Do We Really Want An E3?

E3 went out with more of a whimper than a bang this year, and the consensus seems to be that it was largely unsuccessful - especially compared with the festivities of years past.  That said, do we really need the glitzy, booth-babed E3 of yesteryear?  I’d argue that we’re all better off with the party in its current state.

Previously, E3 served a few functions: it celebrated the past years’ winners and losers, it provided enormous quantities of new game and company information, it provided a glamorous spectacle for attendees, and it conveyed a sense of accomplishment - a monument to the idea that gaming was mainstream and important.  Yet most of these rationales are now at best passe and at worst counterproductive.

First, we have a multitude of ways to reward the successful and mock our failures.  Gaming awards are almost ubiquitous online and have a number of offline venues as well.  As a result, it’s no longer as important to have a single, unifying event to highlight such things… we have made reporting largely self-sustaining.  Second, E3 encouraged many companies to hold their news and important announcements for the festival itself.  But this wasn’t really very good for gamers; we had to wait for an artificial deadline to receive news that now trickles out on a near-constant basis.  If there were no bombshell announcements this year, it’s because those announcements have become much more evenly distributed.  Third, the spectacle itself benefited industry insiders and well-connected journalists, but was largely inaccessible to the rest of the gaming population (even if you were able to travel to California in the first place).  As interesting as E3 sounded, it wasn’t possible for most people to attend.  You’ll forgive me if I begrudge the luckier amongst us their sushi canapes and late-night parties… I understand why they’re missed, but I doubt the majority of gamers will be losing any sleep over it.  And the money can probably be better spent.  And finally, gaming has attained, if not mainstream acclaim, at least legitimacy.  We no longer need to proclaim our value to the world; gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry that commands its own respect and marshals its own heroes and villains onto the global stage.  As a result, the need for such a spectacle as E3 has waned, becoming incorporated into the daily actions of hosts of marketing and PR professionals, gaming media, and interested bystanders. 

So will we lose anything with E3?  I continue to think that the ESA is an important organization, at least as far as its mission is concerned (if not the ESA in particular).  Gaming may have achieved a measure of respectability, but like all media it will remain a target of opportunistic politicians, unscrupulous journalists, and demagogues everywhere.  Having a group dedicated to fighting against those perceptions will, I think, remain as critical in the future as it does now.  And that’s why I’m concerned to read speculation about the ESA being further weakened by the poor E3 showing and its recent membership departures. 

I’d also suggest that E3 offers some value in unifying what is a highly fragmented market under the same roof - showing the connections between hardware and software platforms across the gaming spectrum.  But in general, the bad probably outweighs the good.

Stop Reflexively Bashing EA

EA takes a lot of flak from gamers and the gaming press, and some of it is undeserved.  For example, the idea that EA publishes nothing but me-too sequels: see Penny Arcade’s amazement that the company is publishing Mirror’s Edge and Dead Space, two of the more anticipated games coming out of E3 this year.

But EA is also the company publishing Spore.  And Rock Band.  And Crysis, and the Sims, and a ton of other intriguing games that are or were - if not fully ahead of their time - at least doing their part to move the industry forward a little bit at a time.  Sure, they put out a ton of crap as well, and they, like any other large company, milk franchises long after they stop becoming interesting.  But the firm’s doing a decent job attempting to decentralize its management of the group’s developers, and it seems like it’s starting to pay off. 

There’s a tendency for gamers to put on blinders once they’ve categorized a company, and EA is no exception.  Viewing them as the Evil Empire is far too simplistic for what’s really going on there.  And it’s silly to be so shocked by outcomes like Dead Space, because anyone paying tatention to the industry can see that complexity.

Microsoft Gains First Strike and Scores a Critical Hit!

You’ve probably heard by now that one of Sony’s biggest theoretical exclusives, Final Fantasy XIII, is coming to the 360.  To be honest, even before I owned a PS3, this was never a huge concern of mine.  To begin with, I knew the game was basically never coming out.  And as much as I liked Final Fantasy IV, VI and VII, I never really got too into any of the other ones (got close to the end in VIII, barely started IX, played a little bit of X… X-2 and XII are on my shelf unplayed).

