Virtual and Real World Combine at LAN Party

It is a rave unlike any other.

The moon hangs warm and fat in Costa Mesa, casting its midsummer light across the roof of a corporate office complex. Inside, Andrea Bruns squeezes through the sweaty chaos, edging past a couple grinding on the impromptu dance floor and the rows of men playing computer games. Flashing strobes and the glow of dozens of monitors cast psychedelic patterns of light across her pale face.

Every month, Bruns grabs her computer out of her San Rafael apartment, crams it into her tiny black convertible and heads for Southern California. Her destination is the BeatDown, a monthly computer-game party that has hundreds of fans vying for an invitation. The protocol is simple: Bring cash, a personal computer and the desire to revel for up to 72 hours straight.

“I can’t get this off the Internet,” said Bruns, 27. “I came for the games. I stayed for the people.”

Welcome to the new underground, where computer games rock and twentysomethings rule. Dubbed a local-area network (LAN) party--because of the way organizers hook up the crowds’ computers--the BeatDown is part of a growing trend changing the way people play.

That such parties even exist is an ironic commentary on today’s wired culture. These games originally were designed to allow people to play over vast distances. Now, this same technology compels people to travel vast distances, eagerly hauling their equipment across the nation for face-to-face fun.

As critics tout dark visions of computers driving people apart, these hard-core gamers prove that communities--even virtual ones--need physical interaction in order to flourish. As the slogan of the Bay Area Network Gaming Group proclaims, “A scream should be heard, not typed.”

“The best game experience is not on the Net, and I think people are starting to realize that,” said Cliff Bleszinski, a lead game producer with Epic MegaGames. “You can’t look over at the person you just beat. You can’t go out to get a beer afterward. You rarely get to actually talk to the people you’re playing against. You may as well be playing against the machine.”

Promoted by word of mouth and the Net, hundreds of these elite--and often secret--gigs are being held in the United States and Canada: from college students in Portland gathering inside a garage to nearly 200 kids flocking to an airplane hangar in Alberta for three days of head-to-head competition.

No one sleeps at these parties because, they say, sleep is for the weak. Instead, they dance, sing and play computer games for hours on end.

Yet the online mask stays firmly in place; no one uses their real name at a LAN party. Here, Bruns forgets her daily life as a computer program manager and becomes the rebellious “China”: a gun-toting, brassy-haired bad girl known for her fast reflexes and verbal quips.

“There is something about the games that brings out the wild child in people,” said Darci Rose Pierce, director of production for MGM Online. “It’s the anonymous element of the game play that makes people feel that they can go to the extreme. It’s not them at the party. It’s their online persona.”

An Electronic Addiction

Run, shoot, run, run, shoot, shoot, run, shoot, shoot, shoot, run, run, run, shoot, shoot, run, run, shoot, run.

Bored? Chris Peters isn’t. For the past 12 hours, he has been ripping out hearts and tearing off heads. Crouched in front of his computer at the BeatDown, the 19-year-old bobs his head in time to the tinny shrieks of dying electronic foes.

“People are dying to get into the BeatDown,” said Peters, a student at Orange Coast College who is studying computer science. “They need their fix.”

Two things count at all LAN parties--the people and how the computers are configured. A local-area network is simply a collection of computers linked together in one location.

To set up a LAN in a house, users need to install a network interface card in each computer. Cables connect the machines through these cards, which allow the PCs to communicate with each other. The parties can then be configured in different ways, depending on their size.

The most popular titles at these events are the fast-shooting, trash-talking, stomach-churning games that inevitably fascinate kids. In Epic MegaGames’ “Unreal,” human rebels chase after flesh-eating amphibians from outer space. In the Quake series by id Software, the goal is simple: Kill everything that moves.

Since the mid-1990s, millions of players have been flocking to the Internet in search of these games. But as the audience grew, something strange started to happen: People got tired of playing the lone warrior.

Enter the BeatDown. The rave, which marked its one-year anniversary last month, began as an intimate gathering of friends, said founder Mark Surfas.

Word of the Costa Mesa bash spread quickly on the Net, where Web sites such as the LAN Party Ring and House of LAN offer information on the latest network parties. A recent visit to Blue’s News--a site gamers uniformly call the “white pages of the LAN scene”--listed more than 150 scheduled events in the United States and abroad.

“We don’t make money doing this,” said Surfas, chief executive of software company Critical Mass. “We do this for the love of games and to get people to notice us.”

Working Hard, Playing Harder

Part computer-game orgy, part all-night rave, LAN parties tend to draw young men in their late teens and twenties. Many attendees are multimedia professionals and are accustomed to playing networked games at work, thanks to their employer’s high-speed Internet access.

Some LAN parties, like the S.P.L.A.T. Club in Colorado, are merely a few college guys getting together in an empty classroom to play games.

Then there’s the Manhattan Memorial Marathon, a festival that drew more than 300 people to New York. The free, three-day party turned a 20,000-square-foot warehouse into a new-media slaughterhouse.

