LAN parties in Norway - a dying trend?

I discuss LAN parties in Norway through the lens of my experience running them myself

Published 27. January 2024

The Gathering (TG), the world's second largest LAN party (and Norway's largest), announced they were cancelling this years event^[1]. This happened after the ticket sale had started, just a few months away from the event itself.

For those paying attention, this isn't a big surprise. In 2023, the LAN had under 50% (2200 according to Wikipedia^[2]) of the normal 5200 participants they would have pre-COVID. After 3 years of not holding an event, most of the userbase seems to have disappeared. But why?

I was participant at The Gathering 2011 and 2012. From there, I was crew during 2013, 2015, and 2016. I've worked with LAN parties since around 2013, when I joined the Tech crew at Infected LAN. Around 2015 I was invited to join the board, and have been technical chief since fall 2018. When management changed in 2020, I became advisor for the new generation of leaders - youth events should be for kids by kids. The LAN was shut down in 2022 by the parent organization due to a need to create something new post-covid, and a need to rid an old culture that struggled to attract new kids. Phoenix LAN was created as a replacement, and I acted as advisor and de facto leader until fall 2023 when I stepped down. In addition to this I've been a helping hand at a few other smaller events throughout the years.

My point with listing my LAN history is saying that for most of my youth, and well into adulthood, LANs have been a major part of my life, and I have seen them from many perspectives: participant, crew member, board member, and leader. From these perspectives, I've watched LAN culture slowly die. Most people around me have seen the same thing. And I think it's time to have a frank discussion about it.

A lot can change in 3 years

The state of LAN-culture at the end of COVID took us all by surprise. Infected LAN/Phoenix LAN was hit especially hard as we had to start again in less favorable conditions. In any other time it would have probably been a great idea, but in hindsight, throwing away the brand right after COVID was a deadly blow. Lack of a recognizable brand aside, when the first event was held post-COVID and only 15% of pre-COVID numbers came, something was wrong. Had people forgotten what a LAN party was?

The answer is yes, kind of. Phoenix/Infected is/was aimed at youth. Most participants were middleschoolers or highschoolers, with some regulars being older. After almost 3 years of not running events, any high school regulars would have joined university and probably be well on their way in building their own adult lives, often in another city. The middleschoolers who were too young to participate before COVID probably didn't even know what a "LAN party" was - it is possible they only wanted to join "That infected-thing my older sibling goes to". They might be highschoolers today, still well within our target audience, but also lack a cousin or friend who has been to a LAN and can give them the FOMO they need to bother trying it out. You'll be surprised how fast a tradition can disappear from one's mind, given a few years of not doing it. Of course, todays middleschoolers have very little chance of knowing what a LAN is. Below is an illustration of how our different customer groups have aged throughout the years.

But you don't have to take my word for it. We performed comprehensive market studies, one of which was to have youth clubs go around to all middle schools in the area to promote us, together with their other youth-oriented events, during back-to-school. The feedback was that most kids didn't know what a LAN party was, or complained that it cost money. When being a crew was mentioned, a similar response was often given - "why would we work if we don't get paid". This leads us to a deeper problem.

Engagement is at an all-time low, and more communities are fighting for it

We have trouble recruiting new youth. The feedback we are getting from youth workers is that there is an overall problem recruiting youth to do volunteer work, with fewer kids seeing value in working for something they won't monetarily benefit from. CV padding just isn't enough anymore. At the same time, these workers have observed that hobbies have mostly dried up and been replaced with TikTok. Worst-case, we might be going towards a future were people in general have less of an engagement to do things. In this case, we risk a social divide where families limiting short term video are noticably better off in life. It is probably worth considering that LAN parties may have been one of the early victims of this, and that there may be more damage to come in other aspects of our society.

At the same time as kids are less interested in working for free, there are also more hobbies to choose from, and more communities to be part of. The cosplay/popculture event also within the same organization as us is doing great and has never had better visitor numbers. Conventions like this is a relatively new concept in Norway, especially compared to LANs. The old answer to "what is Norway's comic-con", Desucon, was started in 2006 - 14 years after The gathering. There have been instances of LANs trying to ride on the wave of conventions being a thing by having a hybrid of both, such as GigaCon. Another actor who tried was SpillExpo - who collaborated with TG by hosting TG: Origins in 2017^[3]. The "problem" with cosplay conventions and similar cultures growing is that there are now more easily accessible hobbies available for people to choose from. LANs are no longer the only meeting place if you like gaming or gaming-adjacent popculture.

