The computer game industry is very, very proud of the fact that last year, it managed to out-gross Hollywood. Of course, statistics are like new Significant Others in that they tend to come with terrifying hidden baggage, and this one is no exception. What the proud parents of PC games don't mention, for example, is the fact that while they may have outgrossed Hollywood, your average movie doesn't cost $44.99, presumably doesn't need tech support before each showing, and doesn't take four years to film while the director promises to make you his bitch. (All right, Dinosaur took that long to film, but can you really see an ad saying "This summer, Roy Disney will take you back in time 65 million years into a world of the imagination -- and make you his bitch?" Me neither.) That being said, of course, the billions that computer games raked in last year definitely qualify as "real money" for every sense of the term that I care to mention, and seeing as there's real money to throw around, the industry will throw it with abandon. Now, the stereotypical image of game geeks with money is, well, the stereotypical image of game geeks with money. You know what I'm talking about -- slightly overweight guys with crappy ponytails driving Ferraris bought with stock option money, and so forth. But as much money as nerds on a bender can blow - and believe me, it's a lot; I've seen bar tabs the size of Federal budget adjustments - the real money still gets shotgunned by their employers. And where do these companies go hog-wild? Why, E3. What is E3? Officially, it's the Electronic Entertainment Exposition. However, that's entirely too many syllables for hip computer game developers, so it's been abridged to E3. (Pointing out that it should be 3E if you want to be grammatically accurate gets you funny looks at best, a Shavian "Fuck you, man" at worst. Game geeks are notorious for finding everything deserving of irreverence -- except themselves.) Unofficially, it's the big trade show where computer games and computer game technologies get shown off for A)the media, B)other game developers, and C)the attractive, scantily clad young women that various game companies hire to lure foot traffic to their booths. The fact that A)the media isn't going to cover 2/3 of what it sees, B)other game developers are just swinging by to arrange product trades and C)those attractive young women wouldn't care about a computer game if it looked like Matt Damon and yodeled, never seems to cross anyone's mind. Still, everyone seems to enjoy the exercise, particularly those game developers who get to leave the office on the company nickel, fly cross-country, and ogle the booth-bait for three days.

This year's E3 was held in Los Angeles, at the Los Angeles Convention Center. For those of you playing the home game, that translates in English to "The big building next door to the building where Shaq plays." Yes, it's a big show. It's a really big show. And the sheer size of it is only the beginning of the wonder and folly. Inside, the show is big. Really big. We're talking "needs to be spread out over more exhibition halls than I've got limbs" big, and each of those halls is the approximate size of something James Cameron would build as a test-prop for a film. Basically, there's so much to see that if you want to see everything, see every joystick manufacturer and garage studio cranking out Quake mods, you're going to need a native guide, three days' rations and a dogsled. That would be enough if getting from Point A to Point B inside were easy -- but it's not. Instead, every flat surface (and most of the staircases) are covered in wall-to-wall advertisement. Everywhere you look, you're being confronted with polygon images that look just fine at 800x600, blown up to several gazillion by several gazillion. Most of these images, to be charitable, show evidence of stretching. The rest are just freaky. (Though the twenty foot high poster of Huggy Bear slapped on a support pillar was, to put it mildly, damn cool. Huggy Bear rules.) They're not the worst of it, though. The real slalom is formed by the scattered packs of forlorn booth bait who lurk sans booth. What is booth bait, you ask? In simplest terms, it is the practice of hiring attractive women (and occasionally men) to hawk product, putting them in scanty outfits, and dangling them in front of foot traffic in order to metamorphose it into booth traffic. In other words, put a cute chick in spandex at your booth and you just might draw some geeks. At this point, it's time-honored industry practice, which is pretty good for an industry that's younger than I am. Tradition, after all, is what you make it, and making it definitely seems to be the point of the booth bait exercise. Most booth bait is chained (figuratively, in most cases) to the actual company booths, since their purpose is to lure passersby inside to be viciously bludgeoned with project demos. Some companies go so far as to arrange photo opportunities, whereby you can actually have a Polaroid taken with a boothbabe. These booths tend to have lines around the block, which neatly cuts off all access to product demos and defeats the whole purpose of boothbaiting. (What's truly interesting, however, is watching the progression of expression on the faces of the young ladies thrown thus to the lions. On the first day of the show, they're all smiles; by the end, their faces clearly read "God, he expects me to touch him!" Smart booth operators rotate their hires long before that stage is reached, but most booth operators simply aren't that bright.) However, some show attendees -- mostly media outlets -- cast their boothbait upon the face of the waters. These poor lasses are stationed (sometimes singly, sometimes in small groups) strategically across all traffic lanes of the show, where they function something like scantily clad sea anemones. As soon as someone steps within a certain radius, wham, out comes the plastic smile and the despairing "have you seen a copy of our magazine/website/demo?" combined with the underhanded ninja-style freebie shove. An unlucky (or desperate) chap could walk in the door of the show empty handed, and be burdened down with a hernia-inducing load of freebie crud by the time he hit the first staircase. In many cases, the challenge was seeing if you could get from entrance to booth without picking up a single freebie or having to say "No thanks, already got one." Going from hall to hall was more difficult; some attendees merely set up walls of spandex across necessary corridors, meaning that there was no way you were getting from the South Hall to the main show floor without picking up, at the very least, a fistful of CD-ROMs from a gaggle of feverish women in Playboy t-shirts.

