大象传媒

The sun sets on E3

• Darren Waters
• 18 Jul 08, 06:48 GMT

I wasn't exactly the last to leave the LA Convention Center but I was certainly among the final few to be ushered out politely by security staff.

After four days, three major press conferences, 14 interviews and enough Snapple to stun a cow my E3 draws to a close.

If you haven't seen it already, we have a special section devoted to E3. There you'll find lots of lovely video from our time in LA.

We've tried to do more video this year - which for me meant operating a camera and doing some video editing. So I take responsibility for all the video diaries. Here's .

My colleague Andrew Webb produced all the good stuff. Can I point you in the direction of the sequence about the , the exhibition, and the .

Although E3 is a fraction of the size it was, in many ways it means more work. It's easier to meet more people, play more games, which means producing more output.

The E3 of old was so crowded, so impossibly frenetic that it was almost impossible to get work done.

There are plenty of things I didn't get a chance to see, not least The Who playing at EA's Rockband 2 party at The Orpheum in Los Angeles. My colleague Iain Mackenzie saw them and said they were awesome; he's from Radio 1 so I trust his judgement.

The best part of the show is always the snatches of conversations you have with developers, often after the camera has stopped rolling.

Developers like Todd (Bethesda) Howard and Eric (Crystal Dynamics) Lindstrom were terrific conversationalists. All of it was off the record, but believe me these guys are very smart.

In many ways the new smaller, more dignified E3 represents an industry that is finally growing up.

One of the reasons that E3 used to be such a carnival of light and sound was because the industry was trying so desperately hard to impress.

One of the PRs I spoke to this week said it was about convincing lifestyle journalists that the games industry was credible: "The games industry does Hollywood."

Some people have emailed me to ask why Technology is covering the games industry and not Entertainment. It's a valid question.

It's because, by and large, the 大象传媒 like many other mainstream media organisations does not really see video games as part of the entertainment industry.

It's an attitude that is changing slowly, but rather than see no coverage at all on the 大象传媒, I'd rather do some under the Technology umbrella.

I even managed to get a radio package about E3 on the Today programme on Radio 4.

And if that's not progress, then I don't know what is.