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Trigger Happy
163
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