Venue

Where will you hold your event? Think about places where people gather. How about fraternal orders, such as the Eagles or Elks? How about churches? Depending on the organization, there may be codes of conduct more strict than those of even a well-run, respectable LAN party, particularly in regard to language used in the heat of battle, so be honest with potential hosts about their expectations.

Another common venue is local schools, especially the cafeteria or gymnasium. Pay special attention to the floors here, though. School officials don’t want to arrive on Monday morning and scrape leftover adhesive off their gym floor or find a patchwork of duct tape scraps littering the cafeteria.

Alternatively, especially given today’s commercial real estate market, you might also find available space to rent. The trouble with commercial spaces is that it can be leased to a new business at any time.

“The problem with most venues is that they’ll have the space but not the power,” says Matt “Vector” Conwell, owner of PDXLAN (www.pdxlan.net) and organizer of a wide variety of LAN events around the country, “or they’ll have the power but not the space. Your goal to find a proper venue is a place that has both.”

Assuming your event will last more than a few hours, you’ll need to consider food. Some venues will have an adjacent cafeteria, which can be either a good or a bad thing depending on your attendees’ expectations. Often, you’ll want a venue with nearby restaurants of the pizza/burgers/sandwiches bent. Some shops that don’t normally deliver will make an exception if the attendance looks promising enough. If you give nearby restaurants advance notice, they might even extend their evening hours.

“Do you want to supply food for free and have the cost included in sign-up?” asks Tori Pugliese, marketing manager at gaming hardware vendor SteelSeries (www.steelseries.com). “Or is it easier to bring in local restaurants or caterers selling snacks as fundraisers like candy bars, chips, etc.? Chain restaurants that are associated with sponsoring high school sports would also be excellent to approach.”

Of course, food and drink lead to another inevitable concern. When planning an event of any size, keep an eye on your ratio of people to restrooms. A 1:100 ratio isn’t pleasant. Also, don’t assume that public restrooms and/or nearby restaurant restrooms will be available for all of your attendees unless you have explicit permission.

If you’re planning on a relatively low headcount, as in less than 40 people, consider using the banquet/meeting room in a restaurant. Conwell recounts one event he attended that was held at a local Denny’s. A total of 25 tickets at $20 per person were sold, and the admission price included dinner. That’s a pretty sweet deal for everyone involved, especially if there’s direct access to the banquet room from the parking lot.

For larger LANs that run over multiple days, hotels are a perennial favorite venue, especially because a hotel will likely work with you on the price of its conference room in return for a commitment on rooms booked. Be careful here, though.

“If you commit to too many rooms, you could be on the line for them if they don’t sell,” says Conwell. “If you promise 100 rooms at $100 each and you only fill 80, that’s $2,000 out of your pocket. It adds up quick. Don’t get into a deal you can’t handle. Under-commit and over-deliver.”

Power

We dig further into power concerns in “Some Assembly Required,” but for now, we want to cover a few essentials that are inherently tied to venue selection. You’ll likely find that many venues, especially smaller ones, fail to adequately understand their power setup. A manager might look at a room with five outlets, each offering two plugs, and tell you that he has 10 circuits. He probably doesn’t.

The only way to be sure that you have adequate power for your attendees is to use lamp testing to create a power map. This means that you take a map of your LAN event’s environment and mark every outlet on the map. Then you take a lamp and, one by one, plug it into every single outlet on the map. Once the lamp is lit, go to the circuit breaker box and identify exactly which breaker turns off the lamp. In this way, you can gain a precise knowledge of how many circuits there are and where they run. Be sure to clear this with the venue’s management before beginning this undertaking, however.

You’ll also need to find out how many amps are on each circuit, keeping in mind that you don’t want to sustain more than 80% load on a circuit. As a rule of thumb, Conwell figures 20 amps for every six people. John Motter, who is an organizer of Intel’s LAN Fest Portland, says that he estimates 3A per person.

Motter says, “If you need more power, you go with a generator. I’ve never used a generator at a LAN, although I’ve been to some that have. I just don’t want the hassle of bringing it onsite and having to get the hazardous materials—the diesel fuel—approved. I just don’t think [a LAN organizer] needs that complexity.”

