How frustrating was it to be a minor every May back when E3 was the biggest holiday on the calendar? I remember rushing back from school, jumping on the AOL and refreshing the IGN and ANTagonist homepages every few minutes to make sure I could grab every morsel of news that got posted. I ate that shit up. But the more I read, the more restless I got about one day being able to experience it myself. It was like being forced to go to bed early in the summer: you can hear everyone having fun outside in the sun, and the fact that you couldn't join them only made them sound like they were having that much more fun. On a par with being able to buy porn on tape, being eligible to go to E3 was one of the crystalline promises of turning 18.

I've yet to do either, and it doesn't look like that's gonna change now that all the rules are different. My interest in the whole thing waned during college, when May was just an onslaught of papers and finals. When the material effect of all the E3 announcements finally occurred, it sometimes took me by surprise as a result. But I was fortunate enough to have a day off from work when the first day of press conferences took place this year. I grabbed a beer and geeked out like when I was a kid, although now all the fancy liveblogging software does the refreshing for me. I anticipated not getting as fucking jazzed about all the info being dropped as I used to, but that sense of immediacy at all the prime movers in the industry gravitating towards this one event is still pretty overpowering. As the LIPS demonstration and the new dashboard interface walkthrough were lobbed from the podium at the press, I was pretty sure I was going to get through the day with my brain unasploded. I was trying to figure out what got me so amped about E3 in the past and I guess it had something to do with how real I perceived the console war to be. Back when I was kid I viewed each respective company's game line-up as an "arsenal" without any fucking irony. This wasn't just an overblown conference, this was the platform on which brinksmanship was staged. Killer apps were the campaigns of market dominance and god help you if you supported the losing side. I'm pretty sure my interest in the outcome of E3 was inversely proportional to my sense of allegiance to one company or the other...

And then right as the Microsoft presentation is coming to a close, Yoichi Wada announces FFXIII for the 360. I don't know if it was a twitch of my old partisanship or what, but I gasped and a sense of smugness washed over me. My second impulse was to see exactly how Sony Defense Force is spinning the news. Whether or not it's a joke, that site is good substitute for the shit I used to disseminate in chat rooms when I was a kid, and a good barometer for the substance of fanboyism that still congeals in the darkest annals of the internet. But I wasn't doing an ethnography, I lapsed into an actual concern for how the "other" side is gonna deal with the bomb. When I caught myself, I kinda just rode it out after that. I realize there's not another time in the year when that kind of mindset and purely capitalism-driven affection is not only allowed but encouraged. It's how this kind of news gets amplified and augmented. Granted, that's about the only really big surprise that happened this year. But E3 is still enchanting if you think about it like April Fool's Day. It's when you can let your childish impulses go nuts, feast purely upon the aesthetic, forsake the limits of your budget, and still get pat on the head for it when the more useful pieces of info actually materialize. And when you emerge from it, hopefully you feel a bit humbled by how dumb it made you.