LAN Nostalgia
Last night an old friend of my brother’s came by and hooked up his machine to play games with my brother and me. We played Starcraft, Sins of a Solar Empire, and Battlefield 1942. There were stores of Coke and chips and Twizzlers, and the basement room in which we were arrayed heated up by a good ten degrees. We spent about an hour just getting ready, passing the install CDs around and getting the updates. And best of all, we even had all the classic LAN problems we used to have when we did this weekly in high school — inexplicable Windows crashes leading to an on-site reformat and reinstall, mysterious network errors, version incompatibility and many minutes of patching, and the quintessential older computer that couldn’t handle newer games very well and lagged out the back door to the fury and frustration of its player.
It’s funny how LAN parties, for me, have become a form of nostalgia. This is what I did with my spare time, and a great deal of my not-spare time, from age 15 to 18. My circle of friends was the LAN group, and we met at least weekly in someone’s house, at least eight or nine strong on average, and played all night. We even had our own acronym — MANGLED, or the Milwaukee Area Network Gaming League For Extreme Deathmatching. I know, right? 
Now I’m in grad school, I’ve lost touch with nearly everyone from that crowd, and LAN parties are things we have with two or three people “for old time’s sake” once or twice a year when people are back in town for holidays. Can you imagine? Computer gaming and social gatherings centered around it have evolved and embedded themselves into everyday life enough that they can now be categorized as “old times,” and be a source of fond reminiscence of youth. It’s different from the arcade generation, because that was an external location at which people gathered, like a diner or a drive-in. LAN parties have a different flavor, and a different effect on you when you have them in your home.
As the average gamer age tops 30 and climbs, it’s funny to see gaming start to climb over the hill. Videogames are middle-aged! What a riot! No matter how people rant and rail about the evils of violent games and corruption of youth, games settle into our lives and our history with the slow, incontrovertible persistence of a glacier. Someday I’ll be watching my kids hosting or attending LAN parties (probably) and thinking back to when I was a teenager heading off for the same. Some day, games will be a common experience that unites the generations, instead of dividing them. Some day, the word “gamer” won’t exist. It’ll be synonymous with “person.”
I’m still disappointed that I only got into games my freshman year in college, and didn’t start officially identifying myself as a gamer until a few years later (due to the highly negative connotation and the fact that the “gamers” I had met were very rude, unpleasant people), because I have definitely missed out on these kinds of things. LAN parties are so integral to the culture, but as you said, being older gamers means significantly less time to organize the events. There’s just something about playing an online game with your friends in the same room…purely online multiplayer can never capture that.
Anyway nothing insightful, I just really enjoyed this post