Offline Is the New Online: What the BeatDown LAN Party Teaches Us About Gaming Communities

By Sarah Chen · Tech Daily · MyTechDailyNews

Consider the contradiction first: the tools invented so players never had to leave their rooms are now the reason they load up cars and cross the country. Every month, hundreds of fans converge on Costa Mesa for the BeatDown, a monthly computer-game party that behaves far less like a hobby meetup than like a nightclub wired for competition.

Andrea Bruns is one of the regulars. She lifts her machine out of her San Rafael apartment, wedges it into a tiny black convertible and drives to Southern California. Inside a corporate office complex on a warm midsummer night, strobe flashes and the glow of dozens of monitors sweep across the crowd while she edges past an impromptu dance floor and long rows of players.

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

Why distance-played games push people to travel

Organizers hook the crowd’s own machines into a single local-area network, making each event a LAN party — and that one decision explains why this scene keeps spreading while online matchmaking improves every year.

The irony is easy to miss. These titles were engineered so people could play across vast distances; today the same technology drives people to cross vast distances, eagerly hauling equipment across the nation to sit beside the person about to beat them.

Cliff Bleszinski, a lead game producer with Epic MegaGames, has watched the reversal closely. “The best game experience is not on the Net, and I think people are starting to realize that,” he said. “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.”

The Bay Area Network Gaming Group states the same idea in five words: “A scream should be heard, not typed.” Even critics who assume computers pull people apart are answered here — hard-core gamers keep demonstrating that communities, virtual ones included, need physical interaction to flourish.

Word of mouth plus the Net sustains hundreds of these elite — and frequently secretive — gatherings across the United States and Canada. College students in Portland will occupy a garage; nearly 200 kids once filled an airplane hangar in Alberta for three days of head-to-head competition. Regulars agree on one thing about rest: no one sleeps, because sleep is for the weak.

The crowd that never tires of run and shoot

Run, shoot, repeat — and nobody in the room seems to mind. For the past 12 hours, Chris Peters had been ripping through onscreen enemies at the BeatDown, nodding in time to the tinny shrieks of dying electronic foes.

“People are dying to get into the BeatDown,” said Peters, a 19-year-old Orange Coast College student studying computer science. “They need their fix.”

The draw is the fast-shooting, trash-talking, stomach-churning kind of title that naturally obsesses kids. In “Unreal” from Epic MegaGames, human rebels pursue flesh-eating amphibians from outer space; in the Quake series from id Software, the objective is one blunt line: kill everything that moves.

From the mid-1990s onward, millions of players chased those games online. As the audience ballooned, an odd reversal took hold: being the lone warrior stopped feeling like enough.

How one warehouse party grew into a circuit

The rave marked its one-year anniversary last month, and founder Mark Surfas traces it to a small get-together among friends in Costa Mesa.

News travelled quickly online through sites such as the LAN Party Ring and House of LAN, which publish details on current network parties. A recent check of Blue’s News — a place gamers consistently call the “white pages of the LAN scene” — showed 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.”

Who shows up, and how much the room can hold

Half computer-game orgy, half all-night rave, LAN parties tend to attract young men in their late teens and twenties. Many work in multimedia and already live networked play at work, because their employers provide high-speed Internet access.

Scale varies enormously. The S.P.L.A.T. Club in Colorado may be a handful of college guys in an empty classroom. At the other end, the Manhattan Memorial Marathon was a festival that brought more than 300 people to New York, turning a 20,000-square-foot warehouse into a new-media slaughterhouse over a three-day party. The BeatDown crowd arrives from places such as New York, Seattle and San Francisco.

More than 400 people try each month for 75 coveted BeatDown invitations — the largest number of PCs the venue can link. Even that limit overloads the building’s electrical supply, so promoters draw power from nearby sources. Extra lighting is considered a waste: the games, they say, should be played in the dark anyway. With every precaution taken, Surfas still expects the power to fail, and he and his staff chase one tripped circuit-breaker after another to keep the machines online.

Some tribal feeling, plus an unofficial swap economy

Between matches the room is its own society. The disco ball spins, the music pounds, couples kiss in darkened corners, and women swap stories about tattoos and hard-drive upgrades.

Not everyone uses downtime to play. Some prefer trading software: demos are prized, and so are beta versions and imported games. The rarer the title, the better.

Consider “Thrill Kill” from Paradox Development, in which mutant characters fight one another in gruesome detail. A worker from Virgin Interactive Entertainment, the game’s distributor, stood nervously near the screen as the crowd hovered, his gaze shifting between the players and the small black console holding the disk. The young man, who refused to give his name, insisted that nobody touch the unit.

“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.”

Why publishers keep sending staff to the dark rooms

Publishers accept that risk because such events offer useful openings for market research and talent scouting. As record executives browse bar rooms for new acts, more computer developers browse LAN parties for people who can play their games — and improve them.

Several of the industry’s largest names — Electronic Arts, GT Interactive Software, Interplay Entertainment Corp. and Sony Computer Entertainment America — say they regularly dispatch staff to LAN parties to watch how people respond to their titles.

“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?”

Nicknames, masks and the personas nobody takes off

Gathering face to face is a natural extension for any online community, whether the connection is friendship, romance or business. Still, even in person, many LAN party-goers want to stay anonymous: no one uses a real name at a LAN party.

There, Bruns can set aside her everyday job as a computer program manager and become “China”, a rebellious gun-toting, brassy-haired bad girl known for quick 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.”

Introductions get confusing fast — a protocol regulars openly call chaotic. How do you sort out a room containing a Lunatik, a Lunatic and two men named Phade?

“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.’”

