The Evolution of E3
While by most standards E3 2009 was a huge success, it hasn't always been that way.
By Liana K, GamingExcellence
Posted June 17, 2009
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The proverbial "they" claim that life goes in cycles. Everything has happened before. Everything will happen again. It was hard not to think about that as I made my way down to Los Angeles, California, to attend this year's E3.
This monster of a video game expo has been pronounced dead or dying so often over the past few years that it's hard not to laugh. It's funny for a medium responsible for the term "respawn" to pronounce something D.O.A just because its health bar gets low. So I wanted to offer a different perspective on the past and present of this fabled, infamous event, as someone who's been going for a while.
Anyone who's attended E3 for any length of time wonders how it keeps functioning in the first place, but accepts that it keeps stumbling along in a state of eternal chaos. Because it exists so organically, it's been a great way to check the pulse of the video game industry.
I started going to E3 three years ago, the last time it was a massive, all-under-one roof spectacle. The Xbox 360 was the only next-gen console on the market. PlayStation was still floating its fake PS3 controller redesign. The Nintendo Wii was something most attendees snickered at.
It was admittedly overwhelming, and I had no idea what I was doing. I'd never heard "do you have an appointment?" so often in one day. And, of course, I had no appointments. That was my first understanding that E3 was so big that it draws more media than it can handle, and its supply of time can't keep up with the demand.
That was also my first experience with the "booth babe", a being whose effectiveness I acknowledge but really don't understand. It's funny, because, every year someone thinks I'm a booth babe, then gets confused when I start asking them about their product's specs.
Before you think these poor guys are sexist boobs, factor this in: there are, among the tens of thousands at any E3, about thirty women in attendance who are not booth babes or company reps. About ten of us know a damned thing about games, and I think eight of us have at one point or another appeared on G4TV. This is still the reality of the gaming media.
My second year at E3 was the year everything changed. The show moved out to Santa Monica, which meant better restaurants, a view of the beach, and a whole new kind of chaos. The big three console companies had installed themselves at various hotels, production studios, high school amphitheatres, and even an airplane hangar, and the media spent most of our time on buses, stuck in infamous Southern Californian traffic, calling our next appointments to tell them we were going to be late. Oddly enough, I met a lot of people that way. I also remember that there were a lot of free drinks that year, and very little substance to the presentations.
That format was roundly pronounced a failure. Grouchy, carsick attendees snickered at Wii Fit.
My third year attending, 2008, was another kick at the new-and-improved" can, this one an invitation-only media event, back under one roof, but with a much smaller show floor. Instead, the focus was on the various lounges, scattered throughout the convention center. For television interviews, it was great because it was much quieter, but it didn't have the buzz about it of the Tokyo Games Show or Leipzig, which were still massive feasts for the eyes. Securing an invite, however, was tricky: you needed to know someone who knew someone on the American side of a given company. Then you had to make sure everything got communicated to the proper channels. Furthermore, all of the big press conferences were carried live via cable television networks, unfiltered and uncritiqued, so all that was left for web media to do was what most web media does best: complain.
And the complaining began in earnest. Despite more information and easy access to top developers, many found the format lacking. The spectacle and excitement just weren't there.
So the industry picked itself off, dusted itself off, and went back to the big spectacle, just in time for North America to be put off by big spectacles, thanks to the limping economy. With that came newly "rigorous" (ie: invasive) information policies regarding press registration, without a corresponding accountability that allowed us to make sure sensitive information went where it was supposed to go. After providing information normally appropriate for a passport application over the internet -- and then re-providing it at E3's suggestion because no one would bother to check whether my documentation had, in fact, arrived -- I discovered that the accreditation process took so long that there were no appointments left for many companies.
Does this make sense? Absolutely not, but if things made sense, it wouldn't be E3. The absurdity, to the initiated, is part of the process, fodder for pleasant conversation between gamers, much like colleagues in other fields discuss the weather or professional sports.
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