Graeme Boyd, Microsoft's Live Community Manager, is standing next to the Press Conference Arena, wildly waving his arms around like an idiot. He's doing this for me, because I am one: I am navigating Liepzig's gamer labyrinths as if I had an inner ear infection. Graeme has taken pity on me. I immediately like him.

Graeme is meeting me to hand over an Exhibitor Pass that will open a lot of doors for me. I appreciate this: I am easily bribed. Still, I'm a journalist, so while explaining pleasantries with Graeme, I ask him a hard hitting question.

"Graeme. Let me get right down to it. On the subject of people who say 'Msoft' instead of 'Microsoft': don't you think there's something wrong with them which I won't mention but which may or may not make them eligible for membership in the National Down Syndrome's Congress?"

But Graeme was a pro: "I'm not allowed to talk about that." And then he tells me a story about the irrational, twitching annoyance of certain Xbox employees when the Xbox 360 is referred to as "the 360" instead of the Xbox. The Xbox 360 is the Xbox reborn, and all that jazz. Graeme doesn't say anything about what he thinks about such people, but I like to think that he, like me, was suppressing an eye roll or two.

And now I am sitting in the Live Community's Wonderful Tiki lounge, being plied with free, though regrettably non-alocholic, drinks. A bunch of XBLA gamers who appear to have won some sort of award points lottery have been flown in. The presser is about to start, displayed on shimmering ebony wide screens from a more cramped press arena a few hundred feet away. After the feculent morass of the Nintendo Press Conference, I'm treating myself. This is the ultimate in redundant journalism: blogging in Liepzig about what some guy says through a television screen to me. Florian Eckhardt