E3 2011: What Conference Day is Really Like

It has been cloudy in Los Angeles all week. What a disappointment. Coming to E3 is exciting, but frankly when you visit LA you expect to get the whole package: breaking videogame stories, celebrities and sunshine.

But we shouldn’t complain. Two out of three isn’t bad.

It’s time for E3, Day Zero. Press conference day. Massive VIP cameos and game-changing announcements are the minimum expectations. The event proper hasn’t even started but the information overload is already starting to kick in. To give you an idea of just how dizzying E3 really is, GodisaGeek brings you a journalist’s eye-view of the 2011 Electronic Entertainment Expo.

We start with the Microsoft press conference. Bathed in green light, it looks more like the Incredible Hulk’s family reunion than one of the biggest events of the E3 calendar. GodisaGeek has earned coveted floor seats, no more than the length of cricket pitch from the stage. We are surrounded by giant Xbox screens the showing the Xbox Live avatars of all the attendees. The message is clear: this show is all about Us, the gamers.

Camera crews circulate and customised passes are flashed to TV presenters as the conversations about what we want to see and what we expect to happen bubble up around us, giving the LA Convention Centre an incredible atmosphere. Before we arrive, the queues to get in are buzzing with boasts of who partied hardest, who had the most appointments and who was rocking the coolest gadget. Foursquare becomes a competitive sport and a line of smartphone-toting game nerds are all trying to be the Mayor of LA’s Galen Center, home to University of Southern California’s  basketball team, the USC Trojans.

In addition to this, news of a Microsoft leak is making its way through the enormous line that snakes around the amphitheatre. These days, Twitter is making it harder and harder to keep information released in press conferences secure, and today the micro-blogging site is spreading some pretty big news: Microsoft is going to announce Halo 4. With over a thousand journalists, bloggers and writers crammed into such a small space, questions are inevitably being asked. Is this their big announcement? Why can’t they keep their powder dry? Is there anything else that Microsoft can do to save themselves?

Possibly. Bill Gates’ boys are certainly giving it their best shot. The auditorium shakes to the lambent explosions of Gears of War 3 and the massed crowds have their livers shaken out of their torsos by the bass of the Modern Warfare 3 demo. Kinect is the star of the show, enabling developers to shout commands to their characters in Mass Effect 3 and manipulate and disassemble their weapons in Ghost Recon before snapping them back together with powerful hand gestures. The demonstration is utterly staggering, grabbing our eyes from all angles and producing the kind of sensory overload usually reserved for 3D films or drugged-out trips to Cirque Du Soleil.

And so Microsoft’s mighty press conference draws to a close. Now, it’s time to go shoulder-to-shoulder with the other journalists, fighting to get a seat on the bus to the next conference. Gaming mega-celebrities are everywhere: Peter Molyneux sliding away between a set of double doors, Kudo Tsunoda rocking his shades and Cliffy B walking out like a rock star, leather jacket on and beautiful blonde woman at his side.

That’s the thing about being at E3. The stars of the games industry aren’t like sports stars or movie stars; they aren’t flanked by handlers and PR people neutering them and distancing them from the public and press. They fit in, they walk around, they are accessible. The is emphasised by E3’s dirty little secret, the amount of travelling required to get to and from events. Even though grabbing buses and cutting into lines are the only ways to guarantee good seats, this does at least means that you get to bump into your idols and heroes along the way.

Once a place on a coach had been secured, it’s off to the EA event. The body odour levels are creeping upwards as the bus drives towards the Orpheum Theatre, a golden auditorium which feels like a portal to London’s West End is the location for EA’s press conference. The old theatre is more crowded, noisier and yet somehow more intimate than the clean lines and strong branding of the Galen Center and Microsoft’s green, orange and purple exercise in modern promotion.

The volume of the presentations is truly staggering. EA have turned all amplifiers up to twelve in a seeming attempt to blow the watching journalists out of their seats. Battlefield 3 comes closest to shaking the plaster off the walls, closely followed by the announcement of new IP Overstrike.

In many ways it is gaming nirvana, and cannot be experienced through YouTube. The EA press conference is how you would play your games if you lived in a mansion with a £250,000 surround system, a hundred miles from your nearest neighbour. This is another part of the E3 experience; in the ultra-controlled environments of the press conferences the developers and publishers are showing their games running at full-tilt. It is the gaming equivalent of turning the engine on a Formula One car up to maximum, eking every last drop of quality out of the perfectly-tuned software build.

EA comes to a climactic finish, but the day doesn’t stop. We are on foot now, pounding the pavement over to a developer question and answer session, where experienced developers share thoughts and insights into what it is like to work with cutting-edge technology.  It might be the middle of the afternoon but no one you speak to has yet eaten. The only thing there is time to consume is more news.

This is not a problem however. Part of what makes Conference Day so exhilarating is the speed that everything moves. The energy comes from the developers and the publishers. They have so much to tell you and so much to show that although there is hardly time to take everything in, it is fun just to get swept up in the enthusiasm. Gaming can be quite a cynical industry but seeing the developers and publishers so committed to their ideas is truly infectious, and it is this that powers the day.

As afternoon arrives, the weather finally starts to live up to its reputation. When the sun comes out in LA, it really shines. It is only right that the last stop of Day Zero (a day that started with Microsoft) should be Sony. Whilst the Xbox conference was said to be all about You, Sony’s press event is most definitely all about Sony. Dance music blaring, drinks flowing freely, Sony has turned the LA Memorial Sports Arena into an outdoor nightclub.

It might be less clinically branded than the Microsoft event, but it is certainly more self-consciously cool; everywhere there are cameramen, journalists, Sony staff and investors visiting to see how Sony will stack up over the next twelve months. Sony’s party, whilst not so focused on the gamers, gives us the first real taste of the glamour available on tap in LA, and allows us to rub shoulders with the great and good of the games industry and beyond.

It is also a fascinating insight into how these different companies see themselves and how they position themselves in the eyes of the public, not just gamers but media, press and investors. Microsoft seem to be distancing themselves from their traditionally stuffy corporate image, with Sony defiantly sticking to a glossy and over-produced aesthetic.

Sony’s conference follows in a similar vein, and although by now it is easy to be in tune with the audience, subtle shifts of noise tell developers if the audience likes what it sees, whether they were shocked, or just disappointed. Developers’ responses to these very genuine reactions will be fascinating.

Eventually, the massive 3D screens that showed the games peel back to reveal scantily-clad female dancers and a musicians who put on a very adult show. It is a million miles from Microsoft’s tightly scripted, all-about-the-games, affair. As the music blares out, the massed writers are finally able to get their hands on some games and have a beer. Day Zero starts to blur into Night Zero. It is done. The show starts, full-throttle, tomorrow.

Who knows, the weather might improve as well. Three out of three would be perfect.