Another thing to consider is that you don't need LANs to have meaningful experiences with computer friends. Of course, this is all speculation, but when I joined the LAN culture, gaming was something only a few kids - usually those with less strict parents, were doing. If you were lucky, you had a few other kids from your grade that played video games, and that was it. Internet friends were a thing, but there weren't many ways to meaningfully interact. Sure, I spent many nights talking to friends who were from all around the country, as well as abroad. There were also many platforms to chose from such as Skype, TeamSpeak, MSN, and others. However, it was still a relatively cumbersome experience, as you were both limited by how long you were allowed to stay on the computer. This was especially relevant 10 years ago, when parents seemed more critical to gaming than nowadays.

Today, there are communities for everything, and joining them is often very easy due to social media having a low barrier of entry. Most games have automatic matching and built-in friend systems. Interacting with people is easier. Combine this with there being more people with the same interest in your vicinity, and all of a sudden you don't have as strong of an urge to drag your hardware to some random hall to sleep uncomfortably, just to play the same games as you played at home, with probably the same people and maybe a few internet friends. Today's kids don't need to go to a LAN to be surrounded with like minded people - gaming has become the norm. But when gaming is the norm, and you can easily play with people online, why bother going to a LAN? How can LANs change so people would want to go? For Phoenix/Infected, the answer was to try providing experiences not possible at home. However, the truth is that this was a goal long before COVID. Infected LAN was last sold out in 2018, and we had already noticed that ticket sales were slower for a while before this.

Making change is hard.

Some times, an especially engaged individual would come around, and their area of responsibility would shine for a few years. If their work was especially great, it would surpass their tenancy. Sometimes all that is needed is for someone to put in the effort to prove that change is possible. If you are even more lucky, you would have multiple of these people at once, and their collaborative efforts carried the LAN forward. However, you cannot get this behavior on demand.

I have seen boards scramble to find new ideas to attract new people and keep regulars interested. The ideas would often disappear once people were called on to take responsibility for carrying them out, only to be re-suggested by by almost every new person joining the board. It seems the solutions were obvious, but why weren't anyone taking responsibility?

This is the biggest hurdle with volunteer work. The incentives to participate are completely different from those at a job - you earn no money. Usually, the incentive tends to be the experience of running the event itself, meeting likeminded people, or CV padding. A community with engaged people attracts other engaged people, and there is real value in that. People participate in volunteer work because it's fun, and when it's not fun any more, interest dries up. Some last beyond the lack of direct interest, often due to a feeling of obligation - an understanding that "someone has to do it" so the next generation has the same opportunities. You could view it as sort of a self-sacrifice some people make of their own time and sanity, under the understanding that its their turn to carry the banner.

The truth, is that making large changes in a volunteer organization requires time. If it's not fun, very few people are going to do it. That's why change is hard, and why, despite being obvious, it often never happens.

Is The Gathering dead?

From the looks of it, I'm putting my money on yes. Based on my experience, I think the board is severely underestimating the damage dealt by not running the event. Things become irrelevant surprisingly quick. It's not that I don't understand them - they seem to have quite high anxiety about needing to be the most epic place for computer nerds. With TG's reputation that's understandable - they don't want to fail, after all. However, letting people forget about the event may be worse than failing.

Another possible nail in the coffin might be this years botched cancellation, which media was able to leak^[4] before the board were able to come out with a proper statement. This followed days of damage control, and it took the board 5 days to finally release a statement^[5]. On Discord, board members informed that the stress of dealing with this next to a 9-to-5 job had caused at least one person to become sick. It's a horrible experience and I don't envy the board one bit. Still, the delayed handling and lack of concrete information in the official FAQ that followed seems to have caused a considerable number of people to lose trust in them. My worry is that this will cause a lack of goodwill in participants, which might lead to fewer people being willing to give them another try.

Still, it wouldn't surprise me if The gathering tries a reboot/redesign. I'm all for it, and honestly I'd be happy to do my part to make it happen. However, to survive, I think a lot is needed. First and foremost, TG needs to re-evaluate its position. There are two main problems think have appeared in the last ten years:

TG isn't what it was - it became too professional

This is something I've seen time and time again myself. People who love organizing and developing organizational structures have a tendency to bubble up to organizational roles. This is good, as it's better that the people who handle management are people who want to manage. However, the same people some times design organizations too strict and rigid for volunteers to enjoy. Some times military attitudes are involved, it's a whole thing.

Vegard Skjefstad, one of the people credited with starting the event, quit after 2014. On Wikipedia, he^[6] updated his own page to reflect that he quit due to an organizational change which made him Core-Organizer^[7]. This is consistent with rumors I have heard, which indicate that he was optimized out of the role he loved through rounds of organizational restructuring, making him quit. If this is true, it may be a smoking gun that the event became too professional - so much that the guy who started the event got tired and left. Vegard is not the only person I know with a leader role who quit due to too much bureaucracy.

My experience is that the less limits you put on people, the more fun they have, and the more they want to continue. This doesn't mean you can't have hard deadlines or requirements, but you also need to put some trust in your people. Nobody likes to be bossed around - especially when they aren't paid for it. Being able to do things that are personally rewarding is paramount to volunteer motivation, and rigid systems limit this - at the benefit of more visibility for management. A good volunteer culture is one where everyone cares and is motivated to work towards a common goal - and are able to do their part as frictionless as possible.

