Parting Shot

Tom Chick has a man-purse

So, E3 is an overblown, overhyped explosion of cash and testosterone. What’s on tap for next week, Tom? A stop-the-presses exposé on the cuteness of puppies? The stunning revelation that Ron Howard movies are predictable? Relationship advice telling us that we won’t get anywhere until we pretend to listen when she starts talking about her feelings?

All due respect to your turns of phrase and fantastic scene setting—even though the ‘Konami man-purse’ line made me think of the Accolade man-purse that you were toting around South Hall at E3 1999—this isn’t exactly a new topic. It’s been in vogue to hate E3 since it moved to LA once and for all five years ago, partly because that’s when it first got really loud and partly because that’s when people started to understand that Randy Newman’s ‘I Love LA’ was actually ironicspeak for ‘I Hate LA.’ Does anyone like La-La Land anymore? Even Canucks like myself, still so stuck in Hicksville that we refer to Los Angeles with stupid nicknames that went out of fashion at the same time as Nehru jackets, are savvy enough to get this now, seeing as they’ve stopped playing the song whenever the LA Kings score in hockey games.

Loving Hitler

Anyhow, saying that you hate E3 these days is equivalent to saying you hate Hitler or secondhand smoke. Even people who have never been to one of these glam-rock whorefests seem jaded about the whole thing now. Maybe that’s because the show’s more console-centric now and I run with a PC crowd, although it’s hard to find any evidence of enthusiasm online or off anywhere. I ditched the show this year, begging off for good (I was just starting to plan a wedding) and not-so-good (I needed a couple weeks of crosstraining to handle all the hiking between the LA Convention Center exhibition halls) reasons. So did a lot of other people you and I know, both in and out of the business. I’m acquainted with just one person who got revved up about E3 this year, and he’s both an EB manager and one of those perky guys who gets up every morning with a song in his heart. Uh, not that I’d know anything about the latter first-hand—as much as I follow the trends, I’m having a traditional marriage this fall, not one of those Queer-As-Folk-approved Canadian specials that are all the rage up here right now.

But I do agree that changes have to be made with E3. Though I’d shift the blame away from the show and onto the gaming media outlets that build it into this all-kicking, all-dancing revue where Everything Will Be Unveiled. The crime isn’t the show’s excess, it’s that game websites and mags have turned nothing announcements like the polygon count in Half-Life 2 into the equivalent of revealing the Third Secret of Fatima. I wish the enthusiast game press could be more even-handed with how E3 is presented to readers. It’d be nice if someone would be up front about how the show isn’t meant for media, and that gamers shouldn’t expect to get any real information from the floor. Yet year after year, we get sites trumpeting live updates, as if the Convention Center were some kind of digital stock exchange. I’d gladly like to say sayonara to all of that, although I wouldn’t mind keeping the booth babes, the endless procession of B-list celebrities (not that I want to bring up Gary Coleman again, but hasn’t he been at the last three shows, representing three different companies and products?), and the wonderful sense of big, dumb extravaganza. Then again, Tom, you just spent three days wrapped up in that cocoon of stupidity and I’ve been away for a couple of years. So perhaps I just need a refresher course in how annoying the damn thing can be.