The Linux LAN Party

Cursing, I slapped my leg and stared at the man who killed me. He grinned back.

We we both participating in New Jersey’s first GNU/Linux LAN party. Every game was free software and ran on GNU/Linux. Every one came to the party wondering if it would bomb. Every one left knowing it hadn’t.

Organizing a LAN party is mostly an exercise in common sense, but adding free software to the mix adds a few wrinkles and removes some others—for example, you won’t be worrying about cracking copy prevention schemes.

Who, Where, When, Why, and What?

Start organizing your party around the five Ws: who, where, when, why, and what.

Who is your organizer? He or she becomes responsible for the LAN party’s welfare. The organizer must do or delegate all of the following tasks.

Where is your party? Most LAN parties are held at the organizer’s house or a participant’s house. Larger LAN parties can be held at a school, business, or meeting hall. Your location needs power and high-speed Internet access. Tables and chairs are a plus.

When is your party? The organizer needs to be at the party, so only consider dates and times when he or she is available. Most LAN parties run for six or more hours and, for that reason, happen during the weekend. If the organizer doesn’t have a preferred date, you can create a schedule poll for your party’s target audience. The poll software will tell you the date when the most people are available.

Why should I go to your party? You need to convince your target audience to go to the party. The best medium for advertising a GNU/Linux LAN party is the local GNU/Linux user group. Send an ad to their mailing lists and make an announcement at their next meeting. In your advertisements, tell people what games you’ll be playing.

What games are you going to play? Most Microsoft Windows LAN parties focus on First Person Shooters (FPS), but many of the GNU/Linux users we talked to said they didn’t play, or didn’t enjoy, shooting games, and so we were prepared to play a few strategy and other games:

• FPS
  • Sauerbraten
  • OpenArena
  • Urban Terror
  • Warsow
  • World of Padman
  • Alien Arena
  • Nexuiz
• Action
  • Armagetron Advanced/GLtron
• Strategy
  • Bos Wars
  • The Battle for Wesnoth

Poster

Nobody guessed that the most popular game at our party would be based on a 1984 Disney movie. The movie was Tron; the game was Armagetron Advanced; and we played it for a total of seven hours.

When evaluating games for your party, compare them to the virtues of Armagetron. Armagetron is easy to learn, simple to play (you can play it effectively with only two keys), team based, easy to install, and doesn’t require fast hardware. You die most often in Armagetron from your own mistakes, not by being shot in the head, and repairing your own mistakes is powerful incentive to keep playing.

Ready. Set. Go!

Now that your party is organized, be a good party host by following three more rules: Ready. Set. Go!

Ready? To play at a LAN party, everyone needs at least all of the following things:

• a computer,
• a monitor,
• power cords and power for the computer and monitor,
• a network connection (and probably a network cord),
• a keyboard,
• a mouse, and
• a place to sit.

Unless someone provides free food, everyone needs to bring food (potluck) or money for food (order in).

The organizer can provide some of these things (for example, network cables), but everyone needs to know what to bring. We withheld the street address of our LAN party until participants filled out an online RSVP form and questionnaire. The questionnaire asked them to describe exactly what equipment they would bring so we could email them if it wasn’t enough.

Set-up? The organizer’s first job at the LAN party is to get everyone setup. The organizer can easily delegate this job to the early arrivals. (Hint: if you don’t want to help other people setup, don’t sit near the door.)

New arrivals need five things in this order: power, network, games, server IP address, and ``where is the bathroom?’’. The best place to store games is a network filesystem share on the game server. For GNU/Linux users, the best format for games is pre-compiled static binaries inside tarballs. We also hosted Windows installers, but nobody used them.

Go! The organizer should change games occasionally to keep the party fun or people will get grouchy and leave. They’ll also get grouchy if their blood sugar level drops: a good organizer keeps everyone well fed.

Conclusion

Follow these rules and you’ll have fun—and maybe make a few friends. Except for a brief bout of Frozen Bubble and a few food breaks, my fellow GNU/Linux users and I spent 12 hours at our LAN party trying to shoot, stab, and otherwise kill each other, but I think we really managed to bond.