Back in my day, you had to go to a friends house to play video games!
In that no to distant past, the internet was not what it is today. We use the internet for EVERYTHING….ordering food, watching movies, shopping, communicating, and even writing this blog right? For a time though, video gaming on the internet was not really a thing yet…it wasn’t good enough! So what did you do? You went to a friends house to either play Sega Genesis or Super Nintendo cause it was RARE for someone to own BOTH of them right?
Then PC gaming got good…games like Quake, Doom, Starcraft, Halo birthed something for folks that didn’t have amazing internet yet which was 90% of folks….enter? The LAN PARTY!
A bunch of kids lugging their PC towers and screens to a friends house, plugging them into the wall, grabbing an ethernet cord, plugging that into an ethernet switcher and creating offline lobbies to…you guessed it? Play video games. Now you’re probably thinking, that is A LOT OF WORK and yea…IT WAS! But…it was fun work.
Ever hear that expression, ‘It’s about the journey, not the destination?’ That’s what a LAN Party was to me…sure we eventually DID play a video game…but the art of craftily setting up your PC, connecting all the wires, tossing money in for pizza and pop, cramming all your friends in the car to get the pizza…it was just a fun memory that doesn’t really exist anymore thanks to the internet.
Are there many pros to internet gaming? Sure! But in my opinion, there are cons as well. The internet is faceless, anyone can call you names, and at the end of the day? It’s just you, on the couch….alone. Now to some people that is perfectly fine, but for me it isn’t.
If the internet has taught us anything? It’s how to be alone…no face to face interaction or repercussions of something you say. In MANY cases this is the only option, but I don’t know…many of us play the same games, share the same experiences.
I encourage you to maybe take it a leap further, set up some tables in your home invite some friends over and socially gather to enjoy playing video games with each other.