The BeatDown crew hails from all over the country--New York, Seattle, San Francisco. More than 400 people try each month for 75 coveted BeatDown invitations--the maximum number of PCs that can be linked together at the party. And even that number strains the venue’s power supply, forcing promoters to siphon electricity from nearby sources. Extra lights? Forget it. The games should be played in the dark anyway, they say.

Even with precautions, Surfas knows the power will go out. Like Tantalus and his never-quenched thirst, Surfas and his staff chase one tripped circuit-breaker after another in an endless attempt to keep the machines running.

Communal Spirit Fills the Room

A certain tribalism flourishes here, as free love meets techno-lust. The disco ball is twirling, the tunes are thumping and everyone’s hips are gyrating madly. Couples smooch in the darkened corners, while girls trade stories about getting tattoos and upgrading their hard drives.

Some players prefer to spend their downtime swapping software. Demos are coveted, as are beta versions and import games. The more obscure the title, the better.

Take “Thrill Kill” by Paradox Development, where mutant characters battle one another in gruesome detail. An employee from Virgin Interactive Entertainment, the game’s distributor, nervously watches the crowd hovering around the screen. His eyes flick between the players and the tiny black console that houses the disk. The young man, who declines to give his name, insists no one touch the device.

“Do you know how easy it would be to make a copy?” the Virgin staffer asked. “No way that can happen. I’d lose my job.”

Game makers say they are willing to take that risk, because these parties offer key opportunities to gather market research and find talent. Like record executives scouting for new acts in barrooms, a growing number of computer developers are trolling through LAN parties in search of people who can play their games--and make them better.

Some of the industry’s largest companies--including Electronic Arts, GT Interactive Software, Interplay Entertainment Corp. and Sony Computer Entertainment America--say they routinely send staff to LAN parties to watch how people react to their games.

“The gaming industry is so competitive that any feedback you can get from your core audience helps,” Bleszinski said. “Which would you rather use as a test group: a bunch of faceless players who only communicate by e-mail, or a bunch of living, cheering people?”

A Reluctance to Drop the Veil

Meeting in the flesh is a natural extension of any online community, whether the tie that binds its members is friendship, romance or business. But even in person, many LAN party-goers retain their desire for anonymity.

People introduce themselves by their Internet nicknames. It’s a confusing protocol, party regulars admit. What do you do when there’s a Lunatik, a Lunatic and two guys called Phade, all in the same room?

“Normally, people just sheepishly point to someone and say [their] online name, then point to themselves and say their own,” said Alana Gilbert, 23, who hosts and attends LAN parties in the Bay Area. “It’s very ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane.’ ”

Like the extreme nature of the games they play, these young people often adopt aggressive, mysterious or hyper-masculine personas online. Men aren’t guys, they are “Hell’s Caretakers” and “Overlords of the Universe.” Women aren’t gals, they’re “Crackwhores” and “Lady Quake Marines.”

Of course, the females aren’t glassy-eyed and the males aren’t tromping around in devil costumes. It’s all part of the game, an electronic costume that’s easy to slip on in an age of virtual sex, smart drugs and synthetic rock ‘n’ roll.

At a recent LAN party in San Francisco, a young woman arrived in a leather corset, dog collar and thigh-high boots. When asked about her attire, the 23-year-old technical writer dismissed the outfit as “part of my wild and sexy [Internet] personality.” She declined to give her name for fear that her co-workers would find out about “that side of my social life.”

Such relative anonymity is freeing because “you can look however you want [and] act however you want because no one knows who you really are or where you work,” said Thomas Crenshaw, 30, who hosts LAN parties in San Diego. “Personally, I don’t tend to be as shy at LAN parties as I usually am in real life.”

Glimpses of reality eventually do peek through, said Stacy Horn, author of “Cyberville: Clicks, Culture and the Creation of an Online Town.” In game groups, as with most online communities, people cannot completely hide their true personality traits.

“Over time, people can’t help but be themselves,” Horn said. “You can role-play as much as you want. The games and the cartoonish personas can’t hide the real you forever.”

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Players, Start Your Keyboards

The key to any good local area network, or LAN, party is, of course, the people. After that, each party can be configured in a different way, depending on its size.

1. Everyone brings a computer, which must have a network interface card, or NIC, and networking cables to connect the machines together.

2. The cables connect to hubs, which route the data “traffic” as people begin to play and their computers begin “talking” to each other.

3. Connected to one of these hubs is a dedicated server, a more powerful central computer that accepts requests for resources. Each computer can share files and access data stored on the server.

4. If the party site has a fast connection to the Internet, organizers can link the LAN to the global network ...

5. ... where people around the world can either join the game or watch the fun if digital cameras are connected to the local network.

For more tips, check out these Web sites: https://www.lanparty.com or https://www.bluesnews.com

Sources: Intel Corp., Critical Mass

Graphics reporting by P.J. HUFFSTUTTER / Los Angeles Times