The whole world Is watching

They're coming to E3.

Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly and Newsweek. The New York Times and the LA Times and the Boston Herald.

You know, the mainstream media.

You'd expect the gaming press would converge on E3 in full force. And indeed they are.

But the mainstream press is coming to E3 as well. Not in the numbers of their gaming press counterparts, to be sure, but coming they are.

It's not so much that electronic gaming is entering the mainstream - though with the U.S. installed base of next generation video game consoles reaching 16 million in by some estimates, and more than 22 million multimedia PCs in the United States, electronic games are becoming more mainstream all the time. Newsweek's Cyberscope column, which touches on all aspects of personal computing, is more than three years old at this point. And Entertainment Weekly has covered electronic entertainment since its inception.

Electronic games long ago entered the mainstream.

Whether they're considered at the same level as other art forms ... well, that's open to discussion.

"Sure, the mainstream media has been covering video games for a while," says Michael Pflughoeft, who covers just that for the Milwaukee Journal, "but compared to the amount of space set aside in mainstream media for other forms of entertainment ... coverage given to video games doesn't even