i20 LAN

In the relative quiet of the second floor, someone relates a clan match anecdote. “I was shouting to him, I was shouting! Then I turned around and…” Two others listen, laughing. They wear matching T-shirts, brandishing their green and black Counter Strike emblem with militaristic vigour. “We’re out of hash browns dear,” admits one of the dinner staff from the other end of the hall. The group of five lined up to collect their breakfast look crestfallen, settling instead for a top up of Red Bull, before heading back into the fray.

You may know what this kind of ‘party’ entails. For those who don’t, places are available for up to 600 people to bring their PCs to a cavernous warehouse at Newbury Racecourse. Once set up, they will load up their favourite games and sample the delights of lagless servers and the opportunity to taunt their adversaries face to face. It’s even more fun than it sounds, no wonder there were only a handful of free stations by the end of the sign-in day.

The carnage spans a weekend. Most people arrive some time on Friday, and stay until Sunday night. Everyone agrees it’s long enough. Even before the first night of competition play, (Saturday), greasy pizza boxes and empty caffinated water bottles begin to pile up around keyboards. You can have either of these actually delivered to your chair, but people we spoke to complained it took hours for the delivery girls to find them.

In such an ideal gaming environment, rest comes second. Besides those sleeping on the space bar, crumpled beneath the UT scoreboard on their monitor, there are a couple of other options for when you start hallucinating. A tent is best, but the venue’s a racecourse, so the adjacent betting hall becomes shelter for other players. We’d advise against this however, being woken violently at three AM by a clan member’s drunken entrance isn’t fun. Neither is the rock hard flooring, so if you’re doing it that way, a blow-up mattress is essential.

It’s a LAN event, so of course, there are people who take it seriously. There are ladders for the major games – Counter Strike, Unreal Tournament 2004, Call of Duty – but for most of Multiplay’s attendees, the attraction isn’t in the competition. Why non-professional players would want to stand up £70 to do essentially what they could do at home becomes obvious as we spectate a game of co-op Battlefield Vietnam, against bots.

The game starts badly; on hard mode the NVA have serious aim, and the players’ notice their tickets starting to drop as the odds slide in favour of the AI. Players out for maximum kill counts find themselves at the bottom of the scoreboard, and everyone starts to realise empty transports aren’t moving the troops across the map effectively. When things get really bad, and the humans are reduced to a single spawn point though, everything changes. Someone yells, ‘I’ve got an empty Huie over here!’ and people respond. Soon enough, exchanges across the tables are every five seconds as the team (without knowledge of even each other’s names) are cheering in unison as point after point is re-established. It ends an emotional ‘minor victory’, with everyone thoroughly pleased with themselves.

You could argue that this could be achieved with voice coms from your bedroom, but the truth is that it’s really not the same. You can’t offer a slice of pepperoni to the man who wins the round with a knife, or exchange cooling methods with the over-clocking nut behind you. And that’s really what its all about. The tense ‘mini tourney’ of Alien Swarm, a top down Unreal Tournament 2004 mod, showed many a COD fan the joys of less mainstream multiplayer. The resident CS God, ‘Jools’ offered a 31v1 CS bout that was to be projected on the large screen upstairs. It didn’t happen in the end - Steam was in Multiplay’s words, ‘Fuxx0rd’. Still, it was amusing watching other players squeal in terror at the thought of competing.

Yes, by Sunday, people have had enough. RSI sets in, players yearn for some salad, and the lack of sleep makes speech a nightmare, (no pun intended). Like the morning after the night before, everyone swears they’ll never do it again, until next time. i21 is only weeks away, time to fire up that neon again.

Sam Goldwater