DRM & Loathing in Los Angeles
Sam spent a week at E3, and after reading this story, we’re not sure if he’ll ever be invited back.
The ocean broke softly on a Sunday night in Santa Monica, a good half hour away from my temporary residence in LA. The tide was about fully in and had begun its retreat. On the right side of the horizon, the sun landed on mountains and clouds, casting off orange and purple sparks. On the left side, tourists gathered at a pier, gawking at novelty shirts, gobbling fried food, or craning their necks to watch kids scream on dinky rides.
After enjoying the din of ocean and waves—between sips of a beer I hid in a paper bag—I hiked to the pier and walked into the midway. I couldn’t miss it; the place exploded with ancient forms of entertainment like skee ball, pinball machines, and incandescent bulbs. A single matchstick could’ve set the whole rickety, wooden room aflame. It wasn’t just the bright lights, though. I love walking into old arcades and looking for gaming surprises, especially ‘90s and early ‘00s fare that got lost in the PlayStation era, when kids finally had cooler games to play at their homes than they did at a sugar-stinking pier.
What I found surprised me because of its startling normalcy: Ridge Racer 2. I’d never seen this arcade sequel for the racing series, probably because this one had come out in 1994, a full year before America saw the original article explode on PlayStation. This was no mighty sequel, either, full of enhancements or bravado or “if you liked Ridge Racer, you’ll LOVE,” etc. This thing was the arcade equivalent of Crystal Pepsi, and it looked so old, so neglected. Two beat-up chairs; two little racing steering wheels rubbed ragged by years of toddlers pretending to play without inserting quarters; two CRT screens, covered in orange and purple lines as a result of screen burn-in.
I put my hand on the back of an empty Ridge Racer 2 chair, took another swig from my can, and looked around—at the dominance of light and sound, at every flash and color and trick used to scare a few more quarters out of the admittedly thin crowd. I’d gone to the beach to enjoy one last night of normalcy before a videogame conference began, and I had failed.
“Imagine you’re smashing me to pieces,” the comedian said while turning around and aiming his clothed ass at the crowd. “That you’re getting inside of this.”
Andrew Santino was the last of eight comics to take the Meltdown Comics stage at a weekly stand-up show sponsored by The Nerdist. I was there because I had plotted a few getaways throughout the week of LA’s annual gaming convention, E3, which I’d been covering for three days at this point. So much standing and screen-staring and line-waiting and corporate nonsense, at a show where everyone tried to convince me that THEIR unfinished game or gizmo or obvious toy-selling tie-in was the finest? I knew I would need fresh air on occasion.
Apparently, my E3 oasis was between a gentleman’s clothed buttcheeks.
In my off hours, I’m a stand-up comedy hound, and with promises of an intimate room and surprise comedians, I settled in for a mid-week distraction.
I didn’t entirely get my wish, as a few guys in line proudly wore gaming T-shirts; one sported a design made up entirely of classic game controllers, from Atari paddles to Xbox 360 pads. Not shocking for a Nerdist event, but a few in the shirt posse hadn’t bothered taking their E3 laminate badges off of their necks, even though they’d driven at least nine miles to get to the West Hollywood venue. No point in flashing them here, except to get my attention, anyway. I couldn’t help myself and attempted small talk, but I got no real answers to my question about their favorite E3 demo thus far. Guess they wanted the same respite.
Santino had the dubious honor of closing a very good show, complete with known names like Greg “Whose Line” Proops, Mary Lynn “24" Rajskub, and Michael “The State” Ian Black, and he held court with a filthy, oddball set, complete with a four-minute anal sex closer. (The joke, I mean, goodness.) In the bit, Santino had been told by a gay friend that he was attractive, with a catch; Santino was also told he looked like a bear, traditionally a bottom. So the comic went with it. “I could be a power bottom.” He then explained the control he’d assert while getting fucked.