Conwell describes renting power as “pouring money down a drain.”

Marketing

Introverts will find this aspect of running a LAN to be the hardest of all. If you want to grow your event beyond your circle of friends, it will require getting in front of strangers and persuading them to attend your party. Having charisma will help. If you’re not charismatic and good with strangers, hopefully one of your buddies is.

Where do you find these strangers? The most obvious and effective place is at existing LAN parties. Some admins are willing to help promote other local LAN parties, believing that fostering enthusiasm in the LAN community helps everyone and increases the overall audience. If the LAN’s admin provides a corner or bulletin board for other admins to advertise, use it. If you can get them to introduce you personally to their group, that’s even better.

Word of mouth is far and away the most effective means of promoting your LAN. If you’re already running a small LAN (or are a recognized regular at another LAN), ask the attendees to find and sign up one guest to your planned, larger event. If you frequent local PC hardware shops or game stores enough to know the employees, ask them to attend and refer you to others who might be interested. Colleges tend to be pretty fertile recruitment grounds, as well. Just be warned that putting a flier up on a bulletin board tends to yield few results. The human touch is far more effective—so effective that Conwell states he’s never spent a dime on advertising PDXLAN, which is now the largest regular LAN on the West Coast.

“Another way to get the word out for your local LAN party includes social media,” says SteelSeries’ Pugliese, “the free and easy way to tell the world about what’s going on. Use Facebook, Twitter, forums, and even blogs. There are also sites like www.lanpartylist.com, www.gamerzunite.com, www.lanpartymap.com, and GotFrag.com.”

And, of course, go to www.computerpoweruser.com/lanyard to take advantage of our LAN party resources.

The Money

Venue may be the most important aspect of LAN party planning, but many people immediately jump on the idea of sponsorships. Some naively assume that because their vision for the LAN-to-be is so compelling that sponsors will fall all over themselves to cough up CPUs, video cards, and all manner of other big-ticket prizes.

In the real world, sponsorship is a commercial decision made by companies fighting tooth and nail to maximize profits for their investors and shareholders. If you don’t sell the idea of sponsoring your party as a sound business decision likely to yield an acceptable return on their investment, your odds of success with vendors will plummet.

“SteelSeries is approached daily about providing products and/or support for LAN parties,” says Pugliese. “Most requests that come in are parties ranging from 50 to 100 attendees, but the bigger the better.” Pugliese says that SteelSeries almost always sponsors LANs guaranteeing at least 100 attendees. “Things that ‘wow’ our team include an excellent Web site already designed, examples of where the sponsor logos will go, and talking about where the event will be cross-promoted with other partners. Will you do a local press push, etc.?”

For an idea of what vendors will expect to see in the first round of questioning, see SteelSeries’ site at tinyurl.com/ykb9afj.

Conwell and Motter both agree that beginning admins should approach vendors looking for swag—lots of swag—such as T-shirts, caps, banners, posters, pens, key chain fobs, mugs, USB flash drives, etc. For vendors, this is cheap advertising for their target audience, and it ensures that every recipient leaves with that advertising in hand. Conversely, a single prize, such as a CPU, only vanishes into one person’s bag. Swag is fun, and most people like winning it.

If this sounds like sour grapes, look on the bright side: Do you want attendees who are motivated by big prizes or those motivated by big fun? Attendees only after big-ticket prizes often have bigger attitudes and cause more problems. Because of this, many LANs don’t announce their prizes until after registration closes, just to make sure that the people who show are there for the “right” reasons.

Speaking of registration, how much should you charge? At least in the beginning, just look to break even. If you make a little extra, consider it gravy, or do as Intel does with its LAN Fest proceeds and donate it. (So far, Intel LAN Fest has given over $300,000 to charity.) Regardless, you may want to avoid taking a loss by padding your admission prices by a given percentage. Attendee dropouts are your biggest concern. If you arrive at a per-person cost of $50 and pad the admission price by 20% to $60, you now have a buffer in case 20% of your registrants fail to show up. The second and simpler method is to have a no-refund policy. Some attendees might object to this, but these are the best ways to avert potential financial disaster for yourself.

