E3 2007, the much anticipated, never duplicated, and largely restructured event from years’ past is now in the books, leaving many attendees looking back as they evaluate the proverbial good, bad, and ugly. For me at least, there was a lot to like about the show, which moved from the chaotic stomping grounds of Los Angeles to the more serene Santa Monica, this year taking up residence in a handful of hotels rather than the LA Convention Center. In many ways this proved to be a positive move for the event, as developers and marketing reps were able to spread their wings and speak to much smaller groups of people for longer periods of time, making Q&A sessions more viable and altogether resulting in a much more relaxing experience.

That’s the good part.

The flip side to this is that while on the map these hotels, six in all, look to the casual observer to be well within walking distance, in practice many are anything but, meaning that scheduling suffered, and many such as myself who had planned appointments based on previous years’ experience found that there simply was not enough time to account for the walk. And while shuttles and taxi cabs presented another option for journalists, many times the wait and traffic, especially in the evenings, presented another hurdle altogether.

So, as said, there were things to like about this year, but as I overheard while waiting in line for the Activision press conference, one person said it best by referring to the event as A

Pac-Man, a name with which nearly everyone is familiar. While video gaming hasn’t yet taken over the entire household as the hobby of choice, somehow the mere mention of Pac-Man will almost without fail conjure images of the iconic yellow circle happily (or unhappily – who could tell?) chomping dots while evading and eating ghosts in a variety of mazes.

Just about every member of every living generation at least knows of Pac-Man; since its release in 1980, the game has appeared in pizza parlors, arcades, and eventually on consoles the world over.

Even those who have never played a video game, or those who are old enough to have missed this newly-emerging cultural phenomenon, have at least some scant knowledge of Pac-Man. As the most-played game in video game history, no other game comes close to such recognition – not even the oft-cited Pong – though many developers and publishers still aspire to it.

As with all such things, an entire subculture devoted to Pac-Man arose from its early-80s debut. What is astounding is that this movement still exists to this day, and possibly even stronger than ever before. At the first ever Xbox 360 Pac-Man World Championship, I had a chance to meet some of the old, and some of the new, faces that have defined and shaped the Pac-Man championship circuit for so long, and will continue to do so in the future.

For instance, gaming professional Billy Mitchell was on hand, now with his lovely wife and children, as one of the ten finalists in this competition. Mr. Mitchell was the first person to ever officially achieve a perfect score in Pac-Man, which meant playing through all 256 original levels without losing a single life, without missing a single fruit, and eating every single ghost four times per level, an impressive feat to consider.

It is no surprise that he would have made it far in this competition, as mastering Pac-Man is something that, like riding a bike, apparently stays with someone with a little ongoing practice. Indeed, the community of Pac-Man experts here seemed to be fairly reminiscent of an all-star locker room, throwing each other jibes and jests while offering constructive tips as they all surrounded the classic Pac-Man arcade cabinet in the lobby.

It was interesting to watch how new, younger Pac-Man fans took up residence in the main area, its perimeter surrounded with comfortable lounge chairs, widescreen LCD TVs, and Xbox 360s, on which the newly-revealed Pac-Man: Championship Edition for Xbox Live Arcade was playing, while the original Pac-Man masters gathered at one age-old Pac-Man machine, competing with each other in true arcade A

Like many total nerds, I often feel that my wallet has become empty long before my appetite for games has been sated. Given the large number of games that sit unplayed, this is the dictionary definition of being really stupid. However a recent story by Games.net and a recent thread in the Penny Arcade forums got me to thinking about the industry that creates these games, games that so often are neglected not just by me, but by the gaming masses as a whole.

I personally try to avoid all forms of media that are created with profit as the main motivator. I want to encourage storytellers to have the freedom to tell stories, but I’m not one who likes to fill his hours with meaningless drivel just to be entertained and stimulated. I want my drivel to have meaning, thank you very much, and for someone to give a damn about it during the creative process.

Thus my hate for Spider-Man 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean 3. Notice how silly the sacks of cash were that followed those films. Obviously I am out on a limb here, waving a flag of opinion over a sea of disregard.

