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E3 Expo - Play Yourself (UPDATED Friday, 11:47 p.m.)
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7253 Reads
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UPDATE: Show's over. It was huge.
Memo to the L.A. Times: Next time, try sending someone who's played a game or two and can write intelligently about the scene in context, not a cultural anthropologist with a superiority complex and all the objectivity of a scientist who's discovered a new type of germ - the type she loathes. (to log in and read the LAT piece: username: "lavoice" password: "lavoice")
To read Mary MacNamara, you'd think gamers are little better than brain-dead violence junkies. Then again, consider the appetites of an audience catered to by the creators of the poor fellow pictured here ...
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Posted Thursday, 12:29 a.m.:
After a few hours at E3, you feel like this. (click to ENLARGE) |
The doors have been flung open for the 10th annual Electronic Entertainment Exposition. The combination business circus, candy shop and interactive mosh pit sucks millions of dollars into L.A.'s economy, and hundreds of thousands of game developers, marketers, journalists and addicts from all over the planet into the L.A. Convention Center.
This year, the thunderous stroboscopic overload in the South Hall is staggering. People hunch over slick Nintento and Playstation consoles that pump out high-def, widescreen dragon battles, robot wars and magic quests. Live demonstrations geyser up around the hall, spewing a polychromatic stew peppered with faeries, knights, soldiers and badasses. But what's really striking is the truth about gaming found at the core of this madhouse jungle of pixels and flesh:
Your tax dollars at work: An Army field robot on display for "America's Army" |
After wandering the packed convention halls for six hours, two thoughts crystallized for me:- American civilization has yoked its highest technology and creativity to denying reality;
- And it excels at creating alternate realities that are - minute for minute - a helluva lot more colorful, empowering and intense than (read: preferable to) real life.
So much so that when real U.S. Army soldiers slinging real M1s stand there in next-gen full-Kevlar battle gear shilling for "America's Army - Special Forces" they literally pale in comparison to the sweating, panting 64-bit grunt's-gunsight view scorching the massive color display overhead.
Everquest II: Note to self - pink burlap tunic might clash with ice-blue tribal tats ... |
So much so that you could spend about an hour just choosing the color of your skin, shape of your eyes, heft of your body and cut of your hair before even confirming the character you'll play in "Everquest II" so you can finally start smashing wraiths with electric-blue sword blows.
One more thought emerges: You are what you do.
That's why most of us would rather fell demons with an axe than file our taxes. And why the XBox Live games network running in the cavernous South Hall connected so many people wanting to smite, shoot, gut, pummel, outrun, outwit and out-fake each other via 2D avatar. With $50 dreams into which anyone could disappear happily for months at a time, it's small wonder the gaming industry is eating Hollywood's lunch.
If the quality of the work is any indicator, Electronic Arts, Capcom, Namco, Blizzard, Activision, Atari and Calabasas-based THQ are sinking huge sums of cash back into their talent pools. There is some mindblowingly gorgeous stuff on display at the Convention Center:
Square Enix's "Final Fantasy XII brings the evil beastmasters to snorting, slashing life with a vivid clarity powered by the highest polygon-per-second count since Final Fantasy XI.
"Star Wars Galaxies" sends massive AT-AT walking tanks striding across a snowy battlefield, and an army of Imperial storm troopers charging toward the tip of your light saber.
Mr. Incredible gets tough |
Pixar's Mr. Incredible (and Mrs. Incredible) lunge through the jungle in "The Incredibles, dispatching thugs and creeps with mutant judo and aerobatic kick-fu. (The movie looks good, too!)
Atari's almost hallucinatorily photo-real Driv3r puts you behind the wheel of a rust-eaten, rally-striped Camaro, screaming down the blacktop through rain-washed cityscapes.
And "Pikmin2 ("This is like CRACK," my brother-in-law gushes) lets you command an army of turnip-like minions that you yank from the ground, rally around yourself with a magic whistle and dispatch to battle huge beetles in backyard weedpatches with the dimensions of rain forests.
