Starcraft Shindigs Extraordinaire
Today marked the first official summer Starcraft Shindig at my house. To be honest, I don’t necessarily love playing Starcraft– I’d never play it by myself; it’s definitely a social game. No, the real joy I get out of hosting said shindigs is derived from the following:
- The chance to socialize with fellow nerds.
- The setup and tear-down of the extended network infrastructure added to support the additional computers.
- The fact that the network everyone is using is my network.
- The fact that others are having a grand time.
- The excuse to get good food.
I’m not really that great at Starcraft. I never play it, and so usually I’m one of the first to be beaten in a game of three on three or four on four or free-for-all. When I’m waiting for the next game to begin, I generally work on other things that I have to do. Today I installed Linux Mint 9 on my desktop because I’ve liked it so much on my netbook. That’s what I’m using to compose this post right now, actually, and it’s working rather flawlessly. Beautiful distribution.
This particular time around, I actually set up two webcams so that people not attending could check in and see how things were going. I even recorded part of the live broadcast, which is available here. I eventually pulled the plug on them because it wasn’t incredibly novel, though we did get fifteen unique viewers– some fellow Starcraft nerds who stumbled upon the live feed while surfing the net, which was surprising. I ran the two cameras off of my netbook using Linux Mint 9, and they worked beautifully. The internet was pretty slow while they were streaming, but they didn’t affect our games at all. Someone who didn’t have a computer wanted to play, though, so I used that netbook for that person. I don’t think I’ll set those up again until I have a dedicated video streaming server to run them off of… a faster internet tier would be preferable, too.
One day it’d be rather exciting to host immense LAN shindigs– have a garage-full and house-full of 64 gamers all playing different games or waiting for the next games. I think I have more fun hosting shindigs than I do playing the games.
