May 26, 2004
Frag Festival 45 hours of networking
100 area computer game enthusiasts attend Frag Fest 8 at Civic Center
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
It was a BYOC event: Bring Your Own Computer.
This weekend's Traverse City Frag Fest 8 drew more than 100 area computer gamers and enthusiasts for 45 straight hours of playing. Held at the Grand Traverse County Civic Center, the Local Area Network, or LAN, party started at 3 p.m. on Friday and ended on Sunday at noon.
Admission was either $15 in advance or $20 at the door, plus the added fee of your own computer and sundry accessories. A network and servers plus pizza and pop were provided - the latter fuel that kept gamers going nonstop for days at a time as they played Counter-Strike, Call of Duty and Battlefield.
Even a virus invasion did not stop the action for long as a roomful of techies means a quick solution.
"We got a virus because someone did not have their system updated and we used a cell phone with a modem to download a patch and distributed it," said Kyle Anderson of Grand Rapids, a St. Francis High School graduate and one of the event's organizers.
Anderson and two other high school gaming buddies, also now in college, have hosted eight Frag Fests over the past two years.
The first Frag Fest was just a half day long, but the 80 enthusiastic gamers who attended showed Fred Kilbourn that there was demand for more. Three months later, a two-and-a-half-day event drew 60 players and an institution was born.
"When it's here, everyone gets to see each other, look at their computers and talk," said Kilbourn, who is studying computer information systems at DeVry University in Chicago. "It is just a much more social environment than sitting around and doing it in your basement."
Kilbourn and Anderson were part of a core of friends who played computer games during high school, usually at Kilbourn's house. As the crowd grew, his mother asked them to find somewhere else to play.
"Eventually it got big enough with my friends that my mom didn't want it there anymore," he recalled. "So I thought, 'Why not rent someplace and charge admission and cover some of my costs.'"
Kilbourn has reflected on the violent reputation of the computer games favored by the high school and college age players, usually male, who attend Frag Fests. He said players realize they are playing a game and he does not believe it is a danger to anyone.
"It is a friendly environment, everyone is here to play video games," Kilbourn said. "As for the violence, I think that that argument is personally not a very good one."
"I know all sorts of people who play these games all the time and it not the video game that is the problem," he added. "I don't think that games are going to cause kids to be violent."
Many of the participants settled in for the duration of the Frag Fest 8, bringing extra food, pillows and stamina. They took occasional naps at their computer or on a bench, though these activities were invitations for pranksters.
"I slept for a couple of hours but you wake up duct taped to things," said Cody Hulett, a junior at Kingsley High School. "I was duct taped to a bench and the kid next to me was duct taped to his chair."
Hulett and his cousin, Brandon Hulett, both enjoyed the camaraderie of the group event as well as the chance to learn new gaming strategies.
"Playing games by yourself is fun but it's a lot more fun to play in a group," said Brandon Hulett, also a junior at Kingsley High School. "You learn a lot of stuff about general computer things here, which is real useful because a lot of us will go into jobs in the computer industry."