The Gaming Lobby

This weekend I sat down with several copies of “Modern Warfare 2” and a fleet of Xbox 360s and TVs. It was LAN time.

As my friends and I looked at our digital buffet, networking cables crossing around the room like a bad sci-fi movie set, we found that our plans were impossible. Warfare’s setup requires each person to have their own monitor. The only split-screen option was the standard four-players-in-one-game, but squad-based game play really seems to require teams of more than two.

I wonder if there are younger gamers who grew up without concepts such as screen-watching. The surge of online gaming has funneled most of my own social interaction in gaming into a cheap plastic headset. It’s really not the same as being able to shout curses at a man in the same room as you.

LAN gaming was always more of a niche, but it’s sad to see resources diverted from it in game development, especially with a few titles where you’d think it’d be a necessity. “StarCraft II”’s developer Blizzard shocked fans with the announcement that there would be no LAN support. Mind you, South Korea treats the original game like its own version of the Super Bowl.

I could see the argument in funneling network games into the online world if there weren’t a few obstacles in place. Xbox LIVE requires a paid subscription, and many developers are creating their own gateways to control access to their online content.

Blizzard hopes to further entrench the old Battle.net system with “StarCraft II,” and “Infinity Ward” removed private networks with “Modern Warfare 2,” preventing any custom or mod games from being played on computer servers. These two services are not paid, but they could very easily become so.

This isn’t just me as some stubborn old man refusing to conform; I’ve been waiting for the online console community to come into its own since back when the Dreamcast tried and failed to do so. But the type of community that’s created when players can physically be together is an invaluable experience that should be tried at least once by anyone who is a fan of gaming.

It’s unlikely that developers will stop going in this direction; it costs a marginal amount of time and resources to build LAN support, and many are seeing financial benefits in focusing on one or two main ways of multiplayer.

As many independent Internet cafes suffer, opportunities to try this become more limited. I encourage you to grab a group of people that can tolerate staring at a screen for long stretches of time, 20 liters of soda and your best trash talk. You’ll find your friends make for better game companions than the screaming kids online.