The Escapist Bulletin: Why E3 fans the fanboy flames

It's that time of year again, when it seems like every gaming journalist in the western hemisphere has decamped from their usual environs and headed off to the City of Angels. That's right, it's E3 time again. We sent a couple of intrepid reporters – Susan Arendt and Jordan Deam – to the event, and they took in Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo’s press conferences, where motion controls seemed to be the order of business. They also had a chance to get their hands on some exciting new games like Left 4 Dead 2, Dark Void and Heavy Rain.

The days of E3 being a Mecca for gamers are behind us (as the show became a press-only affair a couple of years ago), but fortunately since then it’s regained some of its splendour and it’s still a very significant event in the gaming calendar. After 2008’s somewhat lacklustre offering, it’s a relief to see companies showing some really impressive stuff, albeit to a much smaller audience than in previous years.

That’s not to say that there is no room for pomp and spectacle at E3. Activision hired a couple of rappers you may have heard of – Jay-Z and Eminem – for its aftershow party, and Microsoft got The Beatles to appear on stage. There’s no doubting that E3 is still gaming’s ‘Big Show’.

But it’s a show of a different kind as well – a show of force, a call to arms to the legions of loyal fans, a rallying cry and a re-arming of the troops in the console war. Bombastic rhetoric aside, consoles have always inspired an amazing amount of loyalty in the gaming world, and the near ubiquity of the internet has escalated the conflict from simple schoolyard bickering to raging flame wars that encircle the world.

Egged on by representatives on the various sides – most notably Microsoft’s Aaron Greenburg and Sony’s Kazuo Hirai – fanboys bitterly ‘debate’ the merits and flaws of their console of choice, each new press release or console exclusive title widening the divide between the camps. While it makes great business sense to whip fans into a frenzy, it’s hard to think of anything worse for gaming. It’s entirely counter-productive, and the time – and money – could be spent making the games themselves better, rather than trash-talking the opposition and buying limited exclusivity for content.

Even in today’s gaming climate, with exclusives becoming increasingly rare, the wildly different technical specifications in today’s consoles make cross-platform development difficult at best. The Xbox 360 is accessible, but doesn’t have the raw power of the PlayStation 3. The PS3 is powerful and Blu-ray gives developers a lot of room to play with, but Sony deliberately made it hard to program for, in order to increase the console’s lifespan. The Wii further complicates matters by being a sideways step in technology, rather than the usual geometric step forward.

This means that even when games are released across the platforms, you still get arguments about which version is better. The sad fact is that E3 and shows like it bring out the worst in gamers, the divisive side born of brand loyalty taken just a little bit too far. When we squabble over whether Halo 3 is better than Killzone 2, or which console has the best version of Grand Theft Auto IV, we stop thinking about whether a game is good, and only concern ourselves with whether it’s better than a rival product.