Standing on his toes, his butt pert and shaking, he threw an easy laugh at the 20-something crowd: “Up down up down left right left right select start B A start,” he said, aiming his butt in all directions while reciting the famed Konami code from ‘80s and ‘90s videogames. “I know the code.”
The room was tearing up at all of this. Of course, I was the guy over-analyzing the gaming joke (as if dividing a joke into its disparate parts isn’t obnoxious enough). Dude, you technically got the code wrong. Up up down down, etc.
Yet that unease sold the joke. The premise was all about control, and in a way, videogames are similar. They’re these hilarious takes on the control we don’t really have in our own lives. Their plots only play out when we take the correct actions. If we fuck up, or if the great villain wins, we do it over or claim another life. The tale pauses until it proceeds the way we want it to. Power fantasy.
“I want to make my opponent uncomfortable with every possibility,” an athlete said between dramatic music cues and snippets of virtual football, soccer, and MMA combat. “I make him uncomfortable with one inch, with two inches. Just taking, taking, taking.”
I was standing in the EA Sports booth during E3's second day, which meant I was watching an odd video—”inspirational” in tone, I guess—with a crowd of journalists and national retail buyers before we were allowed to see the company’s latest pre-release sports games. Athletes were rattling off the kind of sports-channel drivel that must drive a beat reporter nuts, while 3D-rendered athletes took giant steps into the uncanny valley. At one point, a virtual version of NFL player Robert Griffin III dove into an end zone and landed in a prayer-like bow.
If this was a veritable fluffing, I wasn’t getting the right sensation.
The first stop in EA’s booth was all about UFC, MMA, dudes smacking dudes. Three monitors on one wall displayed highly detailed 3D faces, all silently shouting and growling. There would be no joy for these men on this day.
On the larger HDTV nearby, a perfectly paced demo reel played while a spokesperson spoke loudly over it. The reel focused on before-and-after snippets of sweaty combatants, meant to spotlight EA Sports’ new “Ignite” graphics engine. “We now have more veins and tendons,” he said as a virtual UFC fistfight took place in an endless loop, one man laying beneath the other, writhing in something that didn’t necessarily look like agony. “Bulging as he exerts himself.”
The rest of the crowd looked on, mostly in awe, at the admittedly impressive tech—no giggling, no cocked heads, no Beavis-like responses to all of this talk of inches and veins. The fighters’ faces turned beet red during chokeholds; their bodies more naturally turned with each other as they engaged in a pre-embrace stand-off. Lots of nodding from the crowd.
The rest of this “VIP” EA Sports lobby consisted of brief next-gen demos. Next-gen Madden only existed as an offensive drill, and players couldn’t even choose a pass play. Next-gen NBA Live—a game whose last three years of iterations have been canceled—had you control a single player by himself, dunking endlessly on an undefended basket. Next-gen FIFA drew the biggest crowd, possibly because the game is EA’s biggest at the moment, or because the demo actually contained full 11-on-11 footie. The camera was so zoomed out during this play, however, that there wasn’t much next-gen on display.
Certainly, I noticed nothing in the way of next-gen gameplay. No impressive AI as FIFA competitors approached and retreated. No mind-blowing new system to deal with things like offensive and defensive lines in football. No two-joystick experiment to replicate shooting a basketball. Best I saw was a far angrier man than I’d ever seen rendered in a videogame.
Maybe I walked away just before an amazing super-zoom on a guy ripping his own shirt off after a FIFA goal, but I’d had enough tendons and veins for the day.
My favorite videogame at this year’s E3 was called C3. No way the small group of students behind this little gem expected that sentence to ever be typed. The rhyming makes me want to pound on my delete key and start again, but too late.
