By Connor DeLancey
The UMCP Gaming Club hosted its second LAN event of the semester, “Harvest Moon LAN,” on Nov. 23 at the Computer Science Instructional Center. Campus community members came together to bond over various online games and enjoy the company of like-minded gamers.
LAN, short for Local Area Network, is a term used to describe a computer network over which multiple devices are connected to the same network in a small, localized area, such as in a home environment.
Participants brought their own computers — often custom-built — and filled the rows of the lecture hall, lining its tables with dual-monitor set-ups and backlit gaming keyboards.
The event, which was sponsored by companies like Red Bull, Facebook and Tespa, gave participants the opportunity to compete for various prizes, such as neck pillows and T-shirts.
Some participants, like Gabe Solano, an 18-year-old freshman from Frederick, Maryland, have been immersed in the world of video games since they were children. Solano, in particular, started gaming when he was six. To this day, he said, he enjoys the competitive nature of online gaming.
When asked why he enjoys gaming at events like Harvest Moon LAN, Solano said, “It’s a good pastime for me. It’s just like a kind of escapism … something fun to do.”
The UMCP Gaming Club, founded in February 2017, hosts two main LAN events each semester. The Harvest Moon LAN began at 5 p.m. on Nov. 23, a Saturday, and lasted until 2 a.m. on Nov. 24.
UMCP Gaming Club Event Photographer A.J. Cooper, a sophomore studying computer science, said events like Harvest Moon LAN are a great opportunity for her to meet fellow gamers on campus and to create meaningful interpersonal friendships outside of online chat rooms.
“This is nice, because I’ve met people online, but they’re actually here,” Cooper said. “Sometimes, I have dinner with friends from this club, just because I met them through it.”
According to UMCP Gaming Club President Joel Yoo, a senior majoring in computer science, the term LAN was used colloquially for this event, and was meant to symbolize how players were coming together to socialize face-to-face.
“There’s kind of this impersonal … aspect of gaming when you know you’re playing across screens, maybe even across the world. But now that, like, people are playing together … people are like, ‘Oh, I know this person … not just online, but now I know what he looks like — I can put a face to the name,’” Yoo explained.