OpenArena LAN party pictures

[HanClinto]

Hey all!

First off, thanks for all the fantastic work that you all have done to make OpenArena such a great game to play. I was very thankful to have found such a great free game on such short notice before the LAN party, and it went over very well.

This is a group of primarily churched kids (though not all from the same church), whose ages ranged from around 11 up to mid-40's. Average age is probably 16 or so. This was on a Friday night at a person's house, and the parents are very supportive of having good activities like LAN parties so that the kids can all hang out together and enjoy a once-in-a-while binge on some multiplayer games.

We had a table upstairs with 7 laptops (I'm the goofy dude with his mouth open on the right side)


Several tables downstairs with a set of 4 desktops and 4 more laptops:


We had a pretty varied demographic including younger kids:


...and older kids:


The mom actually stayed up most of the night and spent a good deal of time playing not only OA but also LieroX with us -- she didn't do too badly either. The dad got pretty good at the rail gun in OA as well -- he couldn't learn the maps, so he just stayed by the flag and camped out as defense. Also note the Macbook in this picture -- yay for cross-platform games!

Fun fun fun for everyone!

Thanks again for the great game.

I really think that there is a large, untargeted demographic for making family-friendly multiplayer games. I imagine that there are many youth leaders (school groups, community centers, churches, or just kids who want a LAN party with their friends) who would love to have access to a great prepackaged capture the flag FPS that didn't have to worry about edgy content. Whether it's overly-objectified women in Unreal Tournament, or blatant occultic references in Quake (Pentagram of Protection, anyone?) or disturbing realism (C-Strike, America's Army), there aren't many games that can fit the bill for a 10-20 age group at the moment (especially free/open-source games).

So well done on creating such a great game that we all had such a good time with.

The only real downside was a lack of a good variety of polished CTF maps. Since most of the past LAN parties have been with Unreal Tournament (which excelled at CTF), it was certainly noticed by this crowd. The lack of documentation was a little frustrating when I didn't have access to the Internet and couldn't look up what console commands were to set various options (like how to increase the maximum number of connections because our server was full -- I eventually figured this out) was the only other frustration.

All in all it went over well and I think I'll definitely push for having this as the primary game at the next LAN party.

Thanks again!

Respectfully,
clint

[pheldens]

Yes, why doesn't someone make a jesus or mohammed model so we can frag their asses.
Don't think the target audience in general needs protection, and that it can discern facts from fiction.

[HanClinto]

Don't think the target audience in general needs protection, and that it can discern facts from fiction.

Oh I definitely agree -- I'm not about censorship. However, I'm still not going to hand out hardcore bdsm to my nieces or nephews. People still need to be discerning with what they take in, and it's the parent's (not the church's, not the government's) responsibility to give their kids a healthy, balanced diet of information.

There just aren't many options though for parents who don't want games that are occultic or demeaning of women, or overly realistic. I mean, what -- there's Nerf Arena Blast, Alien Arena, and what other options?

I agree -- I'm all about giving people choice. But I'm just saying there aren't many options out there that cater to the family-friendly market and have good CTF (and even fewer that are free).


I feel like I've said the same thing repeatedly every time I've posted here. I really don't mean to be so redundant -- I just keep saying it over again in reworded ways because I fear people (like pheldens) are misunderstanding who I'm representing. I'm really very happy with OpenArena and am willing to help out as I am able, even if OpenArena doesn't officially take things in a family-friendly direction. The whole reason this all got brought up was just because I complimented OA for not being as demeaning to women as other games are, and letting the dev team here know that my wife and I appreciated that. That's all.

Cheers!

--clint

[dmn_clown]

Yes, why doesn't someone make a [...] mohammed model [...]

Because we don't want a fatwa proclaimed against us.

[Logan]

I could smoke all of you no problem.