Daniel Stahl settles in the corner of his sofa with game controller, remotes and cell phone in hand.

Photo: Matt Ironside

Hazy blue light shines from four TV screens in Daniel Stahl’s West Seattle home. Each TV is connected to an Xbox, and the four Xboxes are linked through a Local Area Network (LAN). Stahl and eight teenage boys are playing with each other through the networked gaming consoles, but none of the players are speaking. It is dead silent.

“Now it’s just you and GOD,” someone whispers to Stahl, “and GOD doesn’t have steady hands.” None of the players move. They know someone is about to die.

Stahl, who is playing the profile of “dastahl” in the game Halo, is the last surviving player of the blue team. One of the teenagers, aka “GOD,” is the last member of the red team. The game isn’t going to end until one of them is shot.

Stahl pulls the trigger on his blue controller. The barely audible squeeze gives way to a louder shot of a sniper rifle on the TV. “Game Over,” says a war-callused voice. GOD is dead.

The teenagers erupt with emotion as the round ends. Groans are heard from the dining room (the red team) and cheers are heard from the living room (the blue team). Stahl says nothing, he stays put on his couch.

All of the boys are gathered in Stahl’s home for a biweekly Halo party, played on four Xbox videogame consoles. As usual, they are playing against each other on Halo 2, through their linked consoles. Console LAN parties entered the mainstream when the first Halo game, “Combat Evolved,” was released in 1999. Since then, the Halo franchise has sold more than 11 million copies of the game, according to gamepro.com.

Stahl’s collection of board games.

Photo: Matt Ironside

For tonight’s party, four TVs and four Xboxes are needed for everyone to play. In addition, a network router is required to connect the consoles to each other. Amid the high-tech equipment, soda cans line the floor and pizza is everywhere.

The odd thing about the party is its host. Stahl is 34, more than 10 years older than his teenage guests. “Stahl. Is that like a bathroom stall?” one of the teenagers asks. “Yeah, something like that,” Stahl laughs back. He fits right in.

Stahl’s house is a gamer’s dream. His living room hosts two massive TVs, one a 46-inch plasma screen and the other a 32-inch HDTV. Underneath the TVs is a sea of DVD cases containing Xbox games, movies and TV shows.

His high-tech living room makes him the favorite host for Halo parties. But Stahl says that the technological aspect of the parties is not what he enjoys most, it is the community. He likens the parties to recess, and Halo, to kickball.

“When you were on the playground playing kickball, you enjoyed playing those big games,” Stahl says. “Some people were better than others, but everyone felt that if they do something good, they will get recognized.

“It’s so funny to me now that so much of my recess behavior has continued on. LAN parties allow me to experience playing kickball in my living room with 16 guys— we are the class.”

Stahl says that he first experienced a gaming community when he was a child attending family reunions: “My grandfather would always require everyone to play games at night. He would always bring Risk.” Stahl’s grandfather so loved the game that he hand painted his black wooden pieces.

“We would play a full, eight-person Risk,” Stahl says. “Nowadays, you never hear about anyone doing that. There were always eight people to start and people would get eliminated right off the bat. And the old boys would play all night until someone won.”

Stahl was first introduced to computers in elementary school: “I got the teacher’s permission to stay after school because I wanted to learn how to program. I had seen the movie ‘Tron’ and Jeff Bridges’ character, Flynn, was a computer programmer. I thought to myself, ‘I want to be Flynn.’

“This guy had everything that I wanted: his house was a giant arcade, he was the best video game player in the world. He was a game programmer on top of that and he saves the day by becoming a video game character. (After) I saw that movie, I never wanted to be anything but that – I wanted to be a computer programmer involved with games.”

Stahl lies on his floor, twiddling with cords. The Xbox made by his employer, Microsoft, isn’t working. He is trying to access Microsoft’s Xbox Live online service and is receiving only error messages in return. He unplugs cords in the back and plugs them back in. He resets his console. He can’t play online.

Stahl works as a manager of Microsoft’s Xbox Web site. He has worked as a board game designer and as a Web site manager for Wizards of the Coast, and is currently working on integrating the Xbox with online communities.

Stahl plays Battlefield 2 with 20 other players, divided into two teams, all playing remotely but connected through the games servers. .

Photo: Matt Ironside

He remembers a time when gaming communities were small, secluded and populated by social outcasts. He says he used to feel like “an oddity,” because he wanted to play games. This desire soon turned into an obsession:

“I remember many nights when games like “Civilization” and “Excom” would come out and I would literally come home from work and start playing and not stop playing until it was time to go to work. I would realize that I hadn’t slept. It was very addictive.”

He says he eventually took a hiatus from video games. His break ended, though, when he discovered online gaming though America Online in the early 1990s and Sierra’s Imagination Network: “You had to pay these enormous fees – I was paying about $350 a month to play pool online with one other person. (There) was a group of about 2,000 people who were spending every dollar that they owned just to play online.”

The most interesting thing to Stahl at this time was the opportunity to chat online. “The fact that you could chat with somebody that you could get to know while playing these games became such a huge social phenomenon for me,” Stahl said. “The fact that I could log in and see that there [were] thousands of people just like me that want to play gave me a feeling that I was part of a group of people.”

The thumb that gets it done.

Photo: Matt Ironside

In the corner of Stahl’s living room is a stack of imported board games from Europe. Games like Formel Fun from Germany lie on top of cult hits like Munchkin. Stahl says his collection of games makes him feel in-the-know. He has people over to play them every Thursday. But he especially looks forward to his next Halo party:

“The thing that I enjoy the most about Halo parties is that you can include a lot of players in the same thing, yet everyone feels like they are doing something. Show me a board game that you can play with 16 players. It doesn’t exist.”