The Millville Rescue Squad provides ambulance and other emergency services to its small, quiet New Jersey town, a virtual stone’s throw from the Jersey shore. But six days out of the year, the unit shares its digs with hundreds of gamers for a little slice of gaming heaven: the LAN party.

Once in the spring and once again near Halloween, gamers gather in Millville for three days and two nights of non-stop multiplayer mayhem. The events are organized by the GXL, one of a number of groups in the northeast that put on parties for as many as 500 people at a time. Imagine inviting 100 of your closest friends to bring their PCs to your house, connecting them all in one local-area network (LAN), then attaching all of that to a master server that can handle dozens of games, from arcade racers such as Trackmania Nations to shooter classics Call of Duty 4, Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2. Add a couple of Xbox 360s or Playstation 3s for the console crowd, toss in organized tournaments and prize giveaways, maybe even find some corporate sponsors (electronics retailer MicroCenter and networking hardware manufacturer D-link have made contributions to previous GXL LANs) and you have the makings of a great couple of days of gaming.

This spring’s event was a more intimate affair, capped at 90 players. Attendees set up their rigs on long banquet tables in a room wired by the GXL staff with power connections and network cables. I was clearly the least ambitious gamer of the weekend, hardware-wise. I brought my trusty five-year-old Alienware M5750 gaming laptop, with its 1.25 gb of RAM and an old Radeon X1800 Mobility video card (check out the pic to the right to see how I roll), but there were those around me who brought multiple monitors, huge watercooled towers and other assorted gaming hardware. The guy sitting next to me was even running the beta version of Windows 7, Microsoft’s new OS slated for general release near the end of this year.

Here’s a word of advice for any of you who might be planning to attend a LAN party: Be prepared. The following are things that you should definitely do before you get into your cars and start your engines.

• Make sure that you have all of the ancillary things that go with PC gaming, such as mouse pads, headphones (with attached microphones for the larger events), etc.
• Update all of your hardware drivers. My video card and gamepad drivers were woefully out of date, so I had to take a half hour to download and install new ones. You can’t always count on the party site having Internet connectivity, so do as I say, not as I do: take care of it at home!
• Find out which games are being played at the party, then install them before you get there. You’ll have too many other things to remember, and bringing software with you might slip your mind.
• And finally, bring money for food. Or better yet, bring your own munchies, but be ready to share if you do.

And in case all of you “mature” gamers were interested in LAN partying but were afraid that the event would be dominated by the obnoxious geeks that play online multiplayer, have no fear. I have discovered that PC-dominated parties are attended by older, more respectful gamers (I’d guess the average age of the people I saw was in the late 20s), possibly because of a minimal console presence. There was a Street Fighter 4 tournament played on the PS3, and someone could frequently be seen shredding most righteously on Guitar Hero: Metallica (on expert; very impressive) on the 360, but the bulk of the party was all about the PC. And it was nice to know that I didn’t personally cause the average age to skew farther upward. I met several old codgers like me at the event, one of whom was a wedding photographer who arrived in his tuxedo because he had to work that afternoon. I had to smile thoughtfully as I listened to him and my Windows 7 neighbor talking about the days when they learned how to program in machine language so that they could fiddle with their Commodore 64s. Geeky, yes, but good times…

How did I fare in the gaming department? As well as my ancient hardware and my slight multiplayer gaming skills allowed. Which means to say, I had my hat handed to me on a regular basis. But I did get my first experience with Valve’s excellent MP shooter Left 4 Dead and Infinity Ward’s masterful Call of Duty 4. The latter had a unique appeal at this particular party. Someone had created a MP mod set in the very building in which we were partying; they had created an amazingly realistic model of the rescue squad, so accurate it was creepy to just move down the corridors that I had just walked minutes before.

Anyone who loves PC games, and multiplayer gaming in general, should plan to attend a LAN party. A quick Google search should yield some events in your immediate vicinity; there are more of them than you might think. You’ll make new friends (in person rather than in chat rooms), you’ll play some great games in vibrant, exciting settings, and you might even learn a thing or two.