Reflecting the extreme games they play, attendees often choose aggressive, mysterious or hyper-masculine identities: men become less “guys” than “Hell’s Caretakers” and “Overlords of the Universe”, women less “gals” than “Crackwhores” and “Lady Quake Marines”. The women are not glassy-eyed and the men are not stomping about in devil costumes — the persona is an electronic costume, easy to put on.

At a recent LAN party in San Francisco, a 23-year-old technical writer appeared in a leather corset, dog collar and thigh-high boots, brushing the look off as “part of my wild and sexy [Internet] personality.” She would not give her name because she feared her co-workers would learn about “that side of my social life.”

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

Reality still peeks through eventually, says Stacy Horn, author of “Cyberville: Clicks, Culture and the Creation of an Online Town”. In gaming groups, as in most online communities, true personality traits cannot be fully concealed.

“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.”

Event snapshot: the basics at a glance

Item	What the record shows
Where and when	A corporate office complex in Costa Mesa, on a midsummer night and every month after that
What it is	The BeatDown, a monthly computer-game party with hundreds of fans competing for an invitation
House rules	Bring cash, a personal computer and the appetite to celebrate for up to 72 hours straight
Capacity math	More than 400 people try each month for 75 coveted BeatDown invitations
How people find events	LAN Party Ring, House of LAN and Blue’s News, which listed more than 150 scheduled events
Who runs it	Founder Mark Surfas, chief executive of Critical Mass; the party is not run for profit

Checklist: how a LAN actually comes together

Two things count at every LAN party: the people and how the computers are configured. A local-area network is, at its core, a group of computers linked together in one place; in a home build, users install a network interface card in each machine and run cables between those cards so the PCs can talk to one another. Organizers then arrange the setup in different ways depending on the party’s size.

1. Everyone arrives with a computer that includes a network interface card, or NIC, and cables for connecting the machines.
2. Those cables run into hubs, which route data “traffic” as participants start playing and the computers start “talking” to each other.
3. One hub can carry a dedicated server, a stronger central computer that accepts requests for resources; each PC can share files and reach data on the server.
4. If the venue has a fast Internet link, organizers may attach the LAN to the wider network …
5. … allowing people elsewhere either to join the match or to observe the action when digital cameras are connected to the local network.

This setup description draws on information from Intel Corp. and Critical Mass.

FAQ: the questions this story usually raises

If everyone can play online, why travel at all?

Because the online version leaves out the part players keep describing as the point: turning to look at the person you just beat, grabbing a beer afterward, actually talking to your opponent. As one organizer’s group puts it, a scream should be heard, not typed.

Can I just show up at the BeatDown?

Plan on not getting in. More than 400 people try each month for 75 coveted BeatDown invitations, because 75 PCs is what the venue can physically link.

What has to be in my bag?

The machine, a network interface card, the cables to link it to the group, and cash. The parties run up to 72 hours straight, so food and sleep plans are part of the equipment list.

Is this a California-only phenomenon?

No. Word of mouth and the Net support hundreds of these elite gatherings across the United States and Canada — a garage in Portland, a three-day hangar event with nearly 200 kids in Alberta, a warehouse festival in New York, and a handful of classmates in an empty classroom in Colorado.

Do the anonymous personas ever come off?

Gradually. Horn’s reading of online communities is that role-play has a shelf life: people can’t help but be themselves over time.

What is in it for the companies that attend?

Feedback and recruiting. Major names send staff to watch real reactions to unreleased and released titles, on the logic that living, cheering players are a better test group than faceless e-mail respondents.

Common misconceptions

• “Offline gaming is the opposite of online gaming.” In this scene they feed each other: the Net is what promotes the parties and lets people elsewhere join or watch the match.
• “Attendees come to be alone together.” The room runs on communal spirit — dancing, trading software, swapping hard-drive upgrade stories between rounds.
• “Everyone introduces themselves by name.” Handles are the protocol, which is why a room with a Lunatik, a Lunatic and two men named Phade needs the “Me Tarzan, you Jane” pointing ritual.
• “The persona is who they are.” Pierce’s view is that it is the anonymous element that lets people go to the extreme — it is their online persona on the floor, not them.
• “Publishers attend to sell copies.” They attend for market research and talent scouting, and they accept the copying risk that comes with handing a rare disk to a crowd.
• “Any hall can host a LAN.” Power is the binding constraint: the electrical supply overloads, promoters borrow power from nearby sources, and tripped circuit-breakers are chased all night.

Action advice: what to do with this story

1. If you want to play: build your machine around the network first — NIC, cables, spare parts — then arrive early, because invitations are capped by how many PCs the venue can link.
2. If you want to host: size the guest list to the power supply, plan for the dark, and staff a breaker-chasing rota before you advertise a marathon session.
3. If you work on a game or a product: treat the room as a live test panel. Watch where people lean in, where they trade, and what they ask for; core-audience feedback is hard to buy elsewhere.
4. If you protect unreleased content: expect nervous custodianship of demo disks. Plan how rarities are displayed and handled before they go near a crowd.
5. If you are simply curious: start with the listings this scene already uses — Blue’s News, the LAN Party Ring and House of LAN — to see what is scheduled near you.
6. If you read people, not just gear: remember that physical meet-ups extend online communities rather than replacing them, and that long-haul enthusiasm for a LAN party is a useful signal about what pure online play still cannot deliver.

The takeaway

Read past the strobes and the noise, and this is a story about a market gap that the internet did not close: the demand to be in the same room as the competition. For anyone covering consumer technology, the BeatDown is a reminder that connectivity metrics alone miss why people pack up computers for a 72-hour session — and that the most interesting product research may happen in a dark warehouse with the music turned up. MyTechDailyNews will keep following how offline tech gatherings evolve; readers with event tips can reach Tech Daily at hello@techdaily.com.