Gaming or sharing at LAN-parties - what is going on?

Over the last few years there have been a lot of discussions about sharing of digital content over the Internet as well as University networks. In parallel, temporary local networks have been established on a regular basis to facilitate multi-player gaming. The similarities between these networks and University networks, both in technical terms and user profiles, provides the motivation to further explore this new phenomena of LAN-parties, currently unknown to most researchers and practitioners, to better understand if they have any impact on content distribution. Using empirical data coming from a survey conducted at various LAN-parties, we find that: gaming is not a dominant motivation to attend LAN-parties; the average amount of files provided and downloaded at these events is much higher than on P2P networks; free-riding is present for all kinds of content; and LAN-parties tend to favor sharing of larger files such as movies compared to P2P networks.