About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherThames & Hudson

ISBN-100500026955

ISBN-139780500026953

eBay Product ID (ePID)28061847251

Product Key Features

Book TitleLan Party : inside the Multiplayer Revolution

Number of Pages176 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2024

TopicEngineering (General), Popular Culture

IllustratorYes

GenreTechnology & Engineering, Social Science

AuthorMerritt K

FormatHardcover

Dimensions

Item Height0.8 in

Item Weight37.5 Oz

Item Length11.3 in

Item Width8.7 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN2023-936973

Dewey Edition23

Dewey Decimal794.809

SynopsisTransport yourself back to the golden era of multiplayer PC gaming, when the internet was a place you built with your friends and the only in-game purchases were pizza deliveries. Ad hoc and adventurous, sweaty, and unsupervised, LAN (local area network) parties embodied an open and optimistic era in computing that's been forgotten in today's always-online digital world. Featuring personal recollections alongside hundreds of crowdsourced photographs ranging from kitchen-table gatherings to massive convention hall-filling tournaments, LAN Party will bring you back to the Mountain Dew-fueled glory days of gaming. In addition to documenting the nostalgic era of LAN parties, the photographs are unique artifacts of the peculiar cultural and technological moment, when gaming was tipping over from niche hobby to mainstream obsession. They reveal not just the home decor and personal fashion styles at the turn of the millennium but also a different world, one that existed before the internet took shape and we started carrying it around with us in our pockets. True to the community spirit of the book's content, author Merritt K pitched the idea for this publication through Twitter and received over 100,000 likes. LAN Party is her sought-after idea brought to life in a high-quality photobook format and includes exclusive contributions from the likes of Naomi Clark (faculty at the NYU Game Center), Kat Bailey (IGN), and more., A loving photographic celebration of the energy drink-fueled, furniture-rearranging, multiplayer gaming trend and its nocturnal participants., A loving photographic celebration of the energy-drink-fuelled, furniture-rearranging, multiplayer gaming trend and its nocturnal participants. Before high-speed internet connections and online servers, playing a multiplayer PC game meant hauling your bulky monitors and towers to a friend's place, convention centre or church basement for a LAN (local area network) party. These sweaty, junk-food-enriched glory days represented the origins of real community spirit in computer gaming's early days. Many LAN party attendees were early adopters of new tech, so digital cameras abounded at these events. The photos produced by these devices were often low-resolution, blurry and badly lit. In their imperfections and limitations, they represent the messy, ad-hoc approach to computing typical of the LAN party - network cables snaking across recreation centre floors, a monitor perched on a kitchen counter, burned CD copies of games labelled in marker pen. In addition to documenting the nostalgic era of LAN parties, the photographs in this book are unique artefacts of a peculiar cultural and technological moment, when gaming was tipping over from niche hobby to mainstream obsession. This is the first full-size photobook on this beloved subculture, one that existed before the internet took shape and we started carrying it around with us in our pockets.

LC Classification NumberTK5105.7.K6 2024