But in gaming the problem seems worse, probably because the market is so small. It’s just big enough to encourage attempted cash ins, but not large enough to create an ample supply of idiots to supplement the dollars spent in a more discerning way. So, instead of being pushed to the margins – you know, like those $5 direct to DVD movies at Wal-Mart, these lousy, lousy games share shelf space and mindspace with the AAA titles. Retailers don’t give a damn, they just fill the shelves and pray.

This makes our hobby look stupid. Really stupid.

But even worse, this creates casualties like Beyond Good and Evil, or Psychonauts. Games that were superbly crafted yet somehow got relegated to the discount bin within a week of release due to an inability to achieve critical mass in pre-release press.

While we are short on stupid game players, the confusion over game quality has created a large demographic of ignorant consumers who will absolutely not take any chances with their purchases. With something like Psychonauts, the artistic style was so unusual you wouldn’t know it was a great game unless you were immersed in the industry. So astute gamers got a deal, and the developers of Psychonauts got a pink slip.

Well, not really, as Tim Schafer’s Double Fine Productions is actually working on its next project, but still, the point still stands. And some people wonder why this medium isn’t growing as an art form.

There is no path that I can see to get us over this hump aside from waiting for the player base to grow in size. While gamers with brains are a small minority, the quantity of them still grows proportional to the size of the industry. It becomes a simple function of volume. Serious gamers knew Beyond Good and Evil was going to work because we knew Michel Ancel’s (Rayman series) track record, but nobody outside the core fandom would even recognize that name. His next game sold in huge numbers not because of its quality or his name, but because it was attached to a huge motion picture (King Kong).

I don’t offer solutions; my intent was simply to relate the problem, not attempt to fix it, as by its nature this column is preaching to the converted. Readership of a site like this is a self selected demographic that is already on the cutting edge of digital entertainment. But do we need to wait for MTV to do the totally obvious and realize that Guitar Hero is fun before we see people with the necessary resources begin pushing games to the mainstream?

The dominant forms of media consumption are still television and film, and the media conglomerates have almost hindered as much as helped interactive media to the extent they’ve been involved in it. Fox Interactive isn’t exactly known for its stellar titles, the parallels between Die Hard : Nakatomi Plaza, Live Free or Die Hard, and the abuse of dead horses being strong.

We live in an interesting age where computers are introducing a constant stream of new ways to interact with ourself and each other, and these ideas are being introduced in a world irrevocably changed by radio and television barely 100 years ago. As it stands, there really is no parallel then for the development of the games industry, and as the business of making and selling games continues to grow and evolve, the painful, sometimes depressing truth is that we can hold up no examples as illuminating in getting the storytelling style of interactive entertainment taken seriously.

[Edward J. Pollard is a web developer and freelance video game journalist from Southwestern Alberta, Canada. Some people think he posts funny and insightful things to his blog. We think you might be one of them.]

At about this time last year I was recuperating from a wild week in LA, sorting through the photos and putting together the last bits of a few articles about the whirlwind that was E3. I also managed to pick up a nasty case of strep throat, so there are a few things I don’t miss entirely. Nonetheless, it was the first time in three years that I hadn’t seen the Pacific in May, and I can’t deny feeling at least a little wistful.

This year’s been a little different. I’ve spent the last week going to work at my day job (the one that actually pays for food and rent) and generally going about business in the usual way. I’ve even been (mostly) sober!

So you’ll appreciate my excitement at having received my personal invite to the newly re-engineered E3, and event that promises to offer a much more intimate, scaled down version of its former self. Only a mere three thousand or so game journalists are said to have been intived to the July event, with Snackbar accounting for a pair, myself included. The real excitement doesn’t come from having a golden ticket though; rather, it comes from having a golden ticket to an entirely different, brand new chocolate factory that no one’s ever been to before.

Now I’m not just talking about the superficial changes here. Okay, yes I’m obviously very interested to see what a company like EA is going to do about only being granted 20′ x 20′ to set up an exhibit in. I half expect it to be about 150′ tall with multiple floors.

No, there’s a bigger and better reason to look forward to this year’s model, but let’s go back a couple of years before we get there.

Once upon a time (early May, 2005) E3 was a den of boobies, kids who worked at Blockbuster, noise and lights. Somewhere in there they apparently had some video games on display. I’m not sure I actually saw that many of them to tell the truth.

