced the daisy chain all the way, not only to a single outlet, but to a single electrical socket. It's a wonder his house didn't catch on fire.

Worse still, every LAN party attracted about three different kinds of That Guys who showed up every single time. There was That Guy Whose Computer Just Won't Work, who needed to run to CompUSA and get a new network card, who tried every conceivable network setting, even ones that hadn't been invented yet, who monopolized everyone's time, and who, around one o'clock in the morning, just gave up.

His lame cousin, That Guy Who Didn't Even Bring a Computer was usually hanging around also. He wandered around, observing games, standing with his crotch next to your face for minutes at a stretch, calmly saying things like, "I would have used the rail gun," after a particularly cheap death. And he frequently asked if he could play the next round. No one ever copped to inviting That Guy Who Didn't Even Bring a Computer.

Finally, there was That Guy Who's Screaming Like a Four-Year-Old. I'm ashamed to say that guy was me. I think if more than thirty seconds passed without my shouting "FUCK," the neighbors would have come over to see if I was ok. No one should have to deal with that, especially at a party.

LAN parties had an alarming tendency to last much too long, usually an entire weekend. On one hand, that makes sense because they're such a production to get underway. On the other hand, by hour 24 of a diet of Mountain Dew and Doritos, temperatures in the 90s, and a roomful of hairy, smelly geeks, the allure of another dozen rounds of Rocket Arena loses its luster. You can't really pack up and leave from a LAN party, though. Someone's probably plugged into your power strip, for one thing, and another guy is downloading a two-gigabyte porn MPEG from your hard drive. You know, if you have something like that. You are trapped until the last frag.

Intended to bring ordinarily solitary people together, LAN parties instead had the opposite effect. After attending a few of them, I never wanted to go again. Judging from how many I've been invited to lately, most people feel the same way. By that last remark, I only partly mean that no one wants me to play with them. I also mean that people have taken their gaming back indoors, especially with services like XBox Live. At home, you know your network connection works, you can play whatever game you want, and, most importantly, your friend's dad won't threaten to kick you out of his house for swearing too much.