C3 asks players to enter giant, 3D rooms and find their way to the exit. It’s Portal at first-blush, all blocks and panels rendered in whites, grays, and blues. The catch is, your hero in C3 gets around by aiming at and shooting little Rubik’s Cubes in the distance, which rotate elements in the rest of the room. Shoot a cube, watch an unattainble platform turn so you can jump on it; then plot out the next few twists to get to the end. The student designers nearby talked about “pitch” and “yaw” while I played, like they’d been dying to say those words to other human beings for months.
This kind of game should be terrifying and confusing, all spinny and weird. But C3, or at least its 10-minute E3 demo, felt smooth. I speak fluent first-person gaming, so my fingers found the keyboard and mouse and waltzed through pretty breezily, but the game also understood visual language—of clarifying which way I should go with clear virtual topography. For all of its cool tones, C3 felt warm and inviting.
This game wasn’t hiding in a giant, corporate booth, but rather the Indiecade booth at the very back of the hall. You know you’re in subprime expo estate when weary men stand nearby and hog the open power outlets by the neighboring bathrooms. Indiecade, as an institution, celebrates a lot of small-fry gaming fare, whether by exhibits or fests or even web stories, and just like years prior, the group ponied up for booth space and doled out free E3 badges to qualifying, top-notch game makers—more so this year than ever before.
Pretty thick crowd back there; Indiecade made the most of its space, packing enough laptops to resemble a World of Warcraft gold-farming op. It hosted lots of good group games, in particular. I’d already played the unreleased games Johann Sebastian Joust, Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime, and Towerfall, but I couldn’t help dipping back into these multiplayer gems with a captive crowd. A game I hadn’t seen, called Voronoid, was set up next to an inflatable couch, and it asked four players to move little spaceships around a screen to claim chunks of the screen. How much you claimed would change based on where you were in relation to the other players—a short way of explaining a complicated mathematical formula. You could also ram other spaceships. Math plus ramming plus people shouting in glee at each other; I was sold.
Nearby, I saw a few game designers sitting with their own laptops at couches near Indiecade. All of their laminates featured names other than their own. I’d seen these men and women posting up in free E3 lobbies with their laptops in the days prior, inviting me to play their games. These were E3's guerillas, stealing power from walls, pestering friends for wifi passwords, and even, as these laminates proved, nabbing spare E3 badges to hit the show floor for a few hours.
One rogue designer, Erin Robinson, expressed concerns about “getting caught” while a nervous grin stretched upon her pale face. What if someone made a stir? Stealing power and wifi, enjoying E3 crowd spillover? I looked around and noticed a crowd of four custodial staff, huddled, bewildered by the proceedings. The laptops were safe.
“Would you take a picture with us in front of the thing?” A bright-eyed, blonde woman grabbed her male companion and sidled up next to a statue of a giant, decomposing butcher while someone else readied a smartphone camera. The statue’s exploded brain-head amalgamation was trapped within a head-sized safe, which itself was covered with barbed wire. In case the head-sized safe wasn’t warning enough. She grinned for the photo, then looked at the phone’s screen. “Oh, it’s perfect. Thank you so much!”
Me, I needed another coffee or six before I’d even consider paying this statue—of an unreleased game, at that—any tribute.
We were in the waiting room for another behind-closed-doors game demo, this time for an offering titled The Evil Within. Former Resident Evil producer Shinji Mekami has teamed up with a traditionally Western game producer, Bethesda, to put out his latest game, and he had been waiting for us in a pitch-black screening room. We were greeted by a snippet of his timid, early-morning broken English: “Survival horror is back.”
It’s a weird proposition, the E3 line. Hundreds-strong lines and crowds will pop up throughout the day to sneak a peek at unreleased video games—your Calls of Duty, your Killzones—only to be ushered into dark rooms and watch someone else play the game. Or “play” the game; there’s no way to tell how cooked up these demos are in pitch-black rooms. More so than any other expo—PAX, GDC, certainly Indiecade—E3 exists primarily to make people wait in lines to watch other people play games.
