“Just a bunch of idiots having fun”—a photo history of the LAN party
Enlarge / The burned-in timestamp, the water-cooled PC tower, the chaotic configuration of monitors and peripherals-this is what LAN Party aims to capture. (credit: Kiel Oleson)
"I guess I am thinking a lot about the early 2000s lately, like a lot of people, I think, in their 30s."
That's one of the first things writer, game designer, and podcaster Merritt K said to me in early November. At this moment, everything about gaming, and being online generally, was fundamentally easier than it was at the turn of the century. You can now play intensive triple-A games on a cheap phone, given a cloud gaming subscription and a decent wireless connection. You can set up a chat room, build an online presence, even publish videos, instantaneously, for free. Performance-minded and customizable PC gaming hardware is just a few clicks and a couple days away from showing up at your door.
And yet we're both hopelessly wistful for something else entirely: LAN parties. Merritt K so much so that she's writing, compiling, and crowdfunding a book: LAN Party. It's a collection of original amateur photos-many upscaled through AI-and short essays on a period when multiplayer gaming meant desktop towers, energy drinks, and being physically present in some awkward spaces. It's been in the works for more than a year, but she's been thinking about it much longer.