The People Factor

Remember that 25-seat LAN party at Denny’s? According to Conwell, it had a good run with regular attendees, but eventually it died. The event petered out not because of Denny’s but because of the admin, who never did anything to make the party different or more interesting over time. It was the same meeting, over and over.

“I always hate it when people tell me that PDXLAN was the same thing as the year before, because that means we’re getting stale and we’ll cease to exist,” says Conwell. “That’s why we really change things up with contests. We did shuffleboard contests with old hard drives. Rather than do another eating contest with the LAN staple of pizza, we changed to Costco muffins, and it was a hoot. Wii Tennis. Rock Band. Dodgeball in the parking lot. Just doing fun and crazy things we don’t normally do. At our last event, we did Family Feud. It was amazing!”

Ironically, though, the Family Feud got taken a bit too literally. In the absence of a buzzer, players had to grab a baton on the table before them. In one of the final rounds, two contestants had a death grip on the baton. The larger male contestant decided to resolve the issue by judo-flipping the 125-pound female contestant. Yes, for real.

This is why codes of conduct and making sure you attract the right audience are essential at LAN parties. Understand that when you rent a property, that property is legally yours to control during the rental period, with all of the rights and liabilities thereby associated. For personal conduct, it might be prudent to either have a lawyer draft you a waiver form or else “borrow” one from a large, well-established LAN in your area. PDXLAN uses a waiver containing a list of 35 rules to which each attendee must agree, with the last of these being “Admins are always right and have the final word in all decisions.” If people get out of line, you can call the cops and have them removed. And just remember that if you make rules, you need to uphold all of them without exception. If you let one attendee use speakers, they all will think they can use speakers, and with one rule broken, people will think all rules can be broken.

For individual game rules, you might consult the World Cyber Games past and present lists (tinyurl.com/yhk29hj), but Motter cautions setting up tournaments with certain games.

“Try not to run your tournaments for the games that the professionals are playing,” he says. “It might be a great game, but you probably won’t see it at too many LAN parties because it brings the group of people that play that game. If you get a pro or semi-pro group that effortlessly destroys everyone else, it can ruin the event.”

Growth

PDXLAN went from 20 people to 500 in one year, but Conwell says this was a fluke and has never seen it repeated. Instead, a far more prudent course would be to aim for growing 50 to 100% each year. Go from 20 to 35 or 40. Go from 35 to 50, and then from 50 to 75 or 100. Work your way up gradually and make the inevitable mistakes that come from learning the ropes on a smaller scale. Again, Conwell cites the disaster that was the Portland Expo Center.

“They charged me over $12,000 for power—just power. My wife and I were sick the week before, because we were in the hole about $10,000 up to a week before the LAN. We had 800 attendees. That’s $15 per person just for power. On top of that, the venue cost $8,000 per day. Now we’re at $45 per person. At that time, we were offering soda for everyone, so that’s another $7 per person. And the Expo Center charges $2 per chair rental, $30 for a two-person table.

“It really adds up quick at these bigger venues. The power is so expensive because of the union required to lay out the power. The Expo Center is a union shop. It was like $120 per 20-amp circuit just to be laid on the floor and plugged in. That’s why venue selection will make or break you.”

Ultimately, Conwell decided that an event of more than 500 people would be unsustainable given the kind of audience and event he wanted to maintain. Psychology is important. For example, the Expo Center venue doubled aisle widths to 12 feet, which made the event far less personal for participants. With so much distance, you might as well be playing online. On the other hand, too much closeness can violate venue codes and possibly city ordinances.

Talk with your venue manager about codes. Beyond a certain point, the local fire marshal may need to be involved and approve your floor diagram and power map. You don’t want the fire marshal to appear on your doorstep 60 minutes before your LAN is scheduled to start and order you to redo your entire wiring and table layout. It happens. This is why it’s important to work with the venue manager as early and thoroughly as possible, because the manager will often go to bat for you with city officials if you’ve done your homework properly.

With each step in your LAN’s growth, expect to make mistakes. Just make sure you learn from your mistakes and avoid repeating them. Do this and you won’t have attendees for long. So go slowly, do your planning many months in advance, and keep your growing LAN as safe as it is fun. Game on!

by William Van Winkle