At this moment it’s the second day in our Dutch island. I’m starting to settle and I am getting used to it all. I think it’s my first LAN-Party in about thirteen years where I don’t have a specific function or role, so I should just lay back and enjoy. Yesterday I had troubles with that (I was rather sick), today it’s much better. I talked to a lot of crew and informed about how things work over here, and how things are organized. Everything is very different over here than at Dutch lanparties, as are the problems they have here. Fun and interesting. Yesterday I got a big introduction and a lot of explanations about the network and the internet connection here. That was really interesting and informative. My biggest surprise was the relatively simple setup they use (outside from being big and huge). You can watch the usage of the connection yourself.

Meanwhile they closed the entrance where we came in. Only the main entrance is open now, which is quite a stylish one. A lot of people see this entrance a lot. At Dreamhack they have figured that it’s good for smokers to walk a lot. If you smoke, you can travel there every time. Our group is in hall B, which means you have to cross the hall, take up a flight of stairs to the game-expo, cross the expo and take a flight of stairs down to a hall with food and the restaurant. Then you get to the entrance hall, where you can go to the other end to go outside. After you’ve smoked, you can come in, get in line for checking your ticket (the wrist band) and you can travel back. All of this through a lot of people, quite some masses. A quick cigarette had become quite an expedition. I think that’s not very nice. When you have more than 10.000 people in an enormous building complex you would expect at least a few more exits, right?

Regarding that sort of stuff, you can clearly see the people are more free over here on how to take care of stuff. The lanes between the rows are quite small and people are tightly packed together. It brings some atmosphere and coziness, but it’s not something which would be allowed in the Netherlands. As you saw in my previous alinea, they have a game expo inside, in between the halls. The bad part is that this expo might be bigger than a Dutch gaming expo, which is just the expo. There is a lot to do, there are many big brands presented and there are Swedish army vehicles on display. There are some competitions too, which aren’t childish at all…

There is one stand for example, where you can win 100.000 dollars in cash. Not childish at all I say! There are a lot of small competitions there. You can clearly see the pro-gaming is big here. There are a lot of big prizes to be won with a lot of stuff. And you don’t have to be good. Gaming is very serious here. Not even eight hours of training a day is a guarantee for winning anything!

They did the grand opening yesterday. This wasn’t very impressive, just some text with music, followed by a movie of them building up, followed by a very short lasershow and that’s that. I think we normaly have better openings than that. It happened on a very big main stage with quite a lot of sound. I don’t mind that, especially for the people who chose to sit next to that with their gaming gear. Then you just ask for sitting in a lot of noise. There are quite a few big acts, bands and famous DJ’s there. What annoys me is that they play the sound in all the halls. Continuously and loud. Luckily the sound in our hall seems to have stopped, which has given us quite some peace for a while. The music that plays here now doesn’t shake my chair anymore and we are capable of having a conversation with the person sitting next to us ;-). Still however, the Swedish seem to like it, maybe we should just get used to it a little more. It’s possible some visitors even come for this reason, but it’s not my cup of tea.

Finishing I just have to say that it is HUGE here. I know I mentioned that before, but if you look at the picture next to this text, you might understand a bit better what I’m trying to say. I wasn’t able to find a place where I could picture the entire hall. And there are a few more halls! That brings me to another bad thing, the toilets. There aren’t very many. You can often see big waiting lines of people wanting to do a number 2. To be subtle, i find that frustrating. I’m very glad that we rented a small vacation bungalow so we can take a nice shower and have a good rest for example.

Clearly it’s an awing and strange happening, giving me a constant feeling of amazement and surprise, but also some incomprehension.

Steph Janssen

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