TG gambled, and lost, at e-sports.

I want to preface this section by emphasizing that I have very little awareness of the e-sports scene at The Gathering. I participated only in the Creative competitions, and hung out in the Creative area of the event. My observations are based on the few times gaming and creativity intersected, my private gaming experience, as well as my own experience from running a smaller LAN party.

Around the time Vegard Skjefstad quit, The Gathering changed course. E-sports gained more focus, probably in an attempt to replicate DreamHack. A cosplay competition was also introduced. It was clear to me that the new management was less interested in the demoscene roots of the LAN, and more interested in current trends. While following trends and staying current is important (This has been a value for a while - see their 2002 party guide), for TG, in this case, it seems to have failed. TG started to put more effort into game competitions. The last year I was crew, the game competitions' prize ceremony was held on the main stage for the first time (as far as I remember) - right after the formal creative prize ceremony which was already a tradition by then. Slowly, the creative offerings at TG were reduced (including a special "creative seating" area being removed), and the focus on gaming increased.

In the mean time, gaming changed. Instead of having to find a server to play on, you simply pressed "play" and was instantly matched with teammates, enemies, and a server to play on. Through the growth of live streaming, watching e-sports matches with the worlds best players was suddenly very easy. With this, the industry commercialized. It became more popular for game developers to host official world championships. League of Legends had its first championship in 2011^[8]. Counter-Strike had its first official championship in 2013^[9]. Your national LAN party was no longer the place to go to see highly skilled players play, nor was it where the highest-level plays would find place.

In parallel, games became more locked down. 20 years ago, most multiplayer games, especially the competitive ones, relied on fans hosting servers. You were often able to download server software and run a server with your name on that people could join. Small micro-cultures spawned around these servers - they were small public places each with their own regulars and owners, kind of like a cafe. The release of server software also made it easy to host local LAN tournaments. In fact, in the old days - people used to travel to LANs to play with each other on such servers hosted on the same Local Area Network (hence the name, LAN party) instead of the internet. However, this wasn't the most optimal user experience, and the game owners had very few ways of policing problematic servers. For these reasons and many more, many publishers stopped distributing server software. To make matters worse, you would often need access to specific tournament clients in order to properly run a competition. Fornite is a recent example of this^[10]. Online multiplayer became predictable and streamlined.

This all culminated in the end of watching other "mortal" video gamers play - why settle for anything but the best? Of course, with the advent of Twitch, people certainly watch other people playing video games more. However, I'd argue most of people are watching due to the streamers personality, not their skills. Instead of people showing up to watch local teams compete, all eyes now fall on either famous streamers or the top teams of the world. Being in the national league isn't enough - this is what a Norwegian player has to say about playing in the nationals:

You can be playing nationals and there are 150 people watching. Most of them are family of the players. ^[11].

The e-sports scene has become more uniform, locked down, and devoid of diversity. Everyone but the game owners and top players have suffered from it. The Gathering gambled on becoming one of the top actors in the industry, but failed. As a result they are left at the bottom with the rest of us. Having a reduced creative offering as well, they are losing participants left and right as TG's offerings become fewer and less relevant.

Are LAN parties dead?

I don't think so. But they aren't for everyone anymore. Many of the reasons to go to LANs 15 years ago are now gone. I believe LANs will turn into more of a subculture thing. A place computer enthusiasts, both creative and gaming, go to meet like minded people not readily accessible in real life. I think we have lost a lot of the casual audience. Let's face it - nobody goes to LANs for e-sports any more, and dragging your computer to a hall just to sleep uncomfortably and not shower(?) for a few days doesn't sound that attractive with how much you can do from home nowadays.

SpillExpo to me is the clostest to having solved the problem by first and foremost being an expo. The LAN component therefore acted almost as an extension for the specially interested. I think this method for capturing multiple audiences is wise. However, as the LAN collaboration only happened once, it may have flopped. I do not know. The Gathering were also probably very wise to include cosplay as a competition. Attracting more communities may be a possible way forward. Having a low barrier of entry also seems to be key to attracting new people, as the barrier of entry to everything is constantly going down in society. This is also obvious in other interests I have, like arcade games. Modern arcade games are a lot simpler and beginner-friendly, often at the cost of being less interesting for the core audience.

The traditional "LAN" format as we know it seems to be dying. Still, as long as there are computer interested people yearning to be surrounded by people more like them, there will be LANs. While Phoenix LAN saw abyssmal participant numbers, we also saw many new young faces. Also, as long as there are friend groups interested in gaming, they will gather in someones basement for a weekend of fun. However, will LANs exist on the scale of TG again? I have my doubts.