Local area network (LAN). LAN parties are emergent forms of social interaction where online gamers meet each other in real life, connecting their computers to a local area (wired) network. LAN parties may be as small as a handful of participants, but can also involve up to several thousand gamers meeting in one place (“Giga-LANs“). While the history of LAN parties reaches back to the 1980s, the phenomenon became widely recognized in the late 1990s when multi-player shooters such as Counter Strike and Quake hit the mass market.
Published in Chapter:
(Self-) Educational Effects of Computer Gaming Cultures
Johannes Fromme (University of Magdeburg, Germany), Benjamin Jörissen (University of Magdeburg, Germany), and Alexander Unger (University of Magdeburg, Germany)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 19
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-808-6.ch043
Abstract
The goal of this chapter is to emphasize a certain notion of self-induced education, to discuss it in the context of digital games and to provide the means for assessing digital games as well as to give hints on their educational use. In the first section, the concept of “self-education” is introduced and distinguished against less complex learning phenomena. The second section discusses and analyses the different layers of “educational space” inherent to gaming software, providing the analytical means for the further sections. The third section presents and analyses educational aspects of single-player games, while the fourth section adds the socio-cultural impacts implied in multi-player communities. In conclusion, a synopsis is given, which sums up the main educational dimensions and connects them to aspects and analytical criteria, allowing a pedagogical assessment of digital games.