why mainstream press doesn't get E3

    Ahhhh, cut and paste press releases and add subtitles. Easy story to write.

    There are a couple camps to fault for this:

    1) The mainstream media, because most do not employ a technology critic/reporter. Those that do often hire some guy in his 40s or 50s who worked at IBM in the 1980s. They often "don't get it" so they write this crap. The NYTimes has a great tech guy who did a huge story on the WoW expansion, in contrast. Usually the reporters at these things just don't care and are phoning it in.

    2) The game industry itself, for two reasons. One, they promote these prepackaged clips. The same thing happens with TV news. companies will prepackage a news story in the format it needs to be in and ship it around for free. Newspapers will pick it up, add a relevant intro, and all of a sudden column inches are filled. However, it's usually just PR schlock rather than insight.

    The second reason is that the industry just tends to do a shitty job marketing it's overall image to the general public. We don't want to be sterotyped as thost commercial cliches of guys who love loud sounds, birght lights, boobies, and EXTREME living, but we fill up a giant arena with just that. The booth babes have been toned down thsi year, but they still exist. The ESA really just needs to ban them outright. (Quite frankly, I would find an attractive woman in a pantsuit explaining Gears of War much sexier.) If the ESA really wants to get serious about PR, they need to be more heavy handed with a lot of this shit. Hire PR people that know how to take a sell video games as a relevant, mainstream hobby instead of nerds in a basement.

    The Times articles here and there have been great, especially as a sort of 'gamer' perspective in a mass media outlet, but I wouldn't be able to show a casual or non-gamer that WoW article and expect them to really get what's going on. general media needs more Chris Morris! It's great; I can read his articles and enjoy them and then pass interesting ones off to my mom, and she can still understand them.

    Good publicity for us to have Marvel on that list, but... hmm. Go go black eyed peas and stupid eyetoy card game!

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