Networking 101

My kids all have their own devices now and, like many kids, they love to play Minecraft. The first time they played a networked game together (their first time do this in any game) they were full of such giddy excitement. Of course, that was immediately followed by immense strife once the youngest started blowing up all of their buildings with TNT.

Like most things local network these days, clients auto discover running games making it quick and easy to join. Of course, sometimes this doesn't work leading to much agony and suffering. In reflecting on this ease of setup, I couldn't help but feel like an opportunity to start learning some networking basics was missed.

Not to sound too crotchety and old, but in my day you had to at least learn what an IP address and a port were in order to get a LAN game going. While I could sit my kids down and say "today we're going to learn about IPv4", that is would most certainly be met with eye rolls, moans, and back flops onto the couch. But, that conversation might go a little differently if it was necessary to make the game work.

People need motivation to learn; I certainly did not set out to learn networking on my own "just 'cuz". It was because I wanted to play network games with my friends. This lead to learning about network hardware, cabling, IPv4 local network basics, game servers vs clients, running web servers hosting CGI programs (gotta have those stats and forums), dynamic IPs and port blocking on residential lines, and DNS.

I guess I will have to find another way to work in that lesson; maybe when they're ready to graduate from a tablet to a PC.