Expo Courts Those Who Love to Go Blam

Fetching princesses threw fake cash in the air and Gothic Avengers waved plastic swords at miniskirted “booth babes” with purple hair. This neon-lighted boombox was Las Vegas with video games instead of slots, pulsating with sound and light.

The enormously noisy, glitzy display of Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), held last week at the L.A. Convention Center, was designed to overload the senses of both chain-store buyers and gamers looking for a new, totally immersive world to play in. And there were plenty of worlds at this installment of the annual high-stakes showcase for sellers, publishers and developers of video games: hobbit houses next to castles bordering graffiti-scrawled alleys that led to futuristic laser-lighted rocket ships.

With global consumers spending a billion dollars more on video games (the PlayStation/XBOX/GameCube versions--”console games”--as well as those played on PCs) than on movies, the $9.4-billion industry this year declared itself “A World of Its Own.” That was the conference theme, as well as an accurate description of the mental space of the hard-core gamer at play. The question is: Just what kind of world is it? John Kreng, a stunt coordinator and former video-game producer, along with a handful of game developers, offered a glimpse into its changing dimensions, a world where the key battle seems to be between impulse and imagination.

Kreng, in his 30s, has been playing video games since the industry was in its early stages--that’s more than 20 years in front of the box. He looked around, hoping to be impressed. “Nothing’s really grabbed me,” Kreng said. “I mean, none of this stuff makes you gasp or think or teaches you anything. A few years ago, the emphasis was on role-playing games and clever puzzles you had to solve. And those games are still around, but the tide’s going against them. Now, it’s all fast twitch. I mean, console games have always been like that, but now it’s true for most PC games too.”

Kreng quickly tapped his thumbs against his forefingers as an example of fast twitch. “That’s the way it’s been going these last few years--from storytelling to twitch games.”

Classic “simulation games” like Sim City or Civilization--in which players build communities or countries--and “adventure games” that involve role-playing and puzzle-solving, like Myst, have strong narrative elements and little or no competitive game-play.

But, said Kreng, role-playing games and “God games [in which the player builds a virtual environment] take time, and most people don’t have time anymore. It’s a microwave mentality. Most people don’t want to know the story. They get home from work or school, they’re tired, they just want to kill enemies. Blam, blam, blam.”

That’s the opposite of what’s happening in other media. Sports coverage, for example, depends on narrative. During the Olympics, we get touching film clips about what hardships an athlete has had to overcome on the way to the medal stand. And take a look at professional wrestling. You’ll see story lines drawn straight out of soap operas: jealousy, rage, betrayal, envy. This looks like a carefully orchestrated attempt to bring in a female audience, and it seems to be working. But in the video-game industry, though there is a female audience for the products--perhaps 15% of the E3 crowd consisted of young women--the target market is young males, who apparently prefer twitch games with pure adrenaline-churning game-play and minimal story.

The writing on the wall was clear to DreamCatcher, a medium-sized company (with 75 employees) based in Toronto. In 1996, it started publishing visually evocative, narrative-rich adventure games in which the player could solve intricate puzzles and explore fantasy worlds full of everything from Arthurian knights to futuristic space travel.

“What’s interesting about the customers that play our adventure games is that the age range really covers the entire spectrum,” said Richard Wah Kan, the company’s president and chief executive. “There are middle-aged and elderly; there are people in their 20s and 30s; there are males and females, about a 50-50 split.” But the core gamers--the ones with the time and money to fuel the industry--are male, and young, from 12 to 25. They’re the fast-twitch crowd. So at E3, DreamCatcher rolled out what its press kit called a “new look.” It relegated its adventure games to a newly formed division called, appropriately, the Adventure Company; and the DreamCatcher label now publishes games--including console games--aimed at the core gamers.

Judging from the crowds, DreamCatcher’s most popular new game at E3 was Gore. (No, it’s not about the 2000 election, though the body count rivals that of the Florida ballot wars.) Gore is a multi-player shooter game set in a gritty futuristic urban landscape. Each player sees what’s in front of him, from his own perspective, while trying to gun down the others. As the title promises, there’s a lot of blood.

E3 is supposed to be for the video-game industry, but every year thousands of gamers find their way inside, and lines of these adolescent and post-adolescent males waited to play Gore. They paid little attention to the subtle charms of adventure games like Pharaoh’s Curse, which was displayed on a video screen nearby. “A shooter game like Gore appeals to a young, predominantly male audience,” said Kan. “The video-game market is growing 12% to 15% per year, and we need to keep on growing with the marketplace.”

