On Gaming Conferences 2007
It’s coming around to conference time again, and this year, unlike last, I won’t be going to any of them. In a way I’m somewhat sad. No trip to California, no demo disks, no swag to ponder the merits of…and yet I find I’m very apathetic about the whole thing. I wasn’t shy about my opinions of E3 last year, it was a grotesquely inflated waste of my time, and the fact that it no longer exists in that format should, I suppose, make me want to attend. Quite frankly, I feel quite the opposite. Nothing repulses and terrifies me more than the idea of “E3 For Everyone”.
Last year E3 consisted of any unwashed, socially inept quasi-eighteen year old boy who posted his own schlock on some obscure website (amidst pictures of Seven-of-Nine and Inuyasha). In the heat and glare of the exhibit halls, the glazed eyes of hero worship and the mad grabs for anything that looked like a free bauble made me want to grasp on to the nearest marketer and schmooze just for the sake of skilled conversation. This year, good grief, this year, with the idea of a trade show being abolished in favour of some sort of twisted FanCon, I can’t imagine how absolutely awful it’s going to be. Even if I were offered the chance to go, I think I would decline simply to avoid the migraines and ballooning attendance numbers. What could it possibly offer me that I couldn’t get from press releases and communication with the game companies themselves?
I will, unfortunately, miss the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC). Yes, we had unwashed masses of developers, yes, the nerd quotient was high, but somehow it seemed slightly more bearable within the umbrella of a conference that melds technical, artistic, and discussion among peers. I enjoyed it last year. I could meet people, talk to people without having to scream, sit in on seminars that were actually interesting, and by golly, I actually learned a helluva lot about the industry. There was a transparency about it that I grew to appreciate only after attending E3. The exhibit hall was far less grand, but people were available to answer your questions and often times it was the developers themselves, and not a polished PR team, making them eager to discuss their current projects and show off their future plans. Grand time. It’s coming up on March 5-7 and I’m wistfully looking at the calendar wishing that I could attend.
I’m curious to see if the re-design of E3 won’t implode under its own weight, much like its predecessor. I have no idea how they’re going to select attendees, and how much of a fortune one pass will cost the average consumer. Just out of curiosity, does anyone out there plan on attending? Is it appealing on the basis of content, or just because it’s E3 and you want to say you’ve gone at least once?
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