So it's the E3 season again, and what better time to ruminate?
I always feel a little bittersweet about E3. I mean, it was formative, right? I spent, subjectively, years of my childhood wandering those halls, being blasted by the concentrated marketing of an entire industry, each booth competing to outdo the next in spectacle. I still remember that fabulous emerald staircase, ascending to the radiant portals of the convention halls. And beyond those doors?
Untold delights.
Well, no, not really. I spent a lot of time looking for food and drink. I was lean and hungry in those days. I would swig down free Bawlz-brand energy drinks, swoop on leftover sandwiches from the conference attendees.
Later, belly full, I would sit in the cozy demo rooms and squint down into the maze of booths, trying to divine the future in the way people bounced from one to another.
Those were good times. I would leave with some small piece of insight, enough of a wardrobe to last the entire year (although it lacked somewhat in the pants department), and the sense that I'd been a part of something grotesque. Grand and monstrous -- perhaps too much so for our world.
So of course I wasn't surprised when they scaled it back, made it tiny. It'd been clear for years that this wasn't working. When I stood in Sony's lavish future-kitsch demo pod, all chrome and white and complete with a Bloody Mary bar, I could hear the business case for that room collapsing. It wasn't getting to the right people, because the right people were already overwhelmed.
When I saw Infinium's E3 spectacle and collected my free t-shirt, I thought it might save them -- but it didn't. And if E3 couldn't work that miracle, then what good was it, really? What good, six weeks (estimated) of creative effort, untold millions in travel, bob alone knows how much equipment? E3 set the industry back, some estimate, by two months every year. Every time I attended, I wondered what they could have made with those two months.
And now it's back, and even though they say it's going to be more reasonable this time around. . . they always say that.
Me? I'm looking forward to my new wardrobe.
words from chris, 2009-06-04 01:25:56, los angeles