Does he think the adventure game--with its elaborate storytelling-- will eventually disappear?

“The genre is evolving toward more game-play,” said Kan, “but I don’t see that the adventure game is going to go away. For us, we’re going to keep on going with both.”

As Kan spoke, lines three- and four-deep waited to get a chance at Gore’s shoot-’em-up thrills, early validation of his strategy. DreamCatcher is like a small publishing house that specializes in poetry but adds romance novels to keep up with the demands of the market. The romance here is in the “twitch.”

At the farthest corner of the Convention Center’s South Hall, what seemed to be a good story was taking shape. A game demo showed monsters creeping across a surreal landscape. Nearby were two men--Roman Kremlicka, 20, and Markus Fuhrmann, 22. They said they had come a few days ago from Vienna and that their third partner, Benjamin Prucha, 21, “a real genius at programming,” was home in Austria.

Eighteen months ago, Kremlicka, Fuhrmann and Prucha decided to build their dream: a “massively multi-player online game.” The idea would be to develop a game that could be played by up to 10,000 people at the same time.

“Benjamin is a little shy, a typical genius,” said Fuhrmann, “so Roman and I went around trying to get money from everybody we knew, our families and friends.”

What did they show their potential investors? “We showed them us,” said Fuhrmann. “And we told them, ‘Look, we’ve analyzed the market of online games. We’ve watched them and played them, and we know what’s working, what people like. And we can do our own that is better, with wonderful graphics, better than the others, and a story that’s different from anything else out there.” Kremlicka said, “And what they told us was: ‘We don’t have a clue about video games or what you guys are doing, but we believe in you.’”

With their friends and family seed money, they set up five computers in a one-room apartment shared by Kremlicka and Prucha, and then worked day and night to build a prototype.

“When you think of it, it’s pretty crazy,” said Kremlicka. “Twenty years old, no money, no proof that we could do this. But we were so determined. We were in a tiny apartment; we did nothing but program day and night--computer screens running all the time. We had no life, we did nothing but work.” Once the demo was well on its way, they contacted Doug Mealy, who does marketing and public relations for many online games. Mealy took them on as clients. Since Mealy had already contracted for display space at E3, there was room for Kremlicka and Furhmann to put up a “relatively cheap” 10-by-10-foot booth.

The young Austrians will try to infuse their game--slated to be ready in late 2003--with game play. “There will be battles involving large numbers of players and duels against a single nemesis,” said Kremlicka. But for these fledgling game designers, the strong twitch factor is woven into a “mix of scientific fact and fiction,” as Kremlicka puts it. The story’s not the thing, as it is in an adventure game, yet even nonstop action seems to need some sort of plot.

“There is an artificial planet called Iritor,” said excitedly. “It was constructed by an omnipotent race called the Creators, who are guardians of the universe. The Creators get a prophecy that there is one race that can help them fight against the evil that comes from another dimension and is trying to destroy the universe. So the Creators gather all the known races of the universe, and they put them all on Iritor so they can determine which is the race that can help them fight evil. One of those races is the human race from planet Earth. This is the back story, and it provides for a lot of conflicts. The human race has conflicts among themselves, conflicts with other races, and all of them have conflicts with the Creators.”

Players don’t have to invent characters, nor follow their own story lines, but the action rests against a plot line that, perhaps inevitably, parallels the young men’s life story. Here were two men far away from home. They had been plunked down on an alien, artificial planet (E3?). Nearby, omnipotent Creators (Sony? Microsoft?) were carrying on a quest to find out which of these other races (smaller companies that develop new software?) could keep the Creators from falling prey to evil (changes in public taste? economic collapse?).

On Friday afternoon, the two Austrians dismantled their booth, reflecting on the story so far. “Six months ago, we were in Vienna, trying to put a demo together,” said Fuhrmann. “Six weeks ago, we didn’t even know we were going to be at E3. And now we’re here. It’s unbelievable.”

Even in the rush to satisfy the twitch factor, it’s still hard to quiet the imagination, a tendency that can’t help but color the games. As DreamCatcher’s Richard Kan had said earlier: “Some stories are better than others, but it’s always the story. The interesting thing about humans is that they love good stories.”