Google Engineer Builds Ultimate LAN Party House 175
Zothecula writes "Anyone who has a attended a LAN party — where people connect their computers on one network in one location to play multiplayer games together — can tell you that they can be both very fun but also kind of a hassle. Playing games with your friends all in the same room: fun. Having to organize all your friends to each haul their usually-oversized gaming rigs to one person's house, ensuring they all have the same software, and inevitably dealing with one or more people having trouble connecting: not fun. With that in mind, it makes sense that one Google employee decided to bypass all that inconvenience and just build a house specifically for LAN parties, complete with multiple networked computers and TVs connected to game consoles."
Having run a gaming room at a convention... (Score:5, Informative)
...I can tell you that unless everyone present is already vetted, there will still be problems. People will reconfigure controls, will bring their own peripherals and will unhook yours, will move stuff around that they have no business moving, etc.
There's a reason why arcade game consoles were the order of the day in old-school electronic arcades- there was one cord to plug them in, they were too heavy to move, and the controls were specialized to the game and fixed into place. They were a kiosk for playing games in the same way that an ATM is a kiosk for dealing with money and banks. They worked well because the user couldn't do much to screw them up.
House?!? (Score:1, Informative)
That's not a house, it's an Internet Cafe that does mind having customers sleep over. BFD.
Re:Bad layout. (Score:0, Informative)
/you have to consider these things if you want to keep going all weekend
That's what your MOM said! ;)
Re:Fun / Not fun (Score:3, Informative)
The guy who built this house attended my LAN party last month. He brought his girlfriend. She is real, and plays games. Yes, you can have the best of both.
Re:Having run a gaming room at a convention... (Score:2, Informative)
Hi, this is actually my house (Score:5, Informative)
Hi Slashdot! I updated my Blogger/G+ profile to link back to my Slashdot ID, so you can see this is actually me.
I'm a little disappointed that the submitter linked the Gizmag article instead of the original blog post [blogspot.com] -- I think a lot of Slashdotters would have found that more interesting, for some of the technical details. Although, even that post is pretty light on details. I'm working on writing a more in-depth description of how I manage the machines. In short: Hooray for PXE boot, iSCSI, and LVM snapshots.
You'd also be interested to know that I ran several successful LAN parties with all the gaming machines running Ubuntu Linux and WINE. I'd estimate 70% of games worked well (although often not perfect) with this configuration. Sadly, I have recently given in and installed Windows, though the server machine obviously still runs Linux.
Here are some pictures of the server room, which Slashdot inexplicably won't let me link as HTML: http://goo.gl/BgFpT [goo.gl]
Here is the back-story behind how I ended up with this house. [blogspot.com]
As I said, I'll be writing some more blog posts soon with full gory technical details. I'll try submitting them as a new story when they're ready, but you can also subscribe to the blog or follow me on G+ if you're interested.