Any frequent attendee will tell you who the ideal showgoer is, then: the retail executive. Your Target and Wal*Mart and Best Buy and Amazon rep, all given particular TLC as they’re walked through elaborate closed-door pavilions with meeting rooms and trays of fruit and endless cups of coffee and those precious release windows. This week in October. That week in November. Surely you see the mutual benefit of building a nice promotion leading up to our launch! We have ideas for your Sunday circulars! Our design team has already come up with a little trinket in the game that only YOUR customers will receive, because that’s the biz these days, baby!
These people could give fuck-all about how a game plays. They love the painfully slow demos of E3, where the guy holding the controller aims his camera at every realistic brick in the virtual wall, every blade of five o’clock shadow on the protagonist’s face, every obnoxious line of overwrought dialogue. I should’ve looked for a Bethesda rep hiding in E3's catwalks, sneaking a photo of the bright-eyed Evil Within fangirl, and forwarding it immediately to a prized team at Costco.
Conversely, I’ll never be plucked out for a post-demo interview like in some campy horror-film advert. Some of the things I scribbled while watching The Evil Within:
“White cops in Twin Peaks getup.” “No gameplay innovation.” “Whatever, cowboy.” “Wet, sloppy sounds, like tomatoes being chopped.” “And then the torture-porn begins.” “You have no control over how this game plays out. No chance for horror empathy here.”
The term “survival horror” isn’t a compliment. The Evil Within, at least in automated demo form, seems stuck on the jumpy scares and stiff controls that made Mekami-san a beloved horror game maker… a decade ago. As a technical showcase, sure, the game rendered emotional faces and bloody stumps and, er, detailed bricks. But there was no terror. My dear friend Jenn Frank believes fearful films and games are at their best when they find and exploit taboos. I don’t count “tired, detached gameplay” as a meaty taboo.
And yet, at arm’s length, Bethesda will get what it wants. My every criticism can be countered with the game-specific nonsense of, “well, you didn’t PLAY it.” Even a rough cut preview of a film could take more licks than my distanced, private, closed-doors snore-a-thon. Never mind that I’ve been down this road before; that I’ve seen similar demos of games like Aliens: Colonial Marines, or Crysis 3, or dozens of other corporate snoozers, and correctly predicted their pre-release stillbirths. The only bell that will toll before The Evil Within launches will be the voice behind me that said, at demo’s end, “That looks awesome.” I didn’t have to turn around.
After E3's third day, I was among a giant crowd of loiterers and smokers in front of the Los Angeles Convention Center. You know, by the military tank. (There’s always a tank parked in front of E3.)
A man came up who looked vaguely familiar, saying hello to mutual games-journo friends and rattling off vulgar jokes pretty quickly. I looked at his laminate: Max Temkin, co-creator of Cards Against Humanity. Got it. For whatever reason, I chose not to interrupt his conversation by suggesting “legitimate rape” as a white card for his game’s next expansion set.
Glad that I didn’t make a peep, especially right as he pointed to a curious thing across the street. In terms of rogue/guerilla stories at E3, the biggest one went down in a parking lot in the distance. The little-console-that-could, Ouya, was about to launch in stores at $99 with a mix of buzzy press—Kickstarter cash, indie cred, tweaks since the “early” launch a few months back—and to capitalize, the Ouya folks had rented a parking lot and set up playable kiosks, a giant DJ booth, free beer, and a food truck out there. No E3 laminate required. I’d noticed their digs pretty easily, having walked past it from the city’s light rail line (read: the thriftier path).
From the tank angle, however, Ouya’s space was a harder sell. A giant, unmarked truck sat in an adjacent parking lot, perfectly angled to block all trace of Ouya’s bright, orange carapace. Above that truck, however, hung a giant sign, directing curious passersby to “OuyaPark.”
Temkin said that none of this was an accident. Indeed, a report went out later that day to confirm this escalating, almost Dr. Seussian battle between E3's official organizers and the Ouya team, with each side renting out spots and walls to one-up each other. It sounded like a good premise for a silly strategy game.
