If you're anything like me, then you're probably getting tired of the often hysterical pre-E3, at-E3, and post-E3 coverage. I assure you from personal experience that such a sentiment would likely be trebled had you actually attended the show and come back bleary-eyed and swollen-footed. Though I have three topics here which I feel compelled to share, the prospect of dragging these topics across weeks and months exhausts me in the usually prime and virile real-estate of my psyche. So, I will condense and compact in the hopes that doing so will bring me to the concise essence of the points I want to make, though reading back over this intro leaves me a little less confident of that particular skill.

Here's what I want to tell you about: Peter Moore/Shane Kim/the Vision of Microsoft Games and their relationships to the PC, the general disservice of most of the gaming "journalists" I encountered, and maintaining something like objectivity in the VIP Press atmosphere of E3.

---- Moore PC

As part of our all-access tour through Microsoft's cavalcade of digital mirth, Certis and I were invited to sit in on two small roundtable discussions; one with Peter Moore, head of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business division, and another with Shane Kim, Microsoft Game Studios General Manager. In the coming days we will transcribe highlights from our Moore and Kim interviews for the Press Pass, but I do want to touch on one of the meatier revelations of the show -- though I wonder how many moons will pass before the gaming media recognizes its importance -- Microsoft's decision to become the retail champion for the PC gaming platform.

Moore is sufficiently well described by the internet's cultural mythos surrounding him, so much so that he seems dangerously familiar as he comes into the room. He oozes success and confidence as he thrusts -- there's no other word for it -- into his chair, fixes the six of us at the round table with a daring, sly smile and challenges us to knock him off his talking points. He is a master at directing the discussion toward what he has come to say, and is king-of-the-hill from the word go. Our best efforts to vex him in any meaningful way are so many pebbles thrown against the castle wall. So, anything I write here is pretty much crafted by his efforts to keep the topics on point, and you should know that from the start.

What he did say, however, was that Microsoft is going to reenergize the PC gaming market. It's the sort of thing I've been waiting to hear for years, and it's exactly the right company to make the effort. Microsoft has apparently wizened up and come to the realization that they have two gaming platforms well in hand, not just the one, and that with the install base of the home PC, should a single company manage to unify the platform and direct it from both a marketing, retail, and development standpoint, the upside is incalculable.

The idea is to create this Games For Windows brand and put it in retail with all the vigor and marketing that might normally prop up the home consoles. Instead of retailers sporting walls full only of console games and a lonely, dusty endcap for a few PC titles, with aggressive "branding strategies" Microsoft hopes to take back the ground lost over the past decade. From the point of view of encouraging developers to turn back their efforts, time, and money into the PC, this is a win, but the move leaves me with the same questions I've always harbored about the quality of the games. From a volume point this is an exciting step, but there's nothing here to encourage publishers to do anything more than port more of their games over from the consoles in the hopes of gaining more shelf-space at minimal cost. Don't mistake this move as an effort to improve PC gaming. It is not. It is only intended to drive more consumers to recognize the gaming potential they already have, and generate more business and brand recognition for Microsoft, Windows Vista, and to a lesser extent the Xbox 360 with the coming improvements to Live.

One question that Certis asked both Moore and Kim, and one which they both pretended not to understand while either dismissing the sentiment or answering another question entirely, perhaps an invented one they would have wanted us to ask, is: who decides what games and companies are featured in this Games for Windows branding? In other words, if Microsoft is footing the bill for retail space of any prominence, then how do they decide which games get that prominent space? By controlling the marketing and retail end of things, essentially buying the PC shelf-space and therefore control of that space, Microsoft essentially becomes the arbiter of deciding what games get put where, much as they do for the 360.

Don't be fooled, the placement and prominence of games in your retail store is bought and paid for by those with an interest in having very particular shelf space. Game retailers do not simply pick what goes on an end cap, or the mall window, or prominent new release sections; that is valuable territory. Though Moore stopped just short of saying that companies don't buy the space, which may be a version of truth under limited circumstances, he did seem to dismiss the shelving end of the retail deal without addressing the serious issue of who decides what gets featured in the Games for Windows section. I'm not trying to get people to put the tinfoil hats on, but it is something worth considering particularly since there are far more independent, small-budget, and niche titles within the PC market than the consoles, and they will continue to struggle despite their qualities for limited shelf space.

Still Kim and Moore both admitted that Microsoft had made significant errors in the past in handling PC gaming, and they're absolutely right. The decline of PC Gaming is a self-inflicted wound that, hopefully, will finally be stitched up and mended as the platform finds unification and store presence under the big M. The integration of Live into the Windows platform is nothing short of a stroke of common-knowledge genius that every gamer has been demanding since Live hit the market. Not only will it bolster online communities, and facilitate this emphasis on PC gaming, but it will sell Xbox 360s.

In short, it's about damn time someone started taking advantage of a platform that's aching for resurgence.

---- On The Media

If you feel as though the gaming media is a placid and benign thing which usually does little more than print up press releases and ogle screenshots of upcoming games, then I have bad news for you. It doesn't get any better in person.

Having spent the last week in direct contact with a lot of people who consider themselves sources of news, it's remarkable how bad they are at actually pursuing unique and objective information. I'm not trying to reignite the tired debate over whether gaming media qualify as journalists; having seen them in action I'm pretty much willing to concede, without qualification, that they are not. But, when you find yourself as a member of the gaming media in a Q&A with the game developers, publishers, and head-honchos that you probably have been aching to make contact with over the fifty-one weeks prior, here's an idea: Have A Damn Question!

And yet, time and again Certis and I took up the lion's share of Q&A opportunities not because we forced ourselves over our colleagues, but because had we not done so, there would have come a distracted and uncomfortable silence reminiscent of the high-school classroom where nobody knows the answer to the question on the board.