But as bad and as freaky as all that is, it doesn't hold a candle to what the actual show floor is like. If one were to call it a swap meet designed by the Wachowski brothers on a Michael Cimino budget, then the vaguest hint of the sheer size, scale and tackiness of the exhibition. You see, E3 is a victim of a massive, inescapable paradox. It exists, not to show off a company's present product line, but rather to give folks a sneak peek at what's coming up. This would be great, except that the process of computer game development means that oftentimes there's really nothing that is in shape to be shown off until just before the product actually makes it out the door. That makes the dog and pony show aspect of E3 problematic, to say the least -- half the time the dog's hiding and the pony refuses to move. However, since attendees still have to draw attention to the game (even if it crashes every time you try to do something complicated like, say, "play"), they make up for it with loud, flashy booths and promotional approaches that range from the disturbing to the bizarre. What did that mean? It meant Nintendo's Pokemon area had a dancing fountain the size of the Chattahoochee River during flood season. It meant that Huggy Bear, Gary Coleman and enough minor celebrities to fill the Hollywood Squares until the end of time were in attendance at various booths, alternately posing for pictures and enduring Unreal Tournament competitions. It meant Sega that built a shagadelic set of dancing platforms for Space Channel Five, then herding dancers with tresses in radioactive shades out to boogie on down for the gawking lads down below. (From my vantage point, I could tell that the dancer on the far right was not a natural orangehead. Believe me, that was a lot more information than I needed.) It meant Motley Crüe (gotta love any band with umlauts -- damn you, Blüe Oyster Cult, for setting the trend) performing two booths down in clear violation of the noise ordinances of the show. And it meant not one, but two half-pipes being built on the show floor so that hired skaters and bikers can wipe out for the amusement of those safely outside the cage. (It also meant at least one company president replacing his official show badge with an engraved metal one that looked to be gold plated, if not solid gold -- why, I can't imagine. But I digress.) Most of all, though, it means people dressed up in really, really silly costumes. And when I say "people dressed up in really, really silly costumes," I mean little people cross-dressed like Kiss, storming a booth's information desk for the sake of promotional tchotchkes. I mean a teenager with a bosom so massive that the sight of her induced, not lust, but pity for her incipient back problems. She was dressed up like Lara Croft, waving unloaded pistols with a grimace for her polygonal predecessor's fans while a vaguely desperate MC tried to whip the crowd into a frenzy of Croftian ecstasy. (Note to the DJ: They were just there to look at her cleavage, the pervs. You're superfluous, pal. Get over it.) And most of all, I mean monkeys. That's right, the Planet of the Apes game had a bunch of folks dressed up like Dr. Zaius' best buddies, along with the requisite scantily clad cavegirls. ("When the one on the left leans over, you can see her nipple," murmured one gent standing behind me as I waited for ape-induced traffic to clear. I resisted the urge to elbow him in a way that would no doubt make the real Lara Croft snicker.) When a trade show has a half-dozen men and women dressed up like apes, waving toy guns and posing for pictures, it's clear that the daily whack from the Surreal-o-matic just isn't enough any more; you've gone in for the full twelve-swing treatment. So there you have the disparate elements (apart from the utterly terrifying food service and the soft drinks that cost as much as a good beer should) of the show. Now imagine all of that going on at once in a series of spaces the size of aircraft hangars, with every available bit of footpath covered in swarming humanity and the air conditioning cranked up high enough to cause weather patterns. Scary, huh?

But the show floor is only half of it. E3's not just a trade show, it's a lifestyle event. That means a lot of things -- what SegaNet has to do with rock climbing is beyond me, but I can promise you that if I'm ever hanging from a cliff face, my Dreamcast would be the last thing on my mind. Mostly, however, it means parties, parties, and more parties -- because some companies just can't spend their money fast enough at the actual show. (Considering the failure rate for computer game companies, you'd think somewhere an accountant would say "Whoah, Nellie!" but it never seems to happen. It seems endemic to the industry that certain dollar amounts above, say, a few million automatically equate to "infinite" in management's mind -- and they're always surprised when the bill comes due. In the meantime, though, they've got a hell of a lot of action figures decorating the company offices.) This year's big winners in the "What the?" sweepstakes were the recently acquired and humbly named Gathering of Developers (that's "GoD" to you and me. Thus far, the Pope has no comment. Considering the fact that they just got bought out, however, it's not sacrilegious to wonder if Yahweh Himself has spoken.) They rented out the lot across the street from the convention center, filled it with carnival booths, and then let the wild rumpus begin. Mind you, their definition of Wild Rumpus is probably something Maurice Sendak wouldn't recognize, but I have a feeling that a cat-pajamaed Max would have fit right in. Between the free beer, the concerts from folks like the Young Dubliners and the Red Elvises, and the gently disturbing fully-clothed lesbian-o-rama that was broadcast on the screen behind the stage on the last day of the show, well, it was definitely a party. The fact that giant inflatable Kiss balloons smiled over the whole thing benignly (except when Peter Criss deflated) added just the right touch of insanity to the entire proceedings. When you've got the benediction of an inflatable Gene Simmons, baby, you've got it all. Is that all of E3? Hardly. It's not touching the $50 cab rides, the endless demos from desperately sad-eyed product reps who knew nothing and wished to know less about the games they were demoing, the small-market hall filled with heartbreakingly earnest -- and utterly unlikely -- dreams of the next Rollercoaster Tycoon, and so on. It's too big, too much, and anyone who says he saw the whole thing top to bottom is either lying or running on pure methamphetamine. But that doesn't keep it from getting bigger and bigger, or crazier and crazier. And God help us all if next year those four undertall ladies dress up like Styx.