Do you like to get together with your friends and play nonstop online games for an entire weekend? This actually has a name. It's called a LAN party. You can host a gaming world on your own dedicated server, then everyone gets together to play a common game. First and foremost, this allows you to keep the game friendly with only your select groups of friends playing. Secondly and probably the more compelling of the two reasons is the ability to configure the options / mods you want enabled in the game yourself. The world of online games has grown considerably over the years. No more text adventure games where you are in a maze of twisty little passages. Instead, today’s dedicated hardware can easily handle the graphical and networking needs of managing a whole world among a group of friends. What might you install and play on your own dedicated servers? Here’s a list of 5 of the most popular. Recent versions of Battlefield and Call of Duty are certainly popular. However, you can’t set up their latest releases on your own dedicated hardware anymore. 1) Minecraft Minecraft comes to us out of Sweden, or Redmond once the $2.5 billion deal with Microsoft goes through. More than 50 million units have sold across all its platforms, such as Xbox, PlayStation, and Android. It also has versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux that you can install yourself. With all that said, what exactly is Minecraft? They provide you with a big open world to do what you’d like. There are no real objectives, but you build, mine, and fight to advance yourself in the game. On public servers, you have to be wary of those causing chaos, but that’s the reason you’re reading this and want to set up your own server. On your own server, you can collaborate with friends to build or mine more, or just to fight them. Have fun in either game mode, Creative or Survival. 2) Sid Meier’s Civilization V Originally available for DOS on the pre-Windows PC back in 1991, the game has evolved considerably from the early days and is available on numerous platforms. It is a turn-based strategy game, in which you act on a macro-scale to take a civilization from nothing up to the space age and beyond. You take on the persona of the leader of an ancient or modern civilization, and you get special attributes accordingly. You get to battle against the other civilizations to see who outlasts everyone else. One nice feature of Civilization V is that game mods can be installed from within the game environment. 3) Counter-Strike: Global Offensive The Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS: GO) game is the latest release in the Counter-Strike series that began back in 1999. It is a first-person shooter type game. You can play as either a terrorist or counterterrorist whose sole objective is to destroy the other team. There are different missions you can play, like bomb or hostage, or timed death matches. There is even an offline mode, where you play against AI-based robots if you have no friends. 4) Serious Sam 3: BFE BFE here stands for Before the First Encounter. It acts as a prequel to the original game in the series. It is another first-person shooter game and is reminiscent of the original Doom series with lots of blood and gore. Multiplayer gaming options include last team standing, capture the flag, and deathmatch. 5) Dota 2 Defense of the Ancients is the Dota acronym expansion. It is a battle arena game in which two teams of up to five players battle to destroy the opposition’s Ancient. Be one of the 100+ heroes, which in and of itself is a daunting task to understand their specialties. You’re limited in what you can carry, and it's a complex world to fully understand, so it's a slow start to enjoyment. But, it's a great game to play for that LAN party weekend once everyone is comfortable with the game play. Each game has its own specific hardware requirements. Setup is also dependent on the number of users you are planning to support. Keep in mind that the server needs to send more to the network than it needs to download. If you’re running a local LAN party, those speeds are less of an issue as everything is local. However, you should consider at least 100 Mbps network speed if you host your dedicated server on a public network. In short, when creating your gaming server, have fun. But more importantly, don’t forget to stop and eat. While you and your friends will enjoy playing in a dedicated world, life goes on beyond and should not be forgotten. Be sure to set reasonable limits on gameplay. Finally, make sure to have a look at this article on the basics of dedicated server protection and this article on why you should have your own dedicated game server!