Some Final Thoughts On E3
I have a few commissioned features that were inspired by brief dev encounters at the Expo and which I'll be writing up in the coming weeks, and a few other ideas I've yet to pitch based on game viewings, but I filed my last, official E3 story tonight and I want to do a quick sum-up and wrap-up. 
I previewed three games at the show for Ars Technica: Halo 4, Gears of War: Judgment, and Planetside 2. I contributed to a preview of Beyond, the new game from Heavy Rain creator David Cage, and also interviewed the CEO of Crytek, Cevat Yerli. My final piece is another CEO interview that will hopefully hit the web sometime this week.
I also wrote two columns related to the show, one about the furor over the increased booth babe presence this year, and a second about the extremely widespread negative reaction to all the violence at the show.
I had a really tough time deciding whether or not to even attend E3 this year because I knew I wouldn’t get much work out of it. The few outlets I publish for regularly as a feature writer or columnist have staff positions dedicated to previews at the show every year and so I never count on getting many paying gigs. That makes the entire show a net loss in terms of what I make as a freelancer, but in the end I decided that I couldn’t afford not to go because it was E3, and E3 is important.
I get a little perturbed when I see or hear colleagues complaining about the show. This year was only my third Expo so maybe after I’ve been attending for a decade I’ll feel differently, but I still remember the summer of 2010 when I was writing for an indie games site, a fan site really, and was so incredibly excited to be going to such an important event as E3 considering I had just started writing in earnest only a few months before. That was the show where I really began cutting my teeth as a game journo by learning how to deal with PR folks.
This year was humbling for me because I had the most access I’ve ever had at the show. I attended all five press conferences for the first time, and had some Microsoft viewings for the first time owing to getting to cover the show for Ars. Getting to interview two CEOs was fun. I may not have made much money at E3 but it was my best Expo yet in terms of getting some quality work done, so I appreciated the opportunity.
As much as I recognize E3 as an anachronistic, almost vestigial organ of the videogame industry, I think I’ll always appreciate the show as long as it serves as a smorgasbord of shooters aimed at the 18-35-year-old-male market. I may be a little outside that demographic at this point but generally-speaking the games that publishers produce for that market are right up my alley, or at the very least games I don’t intend to miss. And the Expo will always be important as a networking opportunity, and a chance to keep up relationships with publishers. My industry book gets fatter every year, and ultimately that is a tremendous help when it comes to writing features that have any kind of development angle.
I do wonder if the show will ever change, or whether mobile, social and indie developers will figure out that they need to hold their own, separate event in order to get the press they communally deserve. Not that I need yet another event to pay my own way to attend. I will say that the benefit of attending events on my own recognizance, and on my own budget, is that my wife usually comes with me and so I have no choice but to stay in a nice hotel. I heard horror stories of journos staying in Los Angeles hotels where crackheads were being carted out of the building by the police, and some of my friends attending were packed in five-to-a-room in cheap hotels or forced to stay in crappy lodgings because the outlet that was sending them to cover E3 was cheap. As much as I may hope for a full-time games journalism position some day, I would miss having digs that might cost me a little more but give me what I pay for. I’m really picky about where I sleep.
On Nuns With Guns
In my wife's book Two Whole Cakes she talks about the difference between radical and liberal feminism. Liberal feminists, she says, want women to have their share of the pie. Radical feminists want an entirely new pie. And that's a good summation of liberal and radical responses to how culture war is conducted. I decidedly fall on the Left side of that culture war, and I spent many years as a radical. Now I'm more of a liberal, because I think about collateral damage.
The cold calculus of war is that sometimes in order to win you have to incur collateral damage. The question is whether or not the value of the target is worth it. One thing you would never do is incur collateral damage if there's no target worth paying that price for.
The collateral damage of the kerfluffle over the Hitman: Absolution trailer owing to the ferocity of that kerfluffle is increased visibility on said trailer, much of which is far more likely to translate into commercial interest for the game than it is to gain any converts to feminist, gender or media theory. So what was the target worth that collateral damage? I'm at a loss to identify it, because so far I'm mostly seeing people who agree with each other on the issue talking to one another and other people making offensive comments in response. It doesn't look to me like there's going to be a net gain in terms of serving the struggle.
A "tone argument" is often used as a derailing method in the face of social outrage. It goes something like this: A white person tells a black person that if the black person "only wasn't so angry" in their speech that the white person would listen to them. I acknowledge this phenomena. I ask you to assume that's not what I'm doing here, because I'm not. Tone arguments are used by someone outside the struggle to address someone inside it. I'm talking about tactics, which is very different.
Let's reiterate that my concern is over ferocity of response, not protest speech in and of itself.
When Brendan Keogh questioned the right of the video game industry to continue to exist on account of that trailer I thought his reaction was way over the top. I think a sound, cool-headed analysis of the trailer from a media theory perspective, as part of mounting evidence about the problems of male gaze and fetishism of violence and all the other issues Keogh believes are ensconced in that trailer would have been a reasonable response. It also would have been a response that most people probably would take seriously by default.
Instead, we get this. As someone sympathetic to the struggle I see this equation as a net loss. There was possibly more collateral damage done than victory won. Those aren't very sound tactics.
Nuns with guns and killers killing killers
Let's reiterate that my concern is over ferocity of response, not protest speech in and of itself.
When IGN ran its reaction piece to the Hitman: Absolution trailer not only was it ironic considering the outlet is overtly aimed at the dudebros who the trailer was also overtly aimed at, but I have no doubts the IGN piece was greenlit because the editors knew the traffic would be immense. Controversy works. It's what the trailer's creators probably wanted. Well played. Those marketers who wrote and produced the trailer truly earned their paychecks.
I wonder how long anyone would have paid any attention to the Hitman: Absolution trailer sans the recent kerfluffle. It's a week before E3. An avalanche of trailers for games that are much higher-profile releases than the next Hitman game are about to land on the internet. And the Hitman trailer may have been smooth and slick like a Quentin Tarantino scene but it was also vapid and boring. It would have been rapidly forgotten.
I've read the academic analysis of the trailer and I can't say all the theory is incorrect inasmuch as any opinion regarding a soft science is wrong by the strictest definition of wrong. I also don't see what these theorists are seeing. I do not think Keogh's conclusions are obvious or necessarily correct. I think they are subject to debate, and generally-speaking I think conclusions which are not obvious call for a liberal response, not a radical one.
I'm someone who has had no choice but to be educated in these theories and issues. I'd be divorced if I wasn't. I certainly will hear some of the same voices who are protesting the Hitman: Absolution trailer protesting other problematic media content in the future, and now I'm going to look at their reactions more critically and be on guard against hyperbole. Just imagine the reaction of someone who isn't even on board with the struggle yet. The risk is outright, summary dismissal that could have been avoided.
Let's reiterate once more that my concern is over ferocity, not protest speech in and of itself. And I am all for getting radical and militant if the situation demands it. I don't think this situation did. In my mind a radical response is truly called for when there's absolutely no question it's appropriate. I don't think this is one of those cases. That it's even in question suggests to me that it wasn't.