E303: Kentia - Where Gamers Fear to Tread

A young videogame programmer felt a sudden urge at airport security in Los Angeles. It was Saturday morning, and he was headed back east from E3. Dashing over to the gray plastic bins reserved for laptops, he grabbed one and immediately vomited in to it. A caring security officer approached him: "Are you okay?" she asked. Slightly chagrined, he didn't mention he had a thorough hangover from a night of drinking with his mates. Instead, he said quickly, "I'm okay, I just have a little fever." He was immediately stuck in quarantine until he could be checked out by a medic.

SARS hung in the air over E3 this year, perhaps because there wasn't any bigger news.

Mostly beauty pageant, part Burning Man, part revival meeting, E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, is where the video games industry sells videogames to itself. The best part of the show (and the worst) is always in Kentia hall - the Hong Kong night market flipside of the deluxe Rodeo drive atmosphere upstairs. In Kentia, aspiring foreign companies, hucksters selling bizarre joysticks, and CD manufacturers jockey for attention from people who have accidentally wandered away from the beautiful blinking lightshow put on by Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. Here Russian, Chinese and Canadian trade delegations demonstrate games we may never see again. The old joke goes, "Kentia afford a better booth?" This year someone asked, "You visited Kentia - weren't you afraid of SARS?"

GameSpy Face Mask. More Photos

GameSpy.com, capitalized on the hullabaloo with a timely if indelicate promotion - a GameSpy branded face mask. At the time it seemed like the wittiest thing around, if only because the rest of the show was focused on more safe bets.

On the show floor the longest lines were for two sequel titles beginning with "ha" - Halo 2 and Half Life 2. Both offer players a chance to grab a gun, grab some friends, and repel absolutely stunning looking aliens from their latest Earth invasion. The footage showed breathtaking graphic detail and remarkable layers of possible play - instead of shooting the aliens, you might shoot a rafter holding up a nearby building and watch the structure fall to pin your foes. There were lines over four hours long waiting to see this footage you can now see online at GameSpot or IGN. Meanwhile, downstairs in Kentia Hall, CDV was demonstrating "Lula 3D," a German erotic adventure game, and few were watching.

A few of those attending sat through the panel discussions upstairs, which revealed two major movements in game publishing - mobile games and multiplayer. Mobile phone games are now the leading way to make a commercial title for under $100,000, and still put it in the hands of millions: reaching people who wouldn't otherwise play electronically. And mobile games present a host of new challenges - how to manage portable, segmented play, and how to get people to pay for it. (See "Mobile Games Teach the Big Boys: Report from E3 2003" for more coverage).

A dancer weilds a sword during a traditional Korean drum dance at the Mu: Continent of Legend booth. Afterwards, a somewhat engaged hostess explained the game to the audience. "There are four playable character-classes in Mu." Then she would immediately follow with a question: "How many playable character-classes are there?" If you responded correctly, you won a keychain. I got my second guess right.

Talk of massively multiplayer games in Korea and China dominated many panels. On a panel I moderated on "Game Gems from Asia," Joon Oh from CCR explained that multiplayer online games are a lifestyle in that part of the world. Think of Korea as gaming promised land. Thousands of new games exploring genre, gameplay and social arrangements are popping up in affordable, accessible, comfortable internet cafes. Talented gamers are celebrities amidst widespread and well-respected game culture. The government sponsors education and training for wanna-be developers. And, Korea has begun to develop the Chinese game market, translating their online games for eager PC gamers on the P.R.C. mainland.

Most of the games emerging in this part of the world are copy-cat in their own way. Sword and sorcery role-playing with strong knights, bold warriors, elegant sorceresses. While their gameplay innovations may be slight, their subscriber numbers are staggering. Korean company Actoz has over 10 million registered paying players in China for their MMORPG title Legend of Mir 2, which draws more from the mythology of the Orient than from typical Occidental fantasy sources.

But the Legend of Mir series is well-known compared to some of the still obscure products demonstrated downstairs. In Kentia Hall, where the companies are hungry and the PR agents will return your phone calls, developers from the Czech Republic Plastic Reality were reconsidering the Korean War with Korea: Forgotten Conflict, Ukranian developers GSC Game World spun a story Stalker based on a near-future explosion at Chernobyl, and Korean developers Dataway demonstrated Animal Kingdom a real-time strategy game using animals on the savannahs of Africa ("Hey kids - let's play Lions versus Hyenas!").

Award for wackiest peripheral at the show goes to Zboards - custom modular keyboards. For $20 you can get a keyboard that has special buttons just for your favourite game. Pictured here are keyboards for Civilization, Age of Mythology, Madden 2003 and Medal of Honor.

Enterprising entrepreneurs sold turn-key solutions for massively-multiplayer online game guilds, at Guildsites.com. And the wackiest peripheralswere the Ideazon "Zboards" - a series of interchangeable keyboard pieces custom tailored with hotkeys for competitive games (It might be easier to play Age of Mythology when you have a "Villager" key). If all the commerce and speculation was too exciting, "The Journey to Wild Divine" encouraged players to "promote mind/body mastery with easy-to-use, personal biofeedback equipment." At a booth dressed up like a new-age tobacco shop, one man sat working to coax a feather down the screen by quieting his mind.

But E3 is the wrong place to try quieting the mind. Maddened is the proper sensation there - pain in the feet, lower back, and between the ears. From the explosions, drums, screeches. From the flickering lights and giant projections. From the inane copycat games and the desperate remakes. And from those few moments where you see something you want to play again later, and so you hope to remember.

Posted by justin at May 19, 2003 06:20 PM | TrackBack