The Firing Line #1 June 10, 2003 Tom Chick

Tom bids farewell to E3 and gives it a swift kick in the ass for good measure. What's his problem? Read on and find out.

Why E3 sucks

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Welcome to The Firing Line, where we're kind of hoping you don't really know who William F. Buckley Jr. is. If you didn't get that, all the better.

E3 is over and I have a suggestion: let's not have it anymore. Let's just go back to the old way of announcing and previewing games. You people who are making games, how about you go back to spreading out the press coverage rather than squatting on the important stuff until May and then spitting it out in one huge loud colorful projectile vomited torrential splatter?

I know why we have it. We want to be an event driven industry, just like movies. We want our premieres and celebrities and our big budget blockbusters. So we have E3 every year, with impossibly huge banners and those billboard trucks circling the LA Convention Center like remoras and busty girls in stupid costumes pretending to be interested in the whole thing so you'll take a flyer.

But the presentation of the actual games caters to the sort of superficial previews that are little more than ads. E3 is uniquely suited to showing off cool scripted sequences in first person shooters, elaborate character creation schemes in massively multiplayer online games, and not much else. It's a confused collection of dog and smoke and pony and mirror shows that amounts to a whole lot of nothing substantial. I've been to every E3 but one (that's the year I was busying answering email to explain why I didn't like Deus Ex), and although the names of the games change, everything else is the same.

Here's a shaggy headed kid showing up for his appointment with a Konami man-purse, made of faux worn canvas, and a fancy denim jacket with the EA Games logo stitched tastefully over his heart. He's holding a little digital voice recorder that he got from a Microsoft event that he's not even bothering to turn on. "Oh, man, I'm so hung over. I was at the Sony party last night until 4am sucking down free vodka and then I had to get up at eight to get over here from the hotel. Okay, I have to be at the Activision booth in fifteen minutes, so show me what you got real quick. How many levels does it have? Twelve. Multiplayer support? Check. Let's see your water effects. Cool. PC and Xbox, you say? All right, we're good to go."



SIDEBAR: Firing Line is conservative columnist William F Buckley Jr’s interview show, which began in 1966. The Firing Line is Tom Chick and Brett Todd’s alternating column, which began in 2003 and features an article before it’s name.

Quality reporting

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And he's the veteran reporter. The new guy, the even younger kid without the branded swag, has a stenographers pad with the cover folded back. It's crammed with notes, stacked single-spaced on every page. I can see over his shoulder as he watches a presentation and dutifully jots down everything he's told.

"We're making the AI even better than before," the associate producer says.

The AI is even better than before, the guy writes.

"We have twice as many levels as other games," the associate producer says.

Twice as many levels, the guy writes.

"We're adding stealth and limitless replay," the associate producer says.

Stealth. Limitless replay, the guy writes.

"We're taking everything out that's not fun since that's the bottom line. We want our game to be fun," the associate producer says.

The game will be fun, the guy writes.

And this is what will make its way to you, dear readers. These snippets of nearly worthless marketing patter, which may as well be transcribed from the publisher's web site or mock-ups of the box, pass for E3 coverage.

After years of doing interviews and email Q&A to preview games, I've learned that 70% of what I get back is useless. The trick is making an article out of the remaining 30%. But E3 is all about that 70%, with the useful 30% filtered out by the noise and time constraints.

Of course, E3 isn't for the press. We'd just as soon spread coverage out, and spend a bit more time with each title, asking more questions, maybe fiddling around with a playable build or interviewing the guys who make the game without some Yu Gi Oh song blaring from the booth next door. We’d clearly rather not try to cover 300 games in 3 days. And E3 isn't for the game companies. The developers can't possibly enjoy the days it rips from their development schedule to stop what they're doing and retool everything for an E3 build. Weeks of work are lost, ultimately adding to the expense -- and therefore cost -- of a game. The publishers probably don't enjoy having to pay for all that booth space and all those models and their warrior princess costumes, all to be swallowed up in someone's expansive superficial E3 coverage, detailing how many levels there will be in each game and whether it will have multiplayer.



SIDEBAR: The best character in Yu Gi Oh is Joey, who can beat the living daylights out of Seto any day of the week, my friend. You mark my words.

Retailers

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So who is E3 for? The retailers. Most of whom don't need it either. What began as a venue for publishers to show their wares to buyers has ballooned into something too big and loud to be useful to anyone.

Here’s a buyer for [name of retailer deleted] coming in late to a demo. The developers offer to restart the demo from the beginning, but he shakes his head and tells them, ‘naw, it’s okay, go on’. He then proceeds to ignore the game as his eyes play over the PR woman’s chest and it’s painfully obvious to everyone involved that he doesn’t know the first thing about this game or the one that preceded it and he’s going to order it or not based solely on the what he reads on the product sheet this winter. And suddenly I feel a little dirty for being involved in the whole thing and I’d rather just go home and play Rise of Nations, which is what it really all comes down to: a game ends up on my hard drive, on your hard drive, and we’re sitting in front of it, losing time and the space around us, sinking into whatever’s happening behind our monitors where none of the rest of it matters.

This is where gaming journalism, if there is any such thing, belongs. Not at E3, which is yet another example of the industry maturing into big business with retailers puling the strings, just like they did with small boxes, ESRB ratings, short shelf lives, and the supremacy of end cap displays. It’s all an example of the stuff that comes between you and the people who make the games for you. It is a celebration of and for middlemen, and if it were up to me, it would be a thing of the past.

And by the way, can we also cancel that whole holiday season thing, too?



SIDEBAR: According to the NPD Group, the top selling game in 2002 was Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for the Playstation 2, which probably made a bunch of retailers very happy.

Parting Shot & Shot of the Week

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Parting Shot

Next week, my colleague Brett Todd will take his place on The Firing Line. And as his Parting Shot, he'll weigh in on what I've just said about E3. The week after that, in my Parting Shot, I'll weigh in on what he'll write next week. The week after that, he’ll weigh in on what I’ll write the week after him.

Confused? Don't worry. Brett will be here next week with a Venn diagram that explains the whole thing. Just think of it as peer review to keep one of us from pulling a Pons and Fleishmann. Or think of it as international relations, with me representing the US and Brett representing Canada, and you guys as the UN Human Rights Commission. Or Point/Counterpoint with Brett as Jane the ignorant slut and me as Chevy Chase on painkillers. And speaking of painkillers...

Shot of the Week

Every week, we’ll have a Shot of the Week that gives you a glimpse of something we’re playing, a hint of something you can look forward to, or perhaps a cautionary tale to spare you the pain of something we’re forced to endure. Here is this week’s:

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Has the Chickster totally lost his mind? Have all the years of teasing about his name finally caught up to him? Or maybe he’s right, and E3 truly is that bad? You decide, you let us know, and Sound Off! in the news comments!