God, imagine having a big enough friend group as an adult to justify an 18-gaming-PC LAN. These folks are doing something right
Friends of friends would show up. Not everyone knew everyone else and this was fine. Cold drinks of every sort were available at the carry-out next door, and some would bring things to share. Donations were had for pizza or burgers (sometimes nowhere near enough donations, and sometimes more than plenty; it averaged OK). The social aspects of it really worked OK. Cleanup wasn't bad.
The biggest problem was that the first ~couple of hours were spent getting all of the PCs connected, updated, and working properly-enough.
By providing gaming stations, this dude has the big problem completely solved: All of these machines can be known to be on the same page when things start.
(The second-largest problem -- the smell -- is a different issue entirely. It usually ramped up pretty well by the time the first problem was approaching being solved.)
I'm guessing that's where his spending a shit ton on HVAC comes in...
Makeup air unit and exhaust fan, just like a commercial kitchen, sans the hood and fire surpression.
The exhaust fan should have a slightly higher cfm that the makeup air unit to maintain negative pressure so the body odor does not escape the gaming cave :)
Our area of it featured an interior natural gas well that we did not question much. It was just back there in one corner, with extraction equipment, sitting idle; we built a wall faced with clapboard in front of it that we hung neatly-bundled cables from.
DSL had just been introduced to the area wherein DOCSIS was not yet a thing, so we had a lot more bandwidth than some of the participants did at home. 10/100 switching hubs were all the rage in affordable networking gear. LAN parties and gaming happened.
Rent was very inexpensive and we were much younger. One year, rent was paid by putting a fresh layer of muck on the roof over the course of a few days.
The primary intended purpose was for it to be used as a recording studio (we could lay down 12 digital tracks at once!), and we did manage to make it pay its own bills most months, but those bills were tiny.
They'd have all laughed at me if I sent a hat around the room to collect for a heat exchanger to get some fresh air inside and reduce the stink. ;)
(But the original comment was mostly about the people. They showed up. 18? Probably. Maybe more, but often less. Getting enough folks to show up was always the easy part.)
Every lan party would have that one guy who turned up with nothing pre-installed or patched, and would finally, after a couple of hours, get their copy of Unreal Tournament working and join the game just as everyone had grown tired of it and were ready to hop into another game instead. This would rinse and repeat for almost every game.
I had some sympathy, but not too much, because we were generally fairly organised about sending out game lists in advance.
There was something delightfully chaotic about trying to get a good game of anything actually played, because even without technical problems, you'd get a situation where at most a third of the players were keen, another third were mildly amused and another third were basically just barely tolerating it because they wanted to play something next and didn't want to ruin the vibe, but clearly would much rather be playing almost anything else. Of course, as games rotated, so did these groups.
There was also that corner of people who had no intention of playing anything and were just there to utilise the ability to privately swap their terrabyte sized "anime" collections across fast ethernet ( or via physically handing over hard-drives ). I tended to leave them well alone.
I actually didn't get much gaming done on those days since I didn't usually have much of a gaming machine for myself at that time. My focus was instead mostly directed at getting everyone else up and running.
Every now and then I'd take a turn at someone else's computer. It worked fine.
Except that one day when I did bring a reasonably-capable machine with a Voodoo3 2000 card. On that day, I was the one having computer issues and it seemed like getting updated drivers from 3dfx was the correct move to make.
But nVidia had just announced their purchase of 3dfx. And 3dfx's own website was dead like it had never really existed; as if someone had walked into the closet where it was hosted and yanked the plug out of the wall. It was at that time that it became clear that the early web tendency to scatter mirrors of important things all over the place had become a lost concept.
I spent hours trying to find drivers. It felt like all of my well-honed Google-fu was a spectacular failure. But I did eventually succeed at finding recent drivers, and they did fix my problem, and games were then played.
The specificity of the occasion pins down the date very precisely: Saturday, December 16, 2000.
nerd life seems to get lonelier the older you get.
My solution has been to play boardgames remote using BoardgameArena[0].
I usually have 2x turn based games going with two separate groups along with a dedicated chat channel, and then do 1-2 live evening sessions over video call with other groups. But all setup to be flexible and made to fit with the constraints of adult life, so sometimes we play and sometimes we reschedule.
Nerds always thinks they're special :) This is the same for most people in the world.
This is difficult to arrange at short notice :)
I know plenty of people with enough friends to fill a little LAN like this. And setting one up is fairly cheap, if you don't want to build a house just for it, (a few switches and some cables); but not many adults I know have enough time or free enough calendars to get together for such an event more than once a year.
I’m lucky I got in with them but when I moved to this small coastal town from a huge city (Houston) i promised myself I’d say ‘yes’ to almost any social occasion and it has been life changing.
I went from many friends to no friends when I immigrated to USA then back to many friends (although heavily work linked) in Houston over 20 years to zero friends here again.
I guess you get better at it like anything else or you give up and atrophy socially totally.