When I eventually walked over to the kiosks, I encountered a mix of interesting games and undercooked concepts. You Don’t Know Jack, the sardonic, ancient trivia franchise, showed off yet another edition of the series for Ouya which—conveniently—could connect to smartphones by way of a free app. Other hack-and-slash games were so forgettable, I didn’t write their names down. And in the parking lot’s spotlight zone, Portal co-creator Kim Swift stood by clutching a churro in one hand and a malfunctioning Ouya controller in the other.
Swift’s current company, Airtight Games, has an Ouya exclusive in the works that combines Norse mythology and disco-inspired rhythm action. Tap buttons in Soul Fjord to the beat to progress through giant dungeons. What was on display looked and felt cool—the disparate themes locked in as well as could be expected—but sadly, Swift couldn’t get the game to work quite right. Too much wireless/bluetooth activity in the lot meant her button taps never locked in with the beat. She grimaced at her Ouya demo screen and held her churro like an angry conductor.
But at least Ouya’s renegade presence included actual games to play, and to their credit, so did the big three console makers inside of the restricted E3 zone—Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft. Nintendo’s space played the safest, consisting mostly of lukewarm sequels. More Mario Kart! More 3D Mario platforming! An HD remake of a decade-old Zelda! The same Pikmin demo they’ve shown off for two years! That their best offering was a kill-everything-that-moves sequel to Bayonetta, which was so frantic that button taps didn’t seem to register, can’t be much comfort for the company still desperate to explain just what the heck a Wii U is.
Microsoft front-loaded its upcoming console, the Xbox One, at its giant E3 booth, mostly in the form of playable content. But not much. E3's giant-shirt-dude population crowded around a remake of ‘90s fighting series Killer Instinct. Here was a game so long gone, none of its staff remained at Microsoft subsidiary Rare, so Microsoft sent the IP to another studio to carefully recreate. Stick to the series’ stress on pure, button-slapping combo-punchin’, they must have been told. This game, as pretty and flashy as it looked, was a dinosaur by default; that it ruled Microsoft’s E3 booth doesn’t bode well for the Xbox One’s November launch.
Project Spark, the Xbox One booth’s most interesting proposition, absolutely fell flat on the E3 showfloor. Microsoft set a bad tone for this “create your own game” canvas-ware—it’s like coding a game, but easier and more surprising!—by announcing it with a generic, “you’ve played this a thousand times” pre-set adventure. For the rest of E3, the team spent more time hinting at and projecting the experiments that Project Spark could deliver. But that’s the rub with crowdsourced software, the thing that corporations don’t understand when they look at Minecraft and see dollar signs. You can’t launch Google Plus: The Game and expect the crowd to fill in the necessary cracks.
The rest in Xbox One’s playable space: another Forza racing game, and two games that had been announced as Kinect games, only to be turned into controller-first snoozers for Xbox One (Crimson Dragon, Ryse). Buried in the back of Microsoft’s booth was an Xbox 360 pavilion with a few small-fry games. The best of these was an interesting puzzle-platformer called Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, in which you control two young boys at the same time; the rest of it felt like Microsoft’s dumping ground, the remaining scraps of its once-mighty Xbox Live Arcade portfolio, tucked into a narrow aisle where messenger bags mashed together like pigs in slop.
That’s because the indies are fleeing Microsoft in droves. Sony’s booth was a show of indie force, of a commitment to lots of little games that either enjoy Sony’s seed money, or have worked out arrangements to launch on PlayStation while retaining their IP rights, or both. I asked countless game makers about their arrangements with Sony, and the response was the same nearly every time: “I can’t go into details, but it’s fucking awesome,” said a developer for the retro run-and-gun blaster Renegade Kings.
Certainly, Sony’s booth had quantity over quality; the titles set to launch on the portable Vita, in particular, felt like a glut of $1 apps or long-overdue ports. But Sony made sure to put its indies next to its big-and-dumb fare, meaning I actually smiled while playing games under the PlayStation brand.
