LAN Party simulates LAN parties without the LAN

Have you ever wanted to have a LAN party but without the, you know, LAN? Just the watching over other peoples' shoulders and taking a break for a movie? Well, developer LAN Party Technologies is delivering precisely that. It may well be perfect if you've ever thought that your friend group's Discord server should have a fully-featured 3D front end where someone can post infinitely looping meme gifs on the wall.

The app is designed to be used alongside games and streaming media, allowing you to sync up and watch the same thing or show your screens in a shared environment while you do different stuff. The goal, says the developer, is to provide an "immersive and communal gaming experience."

"With its emphasis on small-group interactions, LAN Party stands apart from competitors like Discord. Discord serves large communities in a 2D format, LAN Party is tailored for smaller groups of up to 6 and offers an immersive 3D environment where gamers can connect more personally," said the developer in a press release.

Weirdly enough, it doesn't actually integrate any kind of LAN or even VLAN capability. LAN with no LAN. Keep up with me here: It's a fundamentally funny idea, some kind of recursive loop of gaming where we don't employ the concept of LAN parties enough anymore so we created an app that re-creates the concept of LAN via WAN using synecdoche: Merely the concept of sharing space is there, not the reality of it.

You can watch "together" in a representational way but not within physical space or actual gaming connectedness. This is the kind of stuff postmodern philosophers absolutely lived for.

You can find LAN Party on Steam, where it will release into early access.

Anyway, I'll be interested in the app when it simulates the part at the start of the LAN where you get together and spend several hours of your precious together time trying to get the networking apparatus to play nice and do we have enough cables to connect everyone's machines and let's figure out what game to play and what the hell do you mean Tim's computer is still running Windows 8 and "he thought it'd be fine"?