I weep over the lifeless husk that was E3.
That's a lie. I hated it.
Here are a few words I wrote on it a few months ago, when the event was still fresh in my mind.
For three days in May, everything in the games industry grinds to a halt, as the interactively obsessed descend on a sunny patch of cement in Los Angeles to witness and to celebrate the next revolutions in interactive entertainment. To survive, they must have stamina, painkillers and resistance to a profound amount of hype because E3 is a non-stop rollercoaster of sales pitches and self-congratulation.
Personally, I have scant tolerance for the rush and bumble of E3. Walking through the Los Angeles Convention Centre during the event is like falling into a giant blender with a string of Christmas lights and the large proportioned occupants of Nuts magazine. No matter how much I would love to get lost in that sensory orgasmic soup of hysteria, I just can't fall into step with the seventy thousand eager fans responding like zombies with ADD to every baying call of "Look at me!". If I must be around that many people, I'd rather spend three days in the mud in a field in Wiltshire listening to over-produced mainstream pop than jostling with a guy whose shirt says, "You had me at Halo" for access to two minutes on a controller.
Perhaps my reticence to attend the show is because I don't feel I'd get anything new out of it that I wouldn't be able to gain from watching the river of video from the comfort of my own office. Any hands on access, statistics or insights from developers are dutifully blogged/photographed/published by people who are there, so why spend the cash to get out to LA and be manhandled by pressing crowds when I can get the press releases delivered to my RSS feed?
Ultimately, the reason E3 holds no interest for me is that it's about the new games that are coming out and nothing more. It's a series of sales pitches. E3 is about the public face of the industry, not the brains behind the innovations.
The job of the people who man the booths is to try to court and wow the tens of thousands of congregated journalists with flashy stage dressing and two and a half minutes of allotted game time. To that end, column inches have profound social capital in events like these. Unless you're part of the elite journalist bracket, trying to get your hands on the key titles and systems is like chasing smog through the San Fernando Valley. Ironically, the best vantage point is away from the epicentre, and not in the thick of it. If you don't have the clout or the blagging power to get behind the scenes, you're stuck in a 4 hour queue with no escape. You may as well be downloading the proceedings from home.
What other events have to their credit that E3 doesn't is that they're not just about flogging, they're about examining what has been done well before and what can be done better in the future to produce new and innovative experiences. The talks which dominate other industry shows provide insight into the processes behind the creation of games which capture the public's imagination. Now that's my kind of games event.
E3 is a glorified press briefing. It's nothing more than three days of showboating, providing journalists fodder to contemplate during the barren summer months when publishers slow down the flood of game releases. But ultimately, this annual display of bravado is a necessary evil to gain the attentions of mainstream media sources, and in this objective it's been hugely successful. Thankfully, for the sake of sanity, there's only one E3. Pass the aspirin.