Pre-briefings and between-rounds scenes that had all the subtlety of stick-figure animation five years ago now crackle with cinematic clarity, all funky camera angles and CG lens-halation effects. "Fight Club" looks like, well, "Fight Club," the movie, all grit, sweat and X-rayed bone fractures.In fact, the state of the art now surpasses some of the best movie special effects to the point where - given a choice of passive story reception or active story-making, the gaming world is looking like the intelligent choice for anyone who wants to tailor their denial of reality for the rest of their life.
In aid of this comes the very bleeding edge of gaming technology, on display in full force at E3. Nintendo showed off its wi-fi DS hip-top game deck, Playstation its PSP.
The dragon's better half |
But the one gadget that completely sucked my eyeballs out of my head and my tongue onto the floor was NVidia's 3-D chip/driver system. Demo'ed with a driving game I was too stunned to remember the name of, the system made the huge-screen monitor look like a picture window into the rain-slicked streetscape down which we sped at the wheel of a nitro-fed MIata. When it failed to jump a drawbridge and plunged into the river below, a wave of uncontrollable vertigo swept over me. You are what you do: I am a driver, now empowered with mad skills, raw recklessness and iron nerve, thanks to a microsopic chunk of silicon and some code.
And as much as E3 is about gaming and manufactured lives, it draws together real lives driven by hunger for entertainment, need for business connections, and the need for work: Sales reps and marketers huddled behind frosted glass doors in second-floor hospitality suites. Developers sniffed around rival teams booths looking for tips, job leads, inspiration.
Dragon armor of "MU" |
And working-stiff Angeleno actors pulled on fiberglass armor and token blackstrap brassieres to strut around the halls as in-the-flesh versions of BloodRayne, Roman Courtesans, and countless female warriors.
Despite the fact that war isn't exactly the most popular national pastime at the moment, war games - and mock warriors - abounded: A red-lit Quonset hut manned by "fighting men" showed Brothers in Arms." A surly World War II-era MP on guard duty stalked back and forth in front of a Jeep to advertise "Call of Duty," glaring and jutting his chin at any convention-goer who got too close.
The grimmest E3 battle for mindshare that I witnessed was fought with sound: At THQ's "Destroy All Humans" demo room (tricked out like a 50s movie theater under alien attack), a presenter in Agent Smith drag found himself trying to match volume and beats with the guy pumping the flow on the beefy sound system at the "Tony Hawk's Underground" display next door.
Tony Hawk Underground - simply louder |
Just as the agent launched into his retro-paranoid report on a recent alien invasion, L.A.'s own Cut Chemist loosed a blistering scratch version of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" from the rattling bass cabinets at the Tony Hawk display that pointed directly into the THQ theater mockup 12 feet away.
"This is the face of the enemy," the agent snarled (ostensibly) at the bug-eyed alien on the theater's screen, ignoring the vicious hiphop tsunami swamping his underpowered sound system. Compared with the din from next door, the alien abducted humans, mutilated cows, flung buses with its swollen brain and laid waste an entire city from its warship in near silence. "See how it sucks the thoughts out of our brain faster than a housewife's HOOVER!?," the actor screamed dutifully according to script, veins popping out on his neck. "We MUST REMAIN VIGILANT!"
Just a note to THQ: pay the guy a bonus. He's killing himself for you.
In the end, E3 lets you swim way out of your depth in an oceanic trench of subconscious desire, the codified yearnings of the gaming universe's collective id swirling played out in game trailers on the megawatt diamondvision screens overhead like so many group thought bubbles.
Teletummies, demoing "I, Robot" |
Snapshot of a dream-overload victim: Propped up against the brushed-chrome buttress of some game company's temple to itself, a paunchy little guy slumps in a fitful nap. His head lolls against the exhibitor badge on his chest. Above him, Romans swarm over a battlefield, swords glinting, and a backwater alien mechanic teams with a tiny robot to fight an evil alien bent on galactic domination. The guy sleeps on, oblivious to the boom and sizzle of weapons and the cries of digital alter egos.
And around him flow the meandering E3 crowds, lugging bags full of branded swag, their glazed eyes flicking from screen to blaring screen as they mill from one demo to the next in random, bee-like stagger-step. "Ah," my friend observes drily, "The migration habits of the American geek."
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| Posted by: mack_reed on Wednesday, May 12, 2004 - 09:54 AM
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