By Wagner James Au

When David "God of War" Jaffe posted an infamous blog entry last year, complaining about how members of the gaming press kept referring to themselves as part of the game industry, a lot of them were understandably hurt. For of course the gaming press is part of the game industry— and E3 is the proof.

In the next few days of hard sell, the marketing and publicity departments of every major publisher will spend millions of dollars trying to convince retail buyers that 95% of their games aren't the mediocre and unoriginal rehashes they really are. (And have no doubt, while the gaming press likes to flatter itself thinking E3 is all about them, they merely supply the lubrication for an intercourse between the bloated corporate powers who really matter, the Walmarts and Best Buys of the world, represented in the main by middle-aged men in hotel suites who couldn't care less about any of the games on the roiling Convention Center floor below.)

Read what ruffles James' feathers after the jump.

The gaming press' real job is to ease that transaction, writing breathless "news reports" that are almost always indistinguishable in content from the press releases they're usually cobbled from. Most of the games on display aren't worth even a second glance, but nearly all of the gaming press is reluctant to tell you that. At the end of that sordid week, they'll hand out a series of Best of Show awards that highlight a few genuinely worthwhile games, but gestures like this are designed so as not to deviate from the main task: to keep the product flowing, crappy or not.

After five consecutive E3s, I've decided to sit this one out, but Joel and Brian of Team Kotaku are there, offering their show floor insights with opinions unfiltered. If you can't be there with them, or you're foolish enough to read other gaming sites, here's a few tips to at least read them with a skeptical eye.

Beware Staged/Limited Previews

Any E3 preview written without the benefit of extensive, unmonitored, hands-on play is useless. Actually, even worse than useless, since it's really just a preview of a cinematic ginned up to seem like a game. It's like reading someone's description of the trailer of a Milla Jovovich movie.

It gets even worse: games on the showroom floor are almost invariably just a single level, so even a hands-on preview says nothing about the overall quality. Still worse are the "exclusive" demos held in closed meeting rooms off the floor, usually demonstrated by a developer and a prim-but-sweaty PR girl giving you a carefully controlled walkthroughs.

It's About the Parties, Stupid

"The way to get into the big parties," a game press writer told me happily once, "is ask the PR ladies for a demo, and while they're setting it up, hint that you're looking to get in."

During E3, most of the gaming press spends an inordinate amount of time trying to rustle up party invites. (Not the main editors, who've gotten their invitations in the mail weeks ago, but the low level functionaries who write most of their Expo coverage.) The greatest effort is spent trying to gain access into the crown jewel, the E3 Sony Party. The Japanese mega-corporation is legendary for leveraging its wallet and top artists in its music division to throw parties the size of a city block, lit up by electric blue. One heroic friend regularly runs an "underground railroad" into the party, smuggling out the mylar bracelets that act as invites, so we can secretly hand them to our comrades huddling in the cold outside. (Security is so tight it resembles East Berlin during the Cold War, except all the good shit's inside.)

All this fun wasn't such a bad thing when Sony undisputedly ruled the game industry. (And while I can honestly say I've never written about any game because of them, I'm not above going a few times. Hey, Foo Fighters, live. I mean, come on.) But now that they're struggling in the console wars, it's incumbent on the company to keep the game media mesmerized. (My guess is Sony will be a lot more generous with invites to the gaming press this year.) And though it's too simple to assert one-to-one payola, party invites definitely buy attention.

Picture a Cheering Press

If you think game press previews are hyped up, you should see how their authors act, when they're supposed to be reporting. I can't count the times I've sat in on Expo previews and press conferences where reporters for top gaming publications actually cheered. (One guy next to me got so openly enthused during an E3 demo for Max Payne that I actually turned to him and said, "Dude, are you even trying to act like a journalist?") But while they're entirely over-excited about the graphics or cool power-ups, I've never witnessed a game writer once ask probing questions about design or story. It's the image you should keep in your mind when reading the coverage coming from E3, almost all of it written not by passionately engaged journalist gamers but for the most part, by uncritical enthusiasts who are unwilling or unable to discern originality from retreads.

Which is, I guess, a good way to bring us back to David Jaffe's exasperation with the whole charade, and his frustration at not being taken seriously by the fanboy reporters clustering around him at these things. He could show them finger puppets hitting each other with wooden dowels and call it God of War II, and he'd still get a nice blurb the next day. ("While all the art assets for GoW II aren't totally finished, everything we saw at David's demo suggests it's on track to be a contender for BEST GAME OF E3 2006.")

Send samples of egregiously fawning game previews and information on backroom deals that influence them to au@kotaku.com. Tips from editors and writers in the game press especially welcome—all correspondence kept strictly confidential.