Winterlan: My Annual Gaming Retreat

In case you've been wondering why no new articles for the past two days, I've been high off my tits playing PC games at a lan party organized by an old college friend. He throws this same lan party every year during December, it's the only time I get to see him as it's quite a drive.

If you've never been to a lan party, a bunch of sweaty nerds gather in one place to network their computers together. This made a lot more sense before internet got so fast, as you could play lag-free multiplayer games against buddies. These days internet's good enough to negate the latency advantage, but of course that's not the main draw.

This is as social as PC gaming gets. It really is a party, with someone managing music, beer, snacks, a taco bar one night, pizzas the one before. The weed flows here. I don't smoke, my lungs refuse it, but there were plentiful edibles. I may have had too many, though.

^{Me on the far right}

I ate 4 big pot brownies on the first day and passed out in 30 minutes. I was then unconscious for 6 hours. Thereafter I was higher than Buzz Aldrin and forgot how to add. It didn't meaningfully impact my skills at Doom however. If anything I did a lot better in that condition than I had any right to.

Games played included Doom, Overwatch, Rocket League, TF2, Heroes of the Storm, Suicide Survival and Genital Jousting. Suicide Survival is a tradition, it gets played every year no matter what new games occupy most of our time. It's a mod based on the lyrics to an old song, as I understand it.

One team is potted plants. They blend in with hundreds of identical looking potted plants that are just props. They can self-detonate and move, but that's it. The other team are overweight WW2 fighter pilots armed with copies of "Gardening for Beginners" which they can throw at the bushes to kill them.

^source

Obviously they can't at a glance tell which bushes are players. So the explosive bush players can sneak up on and blow up the other team members. It's absurd but a very good time, similar gameplay-wise to Prop Hunt. Paranoia rules if you're one of the human players, as any of those bushes might be out to kill you.

Meanwhile there is a delightful sneaky feeling when playing as one of the potted plants. It's dead simple but addictive, and I personally never grow tired of it. I'm the only one though, and as a consequence we rarely played it for longer than thirty minutes at a stretch.

This year I wasn't the only one with a VR headset, and as a consequence was able to put in some time on roomscale Vive games I normally don't have the space to play. This had to wait until after most people had gone home however as roomscale requires a minimum of 8 feet by 8 feet, at least for the games we played.

We both got the VR mod of Doom 3 BFG edition running, but couldn't work out how to get them to see each other on the network. No multiplayer sadly. I tried talking the guy with the Vive into downloading ReVive so he could get Ripcoil, and he was into it at first, it just didn't wind up coming together in the end. Almost like being in a room full of ongoing gaming is distracting.

The setup that goes into something like this is arduous. I helped somewhat by sweeping up before and cleaning up empty cans afterward but most of it was on my buddy. Rerouting power to support all these PCs, paying for the pizzas (the taco bar was all donated ingredients, potluck style rules). It's a major undertaking.

Getting to hang out with him in person and play all manner of games is always the highlight of my year. I also admire his father as he's used his enormous house to rehabilitate a wide variety of people who needed a hand up at various points in the past few decades. His altruism really inspires me, and I assume that's where my buddy gets it from.

Another year, another successful Winterlan. Games were played. Brownies were eaten. I am only now remembering how to multiply and divide. A glorious fever dream of camaraderie, competition and cooperation, with next year's event already in the planning.

I'm already looking forward to it. For someone like me, this is pretty close to utopia, and I can't think of anywhere else I feel more comfortable. Good friends, good games, good food, good weed. If you need more than that to be happy, I don't understand you.