Nerd-vana: LAN Parties, Energy Drinks and 25’ Cables

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“Let’s flank them to the right.  You go through the door and get the bomb.”   I hear this spoken in a low tone to my left.  The man in front of me nods silently and squints ahead of him.

“I think they’re flanking us from the right.  Let’s intercept them. Do you have any rounds left in your rocket launcher?” The kid across the room hunches down and slowly moves his right hand across the table.

It sounds like I’m in the middle of a war zone, but it looks like I’m at a technology convention.  30” monitors spring up every couple of feet from crowded table-tops, hundreds of feet of electrical chords are taped in rows along the carpet’s edge to minimize tripping while glowing red and blue LEDs compete for your attention from behind plastic, Plexi and steel panels.  In the row in front of me, a solo-gamer races an Indy car around a virtual track, another guy creates a virtual landscape, and a guy with purple neon leaking from his case steps away from his computer after a marathon gaming session.

Tournament after tournament are played throughout the day, night and next day.  War games, strategy platforms and social RPG’s are commonplace, while geek-speak and LOL style chatter abound.  Here, technology is king and even the socially un-savvy can rule the virtual world with a few network cables and a bit of hard-to-find hardware.

Row after row of gamers, bloggers, chatters and surfers fill the warehouse-sized room.  Most of them (including myself) don headsets and microphones so that they are able to tune out the chaos around them and speak with team-mates who are spread sporadically throughout the room.  I mute my fresh set of Indie Rock for a moment to listen to conversations like the one above and make faces at the guy next to me while he tries to concentrate on sniping out his competitor from across a virtual canyon.

Every once in a while a woman will walk through the crowd.  A few of them are gamers, but generally they are wives and girlfriends just stopping by to drop off food, caffeine or a copy of a game left at home on accident.  The LAN (Local Area Network) crowd is primarily made up of teen and middle-aged men who are dedicated to building and maintaining their virtual prowess.  It is a lifestyle of sorts, and is not easily understood by those who have never been addicted to a console or PC game. 

Although it is a very singular and solitary way for the geeks and gamers to socialize, it is at least a way for them to all make it outside of their dens, basements and attics and sit in close proximity to another living and breathing being with similar interests and goals.  True, they don’t actually speak to the person sitting next to them but at least they are close enough to peek at one another’s monitors, and that is a step in the right direction.