Trigger Happy
vast acreage of the various videogame halls to meet and do business, and to play as many of the games as possible in five- or ten-minute bursts. People happily wait in line for twenty minutes to try out the most promising new videogames, and the constant bustle and electronic noise starts claiming victims alarmingly early on in the course of the event. The popular outdoor cafÉ area is regularly full of half-comatose men and women sprawled in plastic chairs with a small mountain of promotional carrier bags strewn over the ground. Many of them suck hungrily on cigarettes with an expression of bliss peculiar to the Californian tobacco aficionado, everywhere hounded by the law. I notice this, of course, because that’s where I stagger myself every few hours. Everybody who’s anybody in the industry turns up at E3. So I have gone to Los Angeles too, in an attempt to take the temperature of the videogame industry. And in one way, it’s running pretty high. This year, producers are more concerned than usual about the question of “violence”; parental lawsuits are in the air, and federal interference with their industry is thoroughly undesirable. Hence, the Dreamcast version of zombie- shooting game House of the Dead 2 is on demonstration without the game’s cybernetic sine qua
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