Octodad: My pick for most grin-inducing game at E3, whose joy comes from the awkward wobbling of your octopus-hero’s limbs around a wedding ceremony. Ray’s The Dead: a delightful twist on the Pikmin series. Outlast: a mood-centric foray into a spooky mansion from a photojournalist’s point of view (my journo bias: met). Secret Ponchos: a two-on-two, Diablo-like deathmatch game, distilling good genre ideas into refreshing combat. And Transistor, the next offering from the makers of Bastion, which absolutely dripped and drooled with style, narration, cool fights, and a time-freeze gimmick that, for once in videogames, felt exciting.
These games will probably all launch on PC or other platforms before long, as will upcoming indie heavies Sportsfriends and The Witness, but Sony showed a clear understanding of what the video game battle will soon be about. Within the next few years, you won’t pick between Blu-ray and HD DVD, or VHS and Beta. It’s the platform, stupid, and Sony’s first out the gate with its hands full of Arrested Developments and Houses of Cards.
When E3 ended, a different crowd filled out the Los Angeles Convention Center. The game-themed T-shirts scuttled out, and the white Polos swept in, eager to dismantle every computer, every kiosk, every table covered in business cards and branded yo-yos.
I started sneaking around the giant hall as the music and screens shut down, as every coiling of an HDMI cord kicked up a pathetic echo. The men in the largest white Polo shirts pointed me in one direction, and I walked in the opposite. I love the weird silence of these scenes, like a nightclub at 1:50 a.m. when the house lights pop on and the angry staffers push shiny-shirt patrons out of the way to do their damned jobs. I wanted to relish the deflation for a moment.
After a few minutes, I saw a man file out of the Bethesda booth, so I followed him. Impeccable suit. Thick, finely combed head of silver hair. Nametag that read Ron Seger, VP. A guy in an oversized, black T-shirt tailed him: “Boy, when E3 ends, it sure is a mix of sweet and sour, right?”
“There’s no sorrow,” Seger replied, kicking up the kind of laugh you’d hear in a cigar lounge.
He graciously chatted with black T-shirt as they made their way out of the giant hall, telling horror stories of E3s past. Worst one was a colleague who had to skip out mid-show for gallbladder surgery. Wonder if that scene’ll make it into The Evil Within.
I got picked up by my West Hollywood buddy Derek a short while later, and I braced myself as we screamed down 6th Ave. At a stop light, I stared out the window at a scrap yard full of rusted roosters. “Coming out of the vortex?” Derek asked.
I sighed, sorting the lights, the sounds, the colors, the flashes, and the tricks that I’d seen all week. “It’s just kinda confusing. Nobody at this thing seems to know what they’re doing. Everyone’s making videogames for brand-new systems, or old systems, or old-seeming systems, or platforms that don’t yet exist, or platforms that will never exist. Just seems like a lot of people being confused about how to make money. Which, I guess, is what I always thought LA was about.”
Then I started quizzing Derek about the kinds of games he’d want from a $400+ system. On some level, E3 wants to get his attention, more than the usual captive audience. He’s about my age, has a wife, a job, a lot to do, and an occasional jones to play old NES games. What about always-online worlds full of other people to battle with and against? “Oh, hell no.” How about blockbuster worlds that look just like a movie, full of explosions and beautiful effects? “I dunno, maybe.”
He punched the accelerator through a yellow light, and then added, “You know what I want? Like, a modern, 8-bit system. I don’t wanna read any shit, I don’t want a million buttons. I want games that look simple and feel like games felt when I was a kid. I want to drink a beer and play a fucking video game.”
We slammed into another red light, where I spied a hot dog shop painted in carnival colors. A line of people extended from the door all the way down the block. Derek chuckled. “I promise you, those are NOT worth the wait.”