As time progressed (one year later, early May of 2006) E3 grew more mature (made the girls put on some clothes, stopped giving free admission to kids who worked at Blockbuster). It was still noisy, and crowded, and loud, and bright and oh yeah also there were video games.

The video games were actually a good deal easier to gain access to last year, mainly because half of the attending journalists (as well as many booth attendees) could be found in line to play the Wii at any given time, but at the same time, that damned line would have been half as long if all of the kids who worked at Blockbuster didn’t set up “review” websites a few months prior and scammed press badges instead of their exhibits only badges from the year prior.

The thing is though, while it was easier to get around and you didn’t have lines of sweaty nerds waiting to cop a feel/get a photo with a booth babe clogging up the aisles, there was still no serious journalism being done. It wasn’t realistic to expect any of that; the place was set up as it always was, a maze of lights and sounds and looping demo videos and a dozen kiosks for every PR robot. You could forget about talking to someone who actually knew anything that wasn’t memorized the night before about the products on display.

Of course, you can’t ignore the fact that no one really wanted to do any serious journalism anyhow. Let’s face it, EA isn’t going to talk to you if you only want to ask questions about why they bought out the rights to the NFL instead of putting that money into just releasing a superior product. Between the maze of distractions, the unwillingness to expose knowledgeable personnel to the general press, and the sometimes less than subtle hints that review copies of games go to those who play ball, the odds were stacked pretty heavily in the industry’s favor. But this should come as a surprise to no one.

What was a little shocking, though, was Doug Lowenstein’s outgoing rant to the industry last year. You know the one I’m talking about, it’s the reason why two-thirds of the internet came to the conclusion that E3 was over forever. If you actually read it though, it does more than that. It points out a number of failings both from the current industry players, but even more so, the press.

Would the industry be better off with a strong gaming press keeping them accountable for their actions? Well, yes, obviously. So why isn’t there that kind of accountability? Obviously we can’t count on the mainstream media or the corporate gaming websites, but why isn’t there a bigger grassroots push?

Maybe it’s a statement about the failure of small sites like this one to draw readers in, or maybe, it’s a statement about the way small sites are brought into line by the public relations firms before they get a chance to grow.

So what does the new and improved E3 do for us? The playing field is a lot more level now. For instance, exhibitors have now been into such small spaces that they can’t set up the sort of maze of distractions they had in years prior, and even more significantly, now Ubisoft can’t rent out a plot five times the size of Atlus’s booth. Think about it: If Ubisoft, EA, Square-Enix, Blizzard, and NCsoft rent out half of the available floor space, and the rest is divvied up amongst 50 exhibitors, whose products are going to stick out in your mind six hours later when you’re writing an article about what you saw today?

It goes beyond that though. The industry transcends the current players. Where there was once Coleco and Atari there was later Sega, Nintendo and Neo Geo. Later still there were Nintendo, Sega and Sony, and then there was Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. The same changing of the guard happens with publishers and developers. The 20-something kids buying HDTVs and PS3s today will one day have mortgages and children to fund, and then those children will one day buy consoles themselves. Where GamePro and Nintendo Power once ruled the gaming press, we have GameSpot and IGN.

We are too easily caught up in the antics of the current industry players. They put on the big show and we buy our tickets and before we know it, we’ve mistaken them for the deities they would proclaim themselves to be. When you take that situation and turn it on its head, force the big boys into the same boxes as the smaller companies, you open up the field for a more honest analysis.

You can count on the usual suspects for glowing previews of all the major publishers. That’s not going to change in a year. But with the industry put into a more appropriate perspective, where no one gets to make their pretense of defining the industry, we can at least do our jobs without subconscious manipulation. If the press chooses to focus on the incremental improvements of the major players at the expense of looking for the cracks and calling the industry’s faults out, then that’s a shame, but at least it’s no longer programmed into the design of the expo.

I don’t know what to tell you to expect from this year’s model. With only a handful of press expected as compared to previous years, and no idea as to what the division will be between the corporate online and print media companies versus the smaller, independent sites, it’s hard to say who will even be there. The gaming media has a real chance to take a step towards legitimacy though, and that’s what’s really got me excited.