{"id":732,"date":"2016-06-14T06:41:12","date_gmt":"2016-06-14T04:41:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/?p=732"},"modified":"2016-06-14T06:41:12","modified_gmt":"2016-06-14T04:41:12","slug":"why-i-cant-take-e3-or-any-trade-convention-seriously","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/why-i-cant-take-e3-or-any-trade-convention-seriously\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I Can&#8217;t Take E3 [Or Any Trade Convention] Seriously"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It happens every year.\u00a0 Every year, without fail, at around this time, &#8220;real&#8221; news [and I use the word in inverted commas, because really &#8211; game releases and hints at game releases aren&#8217;t really &#8220;news&#8221; at all.\u00a0 They&#8217;re &#8211; at best &#8211; terrible product placement] drops right off the radar.<\/p>\n<p>Why?\u00a0 Because some PR drone way up on high has decided that nothing can leak out prior to E3.\u00a0 And that results in what fans generally call &#8220;lots of slow news days.&#8221;\u00a0 While that&#8217;s a problem, E3 &#8211; and shows like it &#8211; have a far bigger issue that I want to tackle.<\/p>\n<p>They&#8217;re pageants.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_733\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-733\" style=\"width: 150px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/crown.png\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-733 size-thumbnail\" src=\"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/crown-150x150.png\" alt=\"In the same way we trot out beautiful gowns and wonderful looking people for beauty pageants, so our conventions have become nothing but hollow-seeming displays of &quot;beautiful games.&quot; There's no rawness to any of it. Just the intent to engender some kind of &quot;wow&quot; factor. And, frankly, it's dull.\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-733\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">All games are beautiful if you&#8217;re showing pre-rendered footage that constitutes &#8220;game play.&#8221;<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Every year at E3, the giants get together for what has become a fundamentally bland spectacle that attempts to let us know about stuff that&#8217;s going to happen in the next year or so for those companies.\u00a0 So, for example, Ubisoft will regale us will bullshot video of it&#8217;s latest Watch_Dogs and\/or Assassin&#8217;s Creed and\/or next bland open world game.<\/p>\n<p>Then, Microsoft will trundle themselves out in khaki and attempt to whip us into a frenzy of TRANSMEDIA SYNERGY!\u00a0 A word that&#8217;s as dumb and boring as it sounds.\u00a0 I didn&#8217;t count, but last year&#8217;s Microsoft statement featured the word TV so many times, you&#8217;d be forgiven for thinking you were at a convention about the latest blockbuster TV thrillers and not games.<\/p>\n<p>At this point, Sony might decide to try and steal Microsoft&#8217;s thunder by saying &#8220;how good they are for gamers&#8221; by &#8220;not enforcing crazy drm!\u00a0 Hahaha!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s all terrible and scripted and bland.<\/p>\n<p>Last year, the most exciting thing that happened at E3 itself was when the developer for Unravel got onto the stage and very nearly cried, he was so glad to be there.\u00a0 This man had something all the other PR people completely lacked.\u00a0 He had passion.\u00a0 He loved his game.\u00a0 He wanted people to get ahold of it and enjoy it.\u00a0 In short, he was one of the only people in that room at that moment who understood what gaming was all about.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"900\" height=\"506\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/tvazMS76FS4?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" gesture=\"media\" allow=\"encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>As we&#8217;ve gone along, our games have kind of turned out a lot like our E3&#8217;s.\u00a0 They&#8217;re scripted and formulaic, which makes it very easy to sell them to the masses at a convention like this:\u00a0 You simply find the most cinematic moments in the game, string them together as a teaser and attach a whole lot of buzzwords to the result.\u00a0 Instant E3 fodder.<\/p>\n<p>And it isn&#8217;t just the way E3 gets trotted out that&#8217;s the problem.\u00a0 It&#8217;s everything surrounding the event, too.\u00a0 Whatever happens to come out on blogs is mostly PR-spin press releases.\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 That&#8217;s in part because the press hasn&#8217;t had hands-on time with the games, but it&#8217;s also because this is the way we&#8217;re drip-fed now.\u00a0 Everything has to be sanitized and clean and without an opinion until later.