Another year, another E3, but this one, as has been said eighteen thousand times, was not like the E3s of old. Nobody was sure what to expect when we got to Santa Monica--even now, after it's all over, we're not quite sure what we got--but at least it wasn't the complete disaster that many were predicting and dreading.
So does the new E3 work? Did it achieve what it set out to do? Did anyone win, and if so, who? Although Chris and I were at the same show, we saw different aspects of it, so hopefully my thoughts won't overlap with his take on last week's events too much.
"What do you think of the new E3" was a question everyone was asking, and the answer usually depended on what the respondent did for a living. The journalists had a love/hate relationship with the entire thing. On the one hand, it was great not having to shout over eardrum-shattering music or shoulder your way through Final Fantasy-loving Petco employees to get to a developer at a booth. Appointments were conducted in normal speaking tones, and with actual developers, not a random PR drone who couldn't go any further than bullet points from a sales sheet. From the standpoint of actually trying to gather information about the games, it was lovely.
On the other hand, nobody seemed to factor travel time into their schedules, so appointments and press conferences constantly ran late. Walking from one side of the LA Convention Center's North Hall to the other may only take a minute or two, but getting from one hotel to the next was usually at least a fifteen minute walk. Journalists were constantly late, running behind, and forced into doing a sort of on-the-fly triage. Can I miss this next appointment? What games can I skip? Is the Barker Hanger actually worth it?
Ah, the Barker Hanger. Great in theory, not so great in practice. At the old E3, if you couldn't get face time with a developer you could, at a minimum, at least walk up to a booth, play the game, and have its major points explained to you by someone. Not so much at Barker Hanger. There were precious few people on hand to help at all, and those that were there were usually playing games themselves. At Konami, for example, I was completely ignored while two different people in Konami t-shirts traded off the controller to play My Beautiful Katamari.
Also, given that the Hanger was a good 20-30 minute ride in either direction, you had to be willing to commit a serious chunk of time to visiting it, and time was one thing that was always in short supply. Ultimately, it didn't matter all that much, as just about everything there was playable somewhere else at the show, if a) you knew where and b) had an appointment.
The developers themselves were of two minds about the new format."I ________ leave the hotel at all," was their response, with those who liked the new E3 filling in the blank with "don't have to" and those who didn't opting for "don't get to". They definitely liked being able to talk to us journalists without the distractions of the show floor, but most of them were disappointed that they didn't really get to see anything other than their own hotel suite.
So does this new format work? For the most part, yes. Tweak the scheduling a bit, get hotels that are closer together (and/or better equipped to handle a room full of people armed with laptops and video cameras) and it should all work just fine. I do think, however, that it would be beneficial to open it up a bit to a bigger slice of the gaming media.
Don't get me wrong--the smaller number of people there was marvelous, but it necessarily limited the scope of the information that was being piped out of the event. I met folks from several different flavors of Official Playstation Magazine and Official Xbox Magazine, for example. Of course they should all be there, but with only so many invites to go around, is it fair that great a percentage of them be going to "Official" publications?
A very different issue was highlighted by the guy from the Chicago Sun Times sitting next to me at Killzone. He was really very nice, but he didn't seem to know all that much about video games. It's certainly important for the industry to get coverage in mainstream media, but again, with space so limited, it seems unfair to give quite so much of it up to people who don't actually know what's going on, as opposed to, for example, an independent gaming site.
The problem, of course, is separating the wheat from the chaff, the small site that is genuinely trying to say something from the site hastily slapped together so that its webmaster can scam a pass into E3. It is, perhaps, too monumental a job, but the alternative seems to be having the same relatively small group of people reporting on the games over and over again, and when it comes to information, having more choices can only be a good thing.
Really, though, what I think is irrelevant. You people are the ones who matter, because you're the ones that read all of the coverage. What did you think? Did you have enough of a selection? Were there enough perspectives provided? Did this year's E3 seem lacking to you, or are you satisfied?
