Believe it or not, DC-Con 7 was the first real LAN Party I've ever attended that I didn't help run. A lot of people are surprised at this -- but you have to realize that I'm talking large, organized LAN parties. You know, anything larger than the group we can cram into Mojo's place for his MiniMojo events.

My first impression was: this is smaller than I was expecting. The space didn't appear to be any bigger than the larger of the two rooms we used at F.R.A.G. v5.0 (which was about 40x50 feet). I was expecting a little more from a party that claimed an attendance of 450 at their 4th party -- and 150 at their fifth event. Most of the people I went there with estimated the crowd at about 80 or so. The frustrating part was how cramped the setup was, even though some entire tables were empty. It was often difficult to work your way through the aisles, because people were sitting on both sides and there wasn't a lot of distance put between the tables.

My second impression was: fuck, it's cold in here. And that never really changed (except on the few occasions when I snuck back to the thermostat and adjusted it myself). Everybody, I mean everybody, complained about the cold but nothing got done about it. The few times we brought it to the attention of Lunch (the main staff member), we were told "I like it cold" and then placated with "I'll turn it up a few degrees", and once that there was some issues with the servers running hot. Uh, yeah. I came down Saturday morning to find the thermostat set to FIFTY-TWO DEGREES. Everyone in there would have died if I hadn't turned it up. The only thing I can deduce is that Lunch simply gets warm at temperatures others find comfortable and that he (and maybe other members of the staff) didn't care about the rest of the attendees or just didn't get how cold it was. Granted, the server/staff area wasn't as cold as the rest of the room, but that didn't make me feel any better as my teeth were chattering.

I was relatively lucky enough to avoid the power outages that plagued the event on Friday. There were still a few circuits getting tripped after I got there, but none hit my area. This was apparently the result of bad planning, as they were running too many people off of a really small breaker that simply couldn't handle it. They seemed to have it resolved by Saturday. I think. Though, it may have had something to do with why they had the lights out for the entire party, even when we were leaving. There wasn't a lot of info forthcoming from the staff. In fact, there wasn't much interaction with them at all. When others of my group made inquiries or had problems with servers, they were told to wait while the staff members finished their games of Quake 3. Maybe the attendees were introduced to the staff before I got there, but it seemed that there was more F.R.A.G. staff there than DC Con staff.

I guess I should have gotten a bit more info about the party before I agreed to go. It was almost exclusively Quake 3, with a few players starting up a Counter-Strike server. Since I'm not a big Q3 guy, I played some CS with the rest of them and Diablo II with Bad Mojo, Smeg, and Gouki. In fact, as it turns out the major purpose of the party was as a Q3: CTF qualifier round for some large (inter?)national competition. Everything else was (or at least felt) secondary. We got to listen to one particularly loud clan scream at the top of their lungs to their teammates sitting five feet away as they played in the Capture-The-Flag tournament. This is when they weren't trash talking to the enemy team at their maximum volume possible. And I am completely serious when I say that. It's a wonder they weren't spraying blood from their injured larynx all over their monitors. The staff wasn't about to tell them to keep it down, because this was the big tournament, the big money maker, and the team in question was one of the best ones there. So the rest of us were treated to the deafening shouts of "ENEMY QUAD" and "GO TO RED! GO TO FUCKING RED! GET TO FUCKING RED RIGHT NOW". What a wonderful way to spend a weekend.

The highlight of the weekend was the unfortunate forced extraction of a younger player by his grotesquely obese mother. From what she said, she'd been trying to contact him for several hours Saturday evening. Apparently the hotel wasn't able to get through to the gaming room for some reason (I didn't even know there was a phone in there, and if there was, it doesn't explain why the hotel couldn't physically send someone to the room if they were having problems contacting the staff). So she shows up, angry and irate, and proceeds to berate her kid in front of everyone, telling him that the game he's playing is sick (I don't know what he was playing... probably Quake 3, like everybody elese). She calls her husband, telling him this, and when she's done she stands there and rant dementedly about how what we're doing "is sick", and how "this is a road to nowhere." Over and over, she stands there are exclaims "This is sick." Some people tried to reason calmly with her, telling her it was just a hobby. "This is no hobby," she responded hotly. "This is sick. This is just sick." She likened the setup to a "vampire room" because the lights were all out. All of us who were there were on that "road to nowhere" and we'd "never get on Wall Street." Uh, sure, whatever. Apparently the only yardstick of success is to be on Wall Street. And any activity that doesn't actively serve to get you there is a waste of time. There must be something going on at all those fishing trips that I just don't know about. "You ever heard of a company called Merrill Lynch? That's who my husband works for. He flies all over the country." Who cares? How is that a measure of success? Simply working for Merrill Lynch means you're successful? Simply flying all over the country? Unfortunately, there was no reasoning with the massive land whale of a woman, which is pretty characteristic of the closed-minded masses when presented with something they don't understand. To them, it really is as simple as [ Success = Merrill Lynch ] or [ Unfamiliar and Incomprehensible = Fear and Hatred ]. Somewhere along the line these people's minds were irrevocably closed to anything beyond what they were taught was "good" and "normal". But I've strayed way beyond the scope of this document's original intent. Suffice it to say that that particular scene will be discussed for a long time to come.

In the end, I think it was a good experience for me to see what other LAN parties are like. Will I go back? Nope. I don't think it was a very enjoyable party, but then my perspective isn't likely shared by the majority of the people attending (who were quite happy playing Quake 3 for the entire event). At the very least, I thought it was a good opportunity to see how a party turns out when you make a lot of bad choices.