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Soaking Up the Urge Overkill at E3 - Photos & Visions*
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5180 Reads
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UPDATES BELOW
Check it: You just can't break down the E3 experience and stuff it into a neatly-labeled box.
Granted, it is the world's largest video game-industry convention. Yeah, it's a three-day orgy of sensory overload masquerading as an attempt to get deals made, games sold and millions entertained.
Sure, it brings hundreds of thousands of geeks, artists, coders, marketers, dealers, lawyers, writers, geniuses and dorks to the Los Angeles Convention Center - then it siphons millions of dollars from their pockets every day and spits them back out onto the sun-blasted sidewalk hours later without mercy, for the glassy-eyed slog back to their $25 parking places. But it's so much more ...
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Lifesize Katamari ball made of items donated by E3-goers |
Trying to write intelligently about the whole thumping, screaming, blinky-blinky multimedia mosh just buggers your concentration.
You have to write about the layers of noise, commerce, culture and desire.
By the time you think you've started making sense, you're actually shoving around a huge, sticky ball of disjointed ideas like the prince in Katamari Damacy. You just keep picking up more junk ...
So let's start with the junk: Where else but E3 would you want to stand in line for an hour while the guy in the Conan and the Knights of the Temple booth slowly blows up inflatable vinyl broadswords with a tiny electric pump for the 62 people in front of you?
The line for Legend of Zelda |
How many winking LED necklaces do you need? (And where the hell do you get those, anyway? I never found the swag line for 'em, and I know my kids would really have dug 'em.).
And how much of your precious time in wonderland is that logo'ed Tyvek drawstring backpack worth? You've got games to play, movies to watch, people to see.
But wait you must and grab swag you do, you think to yourself (as Yoda-esque you wax), staring around you at the sinister creatures and gorgeous vehicles booming across the 90-foot-wide video displays at Blizzard Entertainment.
Let's talk booths. The gargantuan architectural wonders of E3 are about as far from the old-school cloth-lined 8x10-foot science fair booths you might see at hearing-aid-dealers conventions as StarCraft: Ghost's techno-espionage heroine, Nova will be from Ms. Pac-Man.
Call of Duty erected a glorious game room shaped like the coastal artillery bunkers in the Maginot Line.
Rockstar Games installed several hundred feet of chainlink fence and parked kandyflake-kustomized tour buses for each of its titles right on the South Hall rug.
Your tax dollars at work. |
America's Army pitched an olive-drab command tent outside and called in air drops by the Golden Knights parachute team, who jumped from a big, whomping Chinook helicopter and whirligigged down through the smog for two-boot pinpoint landings smack on a big paper X set up in a parking lot.
Then there was the staggeringly massive Microsoft XBox "booth." No, really it was more like a two-story jetport conceived by Eero Saarinen, complete with disco floor lighting and aluminum-skinned doors into what appeared to be padded meeting cocoons - the better to shield the delicate sound of business being done from the noise, rabble and stink outside.
But maybe you were there for the hardware: If so, and you had a media pass, Msoft would let you into a bigger padded pod to see sneak previews of the XBox360.
Is this the real life? Or is this just fantasy? |
Daaaayyyyumn: I can't describe the specs on this box without hauling out the drool bucket.
In: up to four wireless controllers, your digital camera, MP3 player and as much personal info as you care to have distributed over a global gaming, chat, social and multimedia network of XB360 usesrs.
Inside: mysterious, assault-grade silicon churning data at 1 teraflop.
Out: Some of the most gorgeously rendered game imagery I've ever seen - hellacious zombies in Quake 4, a ridiculously beautiful cityscape where you can lay rubber and do donuts in the glossy-real Ferraris and Lambos of Project Gotham Racing.
The Microsoft booth's meeting corridor |
Oh, and heavily customizable chats, photo albums, soundtracks, personal profiles and other social-networking nodes built into the XB360 software and network are meant to tap the deepest urges of media-heads and Japanese schoolgirls worldwide.
Coming as it will several months ahead of Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Revolution, the next-gen XBox is well-positioned to pound them both to scrap in the market-share battle. I'm not easily impressed, and I was ... impressed.
But show's over, and you have to trudge onward, shuffling through the crowd in that stutter- step- bump- oh- excuse- me- ogleogleogle- head-shake pace that everyone winds up doing, like a good ol' Texas line dance or the Hustle - only geekier.
Things stop you in your tracks or, more precisely, icons: - Stan Lee signing Marvel-related stuff (Fantastic 4? I can't see through the mob) with a pleasant grin and a flourish.
- Traci Lords pouting for gawping fans' snapshots at the "True Crime 2" booth.
- Evel by-God Knievel moving around gamely on oft-shattered legs to pose with a glittering hog in support of his "Evelution" mobile game.
Traci Lords loves up the camera |
Then there are the unknown icons: The myriad "booth babes" poured into WAC uniforms to hand out rubber grenades for Call of Duty, shoehorned into ridiculous leather bustiers and Herman Munster platforms near the Stargate-SG1 jumpgate or doling out swag wearing little more than bikinis, body paint and endless Stepford smiles.
Jack Skellington claws the ceiling for Oogie's Revenge; a ninja-armored Mickey Mouse offers a giant key; And you wind up staring for a good 60 seconds and waiting for signs of breathing from what appears to be an actress in neon armor holding amazingly still - until you realize she's just a damn good sculpture with a lifelike face.
This guy was collecting booth babe autographs. Never took his eyes off them. They giggled - a lot. |
Two thousand thumbs twitch on a thousand and one controllers. Lush planetscapes come boiling off the screens (StarCraft: Ghost looks absolutely stunning) and the womblike dub of a million watts of gamesound bass pound your chest like a pile-driver cloaked in velvet.
Every 6 minutes, some game character's scream pierces the din: "RRRAAAWWWRRRRRRGGGGGHHHH!!!"
The natural response is stumbling, staring and stumbling some more.
That's how they move through the show - the thousands of soft targets for this assault, who believe in, build and feed off of this brash young medium. They're here to make deals, spy on the competition and take great, sucking gulps from the beer-bong of game-fantasy culture.
The new Batmobile - cross between a stealth fighter and a garbage scow, IMHO. |
While you start to get sick of the crowds, the hellacious noise and the now-cliche'd martial-arts body-slams infecting every single role-playing game in every single genre (doesn't matter whether it's Neo, Nova or some 10-foot-high demon with 24-karat-gold tsais, they're all looking so 1999), you have to love bathing in so much raw creativity, and wielding such unearthly power.
And maybe that's the sensation that's hardest to pin down, the very thing driving the industry that feeds E3: the human mind's need - in an unyielding world - to take control of something deep loud and raw.
On the other hand there's a human cost to so much fun: One dude staggered onto the exit escalator towards the sunshine, muttering, "All those lights 'n' sh*t were f*ckin' my eyes up!!!"
Too much fun. Must pass out. |
UPDATE:
More L.A. bloggers on the show:
- LAist's Paul Davidson on platform wars at E3 vs. Star Wars at the box office (he chooses the latter)
- LA.Comfidential's Alexandra blogs the parties
- Defamer does the Sony PSP party
- Pix galore from Sean Bonner at blogging.la.
- Musings on nerds, sensory overload and digital poker from Wil Wheaton.
- Jeff Koga with pix and parking pains
- Dan Hon on Starbucks hacking at la.foodblogging
- Eric's blogdowntown on the WiFi scam
Technorati: e3, game, games, gaming
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| Posted by: Mack_Reed on Friday, May 20, 2005 - 12:50 AM
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