And, more often than not, with a few exceptions, when some daring soul ventured a question, it was either completely unrealistic to expect an answer of a lob so soft that a toddler could knock it out of the park with a waffle bat and a strong headwind. Watching most these guys question the developers was like watching two very polite old ladies playing tennis. There's no universe in which Bioware is going to start talking about the plans for a sequel to Mass Effect at this point, and I think we already know the answer to the question of whether Peter Moore thinks the PS3 is overpriced.

You may be assuming, at this point, that I'm speaking about the kind of pseudo-media who snuck in on forged credentials or managed to slip through the cracks with their small fan-sites, but I'm actually talking about names you'd recognize, print media, online media, big guys with more readers than I have words in my vocabulary. They would sit there, either as passive as a college freshman's narrative voice, or asking questions that must have sounded penetrating and informed in their heads, but which were so unrealistic that they might as well have asked a campaigning politician how many prostitutes he likes to sleep with at one time.

Forgive me if I sound superior, because I am not a qualified or trained journalist, and I'm certain that they would scorn me as much as I do anyone else, if not more so, but throughout the week we received several compliments from developers, interviewees, PR staff, executives and the like for our level of engagement in trying to find something unique to report. They are as tired as you are of the same questions that weren't even good the first time around. They want to talk about their game! Let them! Engage them!

I even had several people from other media outlets stop me after a session to tell me how good our questions were, and at least one that conceded the floor to us completely and said she'd "just take notes". I suppose some credit should be paid to her, reporting for a major gaming publication, for taking notes at all. Throughout the show I felt unusual for actually scribing comments in my little black notebook, as it was apparently more than sufficient to just sit and watch the presentation as you would an episode of The Family Guy. I can't imagine trying to concoct a meaningful statement about a game I saw, among the two-hundred other games I'd seen that day, without some kind of notes from which to cross-reference, but apparently the gaming media is full of people who get it right on the first try. Maybe that's why they don't ask questions; brains too full of notes.

There were exceptions, and there are some people out there with brains and guts enough to find a good question and ask it, but they did not represent a majority or anything like it. If you feel like you're being poorly served by a gaming media that takes as gospel the promises and assurances of developers, a gaming media that is unwilling to put anyone to task for previous shortcomings or unrealistic promises, then you've got it about right.

I suppose I had expected more from the kind of press that gets VIP access. Maybe it's just that it's E3 and there's too much information and not enough time and space, but frankly I'm not interested in being the one to make excuses for mediocre coverage.

---- Behind the Curtain

What makes this year's E3 remarkable for us is our suddenly vaulted level of access. We are, and remain to some degree, a small, relatively underground niche gaming site. We are not a news dump, or a review factory, or an advertising partner, or a particularly solid avenue for reprinting press releases. We are stubborn, occasionally smug, fastidious, and particular about our community. We are not, in short, a tool of anyone's PR, and that has historically made establishing contacts and access to developers something of a chore.

The lion's share of our past two E3s was experienced among the madding crowd, seeing the games only that were shown on the floor, and then usually by a low-level designer or even someone associated with the game only by the most tenuous of threads. As the privileged and submissive media ascended staircases to air-conditioned rooms with unseen treasures, we tried to hear over the cacophony of the show floor and experience the games themselves among long lines and poor conditions.

While I certainly don't long for a return to those days of being ignored and rejected, of shoving past a giggling and directionless pack of Gamestop employees so I could try to hear the half-hearted presentation given on a game while vigorously scribbling notes, part of me has begun to realize that the experience on the floor is, in some senses, more pure than the all-access experience. In the end the presentation, often delivered lifelessly by an anonymous and exhausted someone with no real enthusiasm, is much more about the game itself than the promises and perfect conditions that one sees under the careful direction of lead designers who want, very specifically, to orchestrate the media coverage.

It is, in short, harder to be objective in the VIP rooms.

First, the people showing you the games in the comfortable, well-maintained rooms are those with the most to gain and lose. Their passion is infectious and undeniable. They speak of the game with love where that same game on the showfloor is as likely to be described by someone who just wants a beer and a foot massage. Your eye is carefully directed to just the right things, and it doesn't occur to you until later that you have no idea how the game might actually play, or feel.

In the worst cases, you begin to want the game to succeed, because you like the guy who is showing it to you. You feel their desire to make a great game, so you start to see only the potential greatness, and not the potential pitfalls. That's something that almost never happens on the floor itself.

The biggest problem, however, is one of environment. The games shown behind closed doors are shown in their idealized conditions and states. You're far more likely to have a controller in your hand on the floor than you are in a behind-closed-doors meeting, and therefore far more likely to talk about what's actually there than what is being promised.

Under these combined effects, the impression one might take from a game as shown behind-closed-doors and that same game on the showfloor is potentially more than just different but opposite. Marrying this segment with the previous, my faith in most gaming media to maintain any kind of objectivity and critical thought within this environment approaches zero. So few seem to realize that the real issue is not what you see, but what you don't see, and fewer still seem to seek resolution on that point.

Forgive me if I seem dire and pessimistic, because I come out of this year's show far more optimistic than I might have expected. My criticism of others is born partly because I want the gaming media to explore its unfathomable opportunities for maturity, but also because I hope to guard against making those same mistakes myself. I only recognize the issues of influence and poor journalism because I'm constantly concerned that they are trends and tricks for which I might fall and perhaps have fallen. I stand behind our coverage of E3, and I will not be falsely humble and describe it as average, but it can be better.

I am enthusiastic for a renewed focus on PC gaming, and I am excited by the prospects for gaming coming the year ahead.

- Elysium