The E3 Trip

Since things have calmed down somewhat, I can finally get around to addressing this.

There’s not too much to tell about that beginning as I’ve written about that here already, but the actual E3 itself is… to put not too fine a point on it, total chaos. Arriving at the Los Angeles Convention Center and seeing the waves and waves of industry related humanity crashing on the doors was an intimidating sight. Heck, while I was waiting in line to get in, the president of Nintendo America went waltzing past with an entourage of lackeys that I found both impressive and disappointing at the same time, kind of like “Well, the president of fun shouldn’t be so… corporate.”

I have discovered one thing about the E3. Though I’ve been wanting to attend this event for years, now that I’ve gone, I never want to repeat the experience again. While it is insanely cool to be able to play games months or even years before anyone else does, the noise, the PR smog, and most important of all, the Marketing Frenzy all tend to kill the fun. I got a kick out of playing the games, and I got a real kick out of talking to the developers, who all seem to be real, genuine geeks that I can relate to. But the whole Booth Babe, Marketing Rep, “Hey, let’s do dinner, hey here’s my card, hey, let’s catch up the next time I’m in town and see what we can do for each other…” All this stuff, while necessary cogs in the vast machine that is now gaming industry, really kill the purity of the whole enterprise, that being, these are games and should be FUN. The developers get that. The players get that. Everyone else around them does not.

So while I was very nearly catatonic with glee over messing with Heavenly Sword on the PS3, or Guitar Hero 2, and while it was righteous cool to talk to the Red Octane guys about Guitar Hero and tell them to their face, “You have no idea how happy that game made me,” and while it was MINDBLOWING to see Will Wright actually demo Spore… All of this is also let down by the noise and static and sheer mean spirited greed that is the artifice and mechanism that frames these efforts.

I guess that’s why I prefer to be a gamer and game reviwer rather than a software development public relations flunky. The job just seems irritating, thankless and not a whole lot of fun.

Speaking of games, it’s back to Kingdom Hearts 2 for me. This time for 100% and the secret ending movie…