The Best Of The Midwest: PCA LAN, Continued

One of the features that small basement LAN parties offer is their lack of coordination and structure, with a bunch of friends convening to play their favorite games. The essence of competition abounds, but with no prizes or money on the line, this environment is spirited with good fun, and offers the familiarity of a local get together where no one panics if the power goes out or the network goes down.

This grill was the only clock anyone was watching.

That "spirit of fun" takes on a different form for larger parties, due to the requisite organization and planning to get 80+ gamers and their PCs together and connected in the same room. And when there are also thousands of dollars' worth of donated computers, parts and prizes for the taking on the line added to the mix, the competition naturally ratchets up.

PCA LAN in Zion, Illinois has it going on in their small town, out-of-the-way niche. They have combined the best parts of a basement LAN with the fun of entertaining and hosting over 100 gamers at their LAN events. The drive in approach to the party was my first clue that I was in for quite a time: a small dirt road that wound back into the woods had shades of the film "Deliverance" written all over it, and I could hear the "Dueling Banjos" tune twanging in my head. Once inside the compound, I saw all types of vehicles everywhere - cars, trucks, tractors, a backhoe, and flatbed trailers...this was getting intriguing.

PCA LAN is not sufficiently close to Chicago to suffer from big city lack of parking.