Courting game geeks

Heather Wile and Andrea Morin, a.k.a. the Atari Watch Babes, were ready for their close-ups. So the gangly young man handed his camera to a friend, straightened his glasses and slid between the two women, grinning awkwardly. On cue, Wile and Morin cocked their heads fetchingly and flashed big, toothy smiles, while a crowd of about a dozen other men stood transfixed. Whether the main draw was the free Atari watches the women were handing out or the pair’s bubbly personalities and bare midriffs was hard to say.

“You guys are the most attractive,” the camera bug confided as he thanked the women and scurried off into the flash of blinking lights and the roar of computerized sound effects rising like thunder through the Los Angeles Convention Center. “Yeah, right,” Wile said, giggling as she watched him go.

It was Wednesday, the opening of the three-day Electronic Entertainment Expo, the world’s largest annual convocation of the newest, the hottest and the hippest in must-have computer gaming technology. But for hundreds of L.A. models, actors and others like Wile and Morin who’d been hired to pass out free goodies, dress up in sometimes outlandish costumes and explain to visitors the finer points of, say, “Mario Kart Double Dash!!” or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds,” the three-day event is a chance to earn some quick cash and gain professional experience while satisfying their own extroverted natures.

“I’ve never really been a shy girl,” said Wile, who sings in a band called Ray and the Corsairs and cites Etta James as her biggest influence. (Her signature tunes, by the way, are the Shocking Blue’s “Venus” and Elvis’ “Return to Sender.”) Like her colleague, Morin is a part-time model with another creative outlet as a film editor who says she’s about to open a post-production studio in Culver City. “But I do this for fun,” she said of trade-show promotional work. “It’s really easy money.”

How easy? It depends, but $25 an hour isn’t unusual if you’re with one of the top modeling agencies, the women said. Between them, they’ve done promotional work for clients ranging from Volkswagen to the U.S. Air Force.

There was no denying a certain hormonal undercurrent to some of “E3’s” display areas, a byproduct of a high-tech industry whose aim is to arouse the brain and plunge the senses into overdrive.

At one especially well-attended display near the booth for Japanese game publisher Tecmo Ltd., a lineup of women in bikinis with phosphorescent hair posed obligingly for photos with the mostly male browsers. Those wandering in off the street might think they’d taken a wrong turn and stumbled into a Hooters tryout.

But working as a trade-show promotional model generally requires more than six-pack abs or high cheekbones, as Brant Wiwi could attest. This week, it was Wiwi’s good fortune to be cast as Natoe, the main character in a Sammy Studios Inc. game based on the classic Japanese story of the seven samurai. Heroically attired in spiked hair and scarlet costume armor, with two samurai swords crisscrossing his body, front and back, the L.A.-based actor demonstrated the game, showing off his manual dexterity as he guided his cartoon alter-ego through a burning, collapsing building and several violent encounters with skeletal “humanoid” warriors. Natoe also must contend with his samurai-girlfriend Jody, who’s “always trying to do the relationship thing while they’re fighting.”

“I’d never played it until today, but I had to do my research,” Wiwi said, explaining how he’d developed Natoe as he would any other acting role. To work up his tough-guy persona for the trade show, Wiwi also drew on some painful personal experience -- namely, having to shoulder his unusual surname, which is pronounced just the way you think it’s pronounced (his family, he said, is descended from New Zealand’s indigenous Maoris).

“It was a very positive childhood, as you can imagine,” Wiwi said ironically. “By seventh grade I was all screwed up. You know how cruel kids are. I ended up in reform school.” But now he considers his name a blessing for a young actor eager to stand out from the crowd. “They’ll see me in 50 years and remember, ‘Oh, you’re Mr. Wiwi.’ It’s publicity,” he said.

A few booths away, in the cavernous West Hall, Alisha Beckum, Patrick Johns and Jennifer Humphrey were doing their best to help conjure the magical kingdom of Mu, the great island continent that sank into the middle of the Pacific Ocean 50,000 years ago. Never heard of it? Well, obviously you’re not among the 380,000 gamers tapping into Mu online from Korea, China, Japan and Taiwan. Or is it Thailand? Beckum, one of several women dressed in black-and-red hooded cape outfits that suggested a Las Vegas revue based on “Dungeons and Dragons,” wasn’t quite sure. “You come back tomorrow, I’ll know all this,” she said, laughing.

Mu’s display was unusually striking, a multitiered set with room to accommodate several roaming character-models as well as a troupe of traditional Korean drummers and dancers, who performed at intervals. Johns, a Newport Beach high school student who was having a bit of trouble speaking through his Dark Wizard armor, said he had a gig a few weeks ago at the L.A. Zoo featuring the Energizer Bunny. “I didn’t get the part of the Energizer Bunny, but he was a pretty nice guy,” Johns said.

Being asked to impersonate an action figure you’ve never heard of, or strike frat-party poses for a camcorder, are only a couple of the tasks that befall electronic entertainment trade-show models. Donald James, senior vice president of operations for Nintendo, said the costs and production values have risen considerably since he started putting together Nintendo booths 20 years ago. This year, Nintendo’s 40,000-square-foot environment of suspended blue-lit fabric swatches and rotating overhead computer screens cost about $3.5 million, he said. Promotional models help an environment feel more interactive, less static, he said, and good ones also can help customers make sense of new technology.

For cool, “E3”-style promotional professionalism, only one group outdid the women of Nintendo: the men of the U.S. Army. A few yards away from the GameBoy players, Lt. Col. George Juntiff was holding forth about “America’s Army,” a state-of-the-art, Pentagon-approved game that also doubles as an advertising and potential recruiting tool for the U.S. armed services. “Empower Yourself. Defend Freedom” read a banner hovering above the Army’s artificial desert-scape display area, which included a nearly life-size replica of a blasted building and a downed helicopter.

“Our job, what we want to do, is communicate to people of all ages what we do, how the Army trains,” said Juntiff between swigs of a Diet Coke. “There are some things that can’t be made into a game. A 30-mile march with a rucksack isn’t really conducive to this type of environment. But for kids that are teeter-tottering (about) ‘what do I do when I grow up,’ there’s a lot in the Army. Our service is very, very robust.”

Back at the Seven Samurai display, Brant Wiwi was soldiering on, brandishing his sword for the cameras. He, too, looked very, very robust.