But, yeah… I know there are a lot of Final Fantasy fans out there and this will make probably half of them ecstatic, a quarter furious, and a quarter who don’t care.  Either way, this is, at the very least, a major psychological blow to Sony and a big coup for Microsoft.  A friend of mine was literally trying to sell his 360 to pick up a PS3 MGS4 package because he figured he could play MGS4 and (what he most wanted) Final Fantasy XIII whenever it finally came out.  Based on this news, that is no longer going to happen and he is keeping his 360.

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Smoke In The Crystal Ball

Hal Halpin of the ECA takes a close look at some popular gaming predictions over at The Escapist.  Unsurprisingly, he views many of the futurist predictions as unlikely; when you consider that previous predictions in all sorts of industries have generally been wildly off-base, his skepticism isn’t really all that surprising.  People just aren’t very good at extrapolating across huge swaths of time - in part because technological change happens so quickly and unpredictably.

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Korearama

Hot on the heels of my own comments on Joystiq comes a GameSetWatch piece on Korea as well.  Worth reading, although it’s more from the perspective of a developer than a gamer per se.  I’ve seen a few links from related sites as well (Kotaku, Massively, etc.).

E3 Sneaks Up Next Week

Kotaku was nice enough to point out that E3 was coming up next week and while I’m sure we’ll hear more about games like Gears of War 2, Resistance 2, Far Cry 2, Rock Band 2, and Killzone 2 (that’s a lot of 2’s), I’m actually more interested in seeing if we’ll get more information about games that we DON’T already have some decent information about.  So, here’s my list of things, divided by platform, that I’d like to see next week (and that I have no clue if they’ll be shown or even exist):

• God of War 3 (PS3)
• New Ico/Shadow of the Collosus team game (PS3)
• Heavy Rain (PS3)
• New Zelda (Wii)
• New Nintendo IP (Wii)
• Peter Jackson Halo collaboration (360)
• Amplitude 2 (Non-Rock Band Harmonix game, perhaps the name “Wavelength” would be more appropriate) (Multi)

Admittedly, there are other games I’d still like to see more about (including the ones listed before, and others such as Resident Evil 5), but these are ones that we basically have hardly any information on, or don’t even know if they exist, and would make great surprises for E3.  What does everyone else think?

Are 100 Hours Out?

Sorry for the drought, but I temporarily relocated to South Korea. 

In any case, Warren Spector thinks that 100-hour games are on their way out.  I tend to disagree simply for the reason that very few games require 100 hours to complete, and almost all of those that I can think of don’t actually require 100 hours to finish unless you’re a completist.  The average game might be getting shorter simply because there are more short games now available (thus dragging down the average), but those that are highly involved tend to be labors of love and I don’t really see them drying up.

The Birdman Fallacy

It’s somewhat rare that I agree so utterly with the first half of an article and so completely disagree with the second portion.  Yet here we are. 

Sean Malstrom begins with an eloquent explication of the fallacy at the heart of Nintendo copycats everywhere, viz. that people who have bought Nintendo’s casual games will buy anyone’s casual games (or indeed, that what primarily attracts them is the fact that they are casual rather than some other feature).  As he notes, companies seem to have confused “casual” with “bad” or at least view them interchangeably.  I suggest you read it, the writing really is unusually clear.

Then, in my view, his piece goes off the rails.

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How much is too much?

With Guitar Hero: Aerosmith coming out in just a few weeks and Guitar Hero IV/World Tour expected later this year, you’d think Activision would be happy with their current Guitar Hero slate for the year.  Apparently not, as Kotaku points out that Guitar Hero: Metallica is slated to hit before the end of Activision’s fiscal year, (by March 31, 2009).

Let’s leave aside, for a moment, whether Guitar Hero: Metallica is a good idea or not.  Does this seem like a bit much to anyone else?  Not only is that going to be 3 Guitar Hero games within a year (4 in roughly 1.5 years), but with Rock Band continuing to offer weekly content, a likely full-fledged Rock Band sequel almost definitely going to be announced sometime soon (no inside info, just a hunch), and even a THIRD Guitar/Band franchise coming from Konami, is anyone worried about over-saturating this market?

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Color Me Skeptical

Nolan Bushnell says that a new computer chip will “absolutely stop piracy of gameplay.”

Really? Just like the XBox 360, eh?

Is it just me, or do these people constantly forget the golden-rule of software security: claiming your software is unhackable will only motivate hackers to hack it even faster.

New security steps like this one will certainly slow down some piracy for awhile, but it’s only a matter of time before it’s broken. When it is, expect the “next big thing” in software security to also be “unhackable” until it is, of course, hacked as well.

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