I'd have friends over, and we'd want to play DOOM multiplayer. The only problem was that as kids we had no idea how networking worked. We'd fiddle around on the Windows networking setup, and there'd be a list of protocols like IP and IPX. Words like Token Ring would appear. Just a blur that 15 year old kid had no chance against.
Curiously despite being a network with only two computers, you couldn't just assign any IP address you wanted. The mask was also an interesting thing, examples would have a bunch of 255s but sometimes a smaller number like 248, and then zeros. I never figured this out until I grew up.
So then we'd goof around a bit more and set it to IPX, which sounded related. Somehow we got that to work eventually.
Nowadays if you just understand IP, you're mostly fine. It's probably easier to learn as well without competing protocols with similar jargon.