E3 2017 Diary Day 3

I’ve grown weary but the show rolls on.

Travel was blessedly uneventful outside of the Metro Blue Line running slightly behind schedule due to maintenance.

My shift at the Extra Life booth was, again, the highlight of my day. I am somewhat introverted by nature but for some weird reason when I’m working for Extra Life the desire to not fuck that up outweighs my natural desire to run and hide from human interaction.

And then that ended. Once again, virtually everywhere I went the lines were capped. For clarity, I know that I have no one but myself to blame for this situation. I could have anticipated the lines and requested different shifts at the booth. This wasn’t my first E3 though and I honestly thought that I’d be able to see at least one game per day. Even the IndieCade booth was still busy in the last day. The other thing about the indies at E3 is that a lot of them are out on the market already. Why would anyone want to play a demo of a game on the E3 floor when they could spend $16 and play the whole game at home without a nervous indie dev literally looking over their shoulder.

People were lining up for the complimentary tote bags for crying out loud. At past E3s I’ve ended up with multiples of those dumb bags because they’ve had people handing them out to make sure they don’t have any left over. This year the Convention Center needed to have staff on hand to make sure people only took one bag. To be fair in the past the bags had corporate branding on them and this year they actually had some cool pixel art on them and they had different bags for each day of the show.

I’m going to write a ‘State of the Show’ piece once I’ve had some time to think this stuff through because right now I’m pretty bummed out about the way things worked out for me personally, but I can see how this was a really good show for a lot of parties involved in E3.