For as much griping as we do about E3 and all its preparations (just wait until you see tomorrow’s Top Ten list), when it comes right down to it, the annual trade show is still one of those occasions we look forward to every year. Maybe it’s because our wives’ friends label us geeks for playing and writing about videogames, and E3 lets us mingle with “our kind.” Maybe it’s because we want to see what’s coming down the pipe, and we haven’t quite honed our ESP to the point where we just Know. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s our desire to eat and drink on someone else’s tab for three days.
Come to think of it, that’s probably it.
Even so, these are still tangential reasons for what gets us so hot and bothered about E3. And so that’s why we wanted to share with you our:
Top 10 Things We Love About E3
10. Seeing the new games
This one’s boring, but it’s true. We get as geeked about hot new games as the next guy, and getting to play them months before they come out is just surreal. Just help us forget the bad ones; we might lose faith in our hobby otherwise.
9. E3 newbies lugging around overflowing tchotchke bags
Lesson Number One: only take what you will actually use or sell. Lesson Number Two: “donate” all the other stuff to an E3 first-timer so you can watch him break a sweat lugging it around the Convention Center. It’s hours of fun for the whole family.
8. Playing games on a display the size of our garage
You know what they say about guys with fancy cars? If the same holds true for videogames, every publisher at E3 is about as endowed as a hair follicle. But God bless their millimeter peters, because without them we’d never see games on TVs this big.
7. Creative booth design
If ever engineering could be cool, E3 is that opportunity. Somebody actually has to design multi-tiered, speaker-laden, light-pulsing booths that somehow stay intact as thousands of people stomp all over them. Booth design is probably the most easily overlooked aspect of E3, but it’s not lost on us.
6. Sharing a room with four other people
We’re all grown men, so the thought of a communal crapper is less scary than it once was. Instead, we focus on the beer, pizza and camaraderie we get to share between the last party of the night and the first press conference of the day. It’s like summer camp for gamers, only none of us is stuck in the bunk below The Pissing Boy.
5. eBay
As you probably gathered from Number Nine above, E3 can darn near fund itself if you pick up the right items and hit the popular auction site a few hours later. Are we evil? We prefer the terms “capitalistic” or “opportunistic.” And it’s not exactly like we thought of this one on our own.
4. Watching E3 virgins flee from Kentia Hall
We’re friends with people who show their games in Kentia because it’s the most affordable venue in which to exhibit. But there’s still a reason people say “Kentia” sounds like “can’t ya,” as in “can’t ya make a decent game?” There are definitely some gems down there, but E3 virgins have a knack for finding all the other stuff. And it’s funny as hell to watch them run away in horror.
3. Los Angeles sunshine
We don’t live in LA. We don’t even live in California. We’re from Oregon, and Washington, and Michigan, and Toronto. Places where hot days can be counted on one hand. E3 may be inside the Convention Center for eight hours, but the minute the closing bell sounds, we’re out.
2. The parties
They may not involve pajamas and sorority girls, but the parties at E3 are still of epic proportions. Sure, they take away from our time to write, but we do have to eat and drink. We may as well do so in style — and while someone else pays the bill.
1. For one week, we’re not all dorks
For 51 weeks, videogames are the redheaded stepchild of the business world, ridiculed for being immature, bashed for being violent, and mocked for trying to aspire to an art form. But for the week of E3, gamers rule the roost. And you’d better believe we love it.