Games Go Boom

Electronic Entertainment Exposition Showcases A $10 Billion Industry

LOS ANGELES, May 14

Outside the Convention Center, the real U.S. Army has stationed a real OH-58 helicopter. Every few hours, real Special Forces teams perform mock urban assaults. The mission: encourage today's youth to play the Army's new computer game called Overmatch, in which our troops use their superior "training and technology to defeat a vast enemy force" in a desert town that bears a striking resemblance to downtown Fallujah. It is a recruitment tool.

Bioterrorists running through an airport terminal. Evil space monkeys on fire. Real? Not real? Sometimes hard to tell in the cavernous hall of the Electronic Entertainment Exposition, the 10th annual video-game trade show known as E3, which we visited this week to see what the best and brightest have spawned for our amusements.

The game industry is huge, the fastest-growing entertainment sector on the planet. Annual North American sales of game software and hardware is $10 billion (compared with $9 billion in movie box office receipts). The games themselves employ advanced physics and artificial intelligence programs to create worlds that are scary-good. If you haven't played a game since Donkey Kong or Pac-Man, you would be shocked, amazed, appalled, enthralled.

We pan left and right across the convention floor: Huge consoles blatting out story lines for S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl. Banks of screens to play Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, ripped from today's headlines, about a contract agent and superspy with carte blanche for the dirty "wet work" needed to win the war on terror. Another display for BloodRayne 2, which features a wasp-waisted assassin armed with a pair of very nasty sickles, and breasts as melonous and pneumatic as a Pamela Anderson blowup doll.

Computer-generated mortality surrounds us. It is a blinking, boinging, bass-pounding Vegas of ersatz death -- and sexual touts. A thousand plasma screens hooked into GameCubes and PlayStation 2s. Splatter! Glorp! Bodies explode and the evildoers cry out, "Uuuggggh." Big biceps and bigger guns.

It's a Sensurround wall of sound of war and combat -- the ringing slice of swordplay and reverb of full-on automatics spitting endless rounds. Some of the players are wearing earplugs, it is so loud, and after a few hours in the hall they take on the glazed, gummy-eyed look of the all-night gamer coming down from a Mountain Dew binge.

At one station, we watch a player fingering the controller for Silent Hill 4: The Room, and the scene on the screen is his character wielding a club and beating a rabid genetic freak of a mastiff to death. It's not a real dog, of course, it's a monster-dog! But still, it's a guy clubbing a dog and then stomping on its lifeless body, and we wonder about that.

So we get a hot dog, and steel ourselves for more assault. But suddenly our gaze is drawn to a pair of hired showbabes who purr and pose beside a burnt-orange superstock race car employed to sell the gamers on the Dukes of Hazzard: Return of the General Lee. One by one, the shy gamers -- and the manufacturers, designers, media and retailers -- use cell phone cameras to pose for pictures, flanked by the hillbilly models. It is the closest many of these Doritos-stuffers may ever get to women who look like this, unless one counts the cyber-minxes who populate today's computer and video games. They increasingly present sexual escapades to cater to the aging demographic of gamers, whose average age is now 29.

The attendees? The vibe skews way male, white and Asian American, with a dollop of Japanese, Brits and French, dressed in black T-shirts advertising Nintendo or Playlogic, in droopy cargo shorts, baseball caps, excellent and tiny cell phones. Some of these are well-paid executives.