Dear Reader,
I have a confession to make. I am dying, slowly, on the inside.
And it’s all due to a horrible concrete building called South Hall. For those of you who don’t know about South Hall, it’s the housing place for the cream of the marketing crop at E3. Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Ubisoft, and all the major movers and shakers from Japan (Square, Capcom, Namco, et al.) have massive installations that cannot be sanely called “booths.” The word “booth” implies three walls and a desk. It implies a sense of structure with pamphlets and business cards and little pens that will barely work but have someone's name on them. E3 booths are the giant radioactive mutant cousin of those sad, mundane little booths that have come to rip out your spleen and boil your brains inside your head.
All around you, lights flash and music screams. Half-naked women shove pamphlets into your hands for products that you can’t define in any sort of coherent language. Millions of dollars in lights and steel frames hang from the ceiling, flashing at near epilepsy-inducing rates. The throng of people shove from one booth to another in search of the much valued “swag” - free junk that the companies pass off on to the people who visit them, which invariably carries the company’s logo and turns the person who receives said swag into a cross between a pack mule and a billboard. By the end of the day, you are bent over from the amount of behemoth sized t-shirts and glossy pamphlets that you carry. You can almost be assured that you’re a good bit farther along the way to developing tinnitus. And you’re seeing splotches of color swim across your vision from the time you looked up just as the laser light was making its sweep of the crowd. Ladies and Gentlemen, I have come to a realization. E3 is the video game world’s Sodom and Gomorrah. And I blame the marketing people.
Yet, with all the millions spent to showcase these games, of which most should be considered lucky to have words like “mediocre,” “unoriginal” and “average” used to describe them, I can’t help feel that people are somehow missing the point. Games are essentially about play. They are about interacting with either your fellow player or the game system in a way that is enjoyable. They can be used to tell a story, they can be used to teach, there is theoretically no limit to them. Video games are the new medium of the age. What movies were in the 20th century, games will be in the 21st. But for now they are ruled by the mega-giants. The South Hall Mafia, if you will.
So, I put this challenge to you, the Reader, be you gamer, developer, publisher, hardcore, casual, old school, new school, or just some random passer-by. Go Metallica on the game industry. Make the game version of the Black Album. Make a game that is brilliant and destined to become a classic, and then wrap it all in black. Make the marketing guys have fits trying to figure out what to do with it. Make it cross-genre, cross-platform, online-enabled, whatever. But wrap it in black. Defy convention, leak stories about your true cover art being rejected by stuffed-shirts at the studios. Do this and the press will come to you, looking for the story. Get the press and you will never need a marketing budget. We’ll do everything for you. I should know, I’m here right now, doing exactly that.
Do this, noble Reader, and start the ebb of the tide away from the established structure of the big studios, toward new games and ideas, not just rehashing of the same dozen IPs. Do this and E3 will shift from sensory overload to hide the imperfections in forthcoming games, and become an actual showcase of new ideas and directions in the marketplace. Challenge, adapt and change the shape of this industry. Don’t just let the South Hall Mafia sit there and shove the same things into your hands over and over again. Give us brain-fried reporters a respite. Please. If I keep this up much longer I’m going to go deaf and blind in South Hall.
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And the TV says to me, "I will eat your children." I look back, and say, "Only if I get to play their games after you're done."
