Halo LANd

Once every month or so I get phone call from a friend of mine telling me to come over that night and play Halo 3. Whenever this happens I have to go stand on the carpet, to dampen the noise of me jumping up and down excitedly. After a day of slugging through it's finally time to head out, buy some Game Fuel (it's terrible), and face the enemies who were friends just hours before.

If you play games, chances are you've played some form of Halo over the years. That means you have probably also been to a Halo LAN party, or as I like to call it Funtown. In all honesty I have never actually called anything Funtown. Except the city of Funville once, and I've already apologized for that. In any case if you've been there you know what it's like: dudes, small stuffy space, controllers in various states of repair and readiness, TVs and monitors everywhere (and often in precarious positions), and a smell you hope is old pizza. The greetings are sparse because everyone is too busy making offerings to the Router Deities, and you don't want to acknowledge what you're going to be shooting.

And then it's three or more hours of running, shooting, throwing grenades, and generally hating everyone you see. Oh and cussing. With all the food laying around it's kinda like a technology fueled Thanksgiving.

I know the word picture painted above is old hat to most people, but it's a beautiful thing. There are underlying themes in such a gathering that are reminiscent of the Freemason meetings of the past. A group of select people gathered around softly glowing devices of mystical design and using a language that no layman could understand. There are secret handshakes too, and a hierarchy established partly through time involved, and mostly through skill. There's also hazing, but it's decidedly less homoerotic than in traditional secret societies, and that is including all the in game tea-bagging . Someone could definitely make a study about that. Or maybe not.

The point is I don't have an Xbox 360, so when there's a Halo Party going down it's a big event. It's one of those things a lot of us will look back on as we turn gray and think, "Boy oh boy I used to have fun before the robot revolution when I wasn't hunted by wolf-like packs of sentient machines." LAN is good. I prefer to think of them as Ethernet chains.