The Gathering (LAN party)

Overview of The Gathering 2005

TG lasts for five days (from Holy Wednesday to Easter Sunday every year), and is both longer and bigger than most other computer parties. Most people tend to let their daily rhythm go and instead sleep as they see fit (many simply in front of their computer, but most people on the arena stands); for a lot of people most of the time is usually spent in front of a computer, but many like to use the opportunity to meet new or old friends in real life.

People have wildly different opinions about what constitutes a proper LAN party; the common trend at TG these years seem to be warez, games (the most popular being Counter-Strike), and IRC. However, many visitors find this too boring in the long run, and there are many unofficial mini-events happening all the time. Informal competitions to build the highest tower of soda cans are not uncommon, and people have been spotted having their own private mini-rave-parties put together by a few people and a PC with PA Systems.

TG has always been a hub for young creative people to battle it out in many types of competitions; demo coding, music, graphics, animation, games, hardware-modification and Dance Dance Revolution to name a few; in addition, there are usually concerts and other things happening live on stage once or twice a day, as well as seminars etc.

In the first years, the focus on TG was pretty much on demos, but as TG is held at the same time as Breakpoint, a German scene-only party (and the earlier Mekka & Symposium), many European demosceners have left TG in favour of BP, and TG, like the majority of other computer parties, has become more of a gamer event. The scene at TG still lives on, though, as TG has introduced features such as a demoscene-only area, "creative cashback" (those handing in entries to the creative competitions get a discount) and other demo-oriented events. In fact, you have to go back as far as 1996 to match the number of entries handed in to the creative competitions at TG04.

The organization Kreativ Aktiv Norsk Dataungdom (KANDU) is formally responsible for hosting TG. In addition, there are around 500 volunteers participating to make TG possible every year; these are collectively called the crew.

The TG crew is split into multiple sub-crews, such as a democrew (Event:Demo), a gamecrew (Event:Game), a first-aid crew (Security:Medic), a network crew (Tech:Net), a server crew (Tech:Server), as well as a logistics crew (Core:Logistikk) etc.. (The exact list varies somewhat from year to year.) Each of these has a chief who reports upwards, and is responsible for some aspect of the party.

All crew members are volunteers and unpaid; the only advantages a crew member has over a normal visitor are free entrance, access to a crew-only sleeping room and hot food served a few times a day. All members of the crew must arrive at the party place one day before the party itself starts, and stay one day after the party to aid in cleaning up afterwards. (Some people, such as chiefs, typically come even sooner.)

Everybody who wants can become crew (except for the Security and logistics crews, where there is a minimum age of 18), by applying at a special interface called wannabe. The chiefs usually pick their own crew, based on the applications coming in and previous experience. Crew members from earlier years must re-apply every year if they want to be crew again, but it is rare for a person having done a good job not to be selected the next year.

Up to and including TG01, TG tickets (as all other tickets to everything else happening in Vikingskipet) were sold by Billettservice, a company closely related to the postal service in Norway. Partly sold via the Internet, partly by phone (but always picked up at a local post office), the Billettservice system broke down hard every year as thousands of people tried to order tickets to the event simultaneously.

To try to make the ticket sales a bit more smooth, a group of people closely related to the administration of TG made a separate company called Partyticket (or Partyticket.net, PTN for short), selling unified ticket-related services (such as ordering, payment, seating, handling competitions etc.) to smaller and larger computer parties. Partyticket went online for the first time in 2002, and like Billettservice instantly went down under the massive load, partly due to a problem at the third-party service authorizing credit card transactions. However, the tickets were still sold out in a matter of hours.

2003 was not much better; a lot of problems had been fixed (and PTN had successfully managed the ticket sales for several other computer parties), but there were still problems left, and it was decided to postpone the ticket sales by one day to fix the problems that had been discovered. The sales went relatively smooth the next day.

In 2004, one hoped that one would finally see the end of the problems, especially as a new queuing system and new hardware was installed; however, the server again buckled under the enormous load, and the queueing system was found to be severely buggy, apparently shuffling people around in the queue at random. This frustrated a lot of visitors, many of which never got tickets at all. Many people blame the ticket-sales problems directly at PTN and has tried to pressure TG into choosing some other solution.

In 2005 the queuing system was changed. Instead of buying actual tickets, people were put in a virtual queue, thus loading the server a lot less during the peak hours. The next day, people were processed from the start of the queue (but no more than 200 at a time). This system ended up working a lot better than the queueing system from 2004, despite some misconceptions in the media.

Since 2006, however, there have been no major issues.

In 2007 the Norwegian Tax Authority demanded that taxes were to be paid for the tickets sold from 2001 to 2008, as it did not consider The Gathering to be a cultural event (all cultural events in Norway are exempt from paying taxes). Although the management of TG sent a complaint to the Tax Authority, it did not reconsider the demands. By August 8, the management of TG was required to pay 988,536 NOK in unpaid taxes, which could have caused the 2009 staging of The Gathering to be cancelled. If no money was paid by the August 8 deadline, the event could have been closed for good. However, on August 16, 2008, KANDU and The Gathering won the tax case and will temporarily be exempted from paying taxes for the tickets sold in 2006, 2007, 2008 and the future. Also, the law will be amended to secure this for all other computer parties in Norway. The stated reason for this decision is that The Gathering's purpose is to gather youth from inland and abroad so these can get together to cultivate a computer culture, and the Storting has declared in a white paper that computer gaming is considered culture.[3]

For The Gathering 2011 KANDU has signed an agreement for ticket sales with a company called Unicornis and their ticket system Geekevents. This agreement was for a three years period.

KANDU has signed a new contract with Geekevents AS, for a four-year period.

Most years, TG has a name or "tagline"; the tagline doesn't really mean much, but it still influences the logo (or the other way round) and some other material. A list of names includes:

Wikimedia Commons has media related to The Gathering (computer party).

• The Gathering official website
• KANDU website
• The Gathering on Pouët
• The Gathering: Computer Parties as Means for Gender Inclusion by Hege Nordli, an academic paper about The Gathering demo party and parties in general. (PDF)
• Various logos