<\/p>\n<p>So, I can&#8217;t take E3 very seriously.<\/p>\n<p>I think I&#8217;d take E3 more seriously if the event were smaller.\u00a0 If the people were genuine.\u00a0 If the product placement and glib bullshots and rendered video were more interesting.\u00a0 Oh.\u00a0 It&#8217;d probably help if the preponderance of he-man shooters went down and we saw more game diversity.\u00a0 And it&#8217;d probably help more if there were anything other than bland males presenting the shows &#8211; seriously &#8211; why can&#8217;t there be a presentation by an interested individual that&#8217;s older than 25?<\/p>\n<p>The other problem for me is that none of these conventions &#8211; really &#8211; is consumer facing\/fan facing.\u00a0 They&#8217;re all aimed squarely at the media machine.\u00a0 And as a result, any actual enthusiasm for anything seems to be tempered by a desire to be PR-perfect.\u00a0 It&#8217;s so bland it almost hurts.\u00a0 Here you have the most amazing medium with the most potential for engrossing storytelling and you want to tell me that the way to develop interest in your product is to be pitch-perfect all the time?<\/p>\n<p>Wrong.<\/p>\n<p>I totally wanted to play Unravel right there, after the reveal of the game on the E3 stage.\u00a0 Shall I tell you why?\u00a0 Because that man seemed like a human making a thing that he cared deeply for.\u00a0 Unravel wasn&#8217;t designed by committee to fit into the bunch of checkboxes that [seemingly] all game designs have to tick, now.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_734\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-734\" style=\"width: 150px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/smaller_conventions.png\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-734 size-thumbnail\" src=\"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/smaller_conventions-150x150.png\" alt=\"I'd like to see smaller conventions again. With gamers being able to attend and conversations actually being sparked by games-journalists looking for interesting stories. Not just &quot;New Game Due Soon.&quot;\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-734\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">MakeConventionsGreatAgain &#8211; by making them smaller and more accessible and about actual, interesting games.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>So, what do I think we can do about this?\u00a0 I think we can start by making the conventions smaller.\u00a0 I think that we should [kind of] leave the PR people at home. It will possibly create PR disasters [Hi, Phil Fish, I hope you&#8217;re doing well] &#8211; but it&#8217;ll also create more of a bond between creator and actual, interested fans.\u00a0 It&#8217;ll bring actual reporting about the games back to the forefront, because in a smaller venue with fewer people around, the journalists will actually be able to do &#8220;journalism&#8221; [of a sort, anyway] and be able to sit down with the creators and really talk to them, as opposed to having five minute sound-byte sessions where all they get is the mandated PR-spin on the current game they&#8217;re making.<\/p>\n<p>I also think we can inject more life and spontaneity into the presentations at these big events.\u00a0 Bring out the little developers.\u00a0 Bring out interested fans.\u00a0 Show actual game-play, not doctored footage.\u00a0 All of this has associated risks [the game might crash very dramatically since it&#8217;s in alpha or the like] but this is, at least, gaming as gaming.\u00a0 Not gaming as pageantry.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s the last word that we should be associating with sometimes fun, sometimes thoughtful entertainment:\u00a0 pageantry.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>Some images courtesy of <a href=\"https:\/\/pixabay.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Pixabay<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Video embedded from the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/user\/gamespot\" target=\"_blank\">Gamespot YouTube Channel<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It happens every year.\u00a0 Every year, without fail, at around this time, &#8220;real&#8221; news [and I use the word in inverted commas, because really &#8211; game releases and hints at game releases aren&#8217;t really &#8220;news&#8221; at all.\u00a0 They&#8217;re &#8211; at best &#8211; terrible product placement] drops right off the radar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10,124],"tags":[151,307,308,309,310,311,258,312,313,203,210,314,315,316,317,117,157],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=732"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":735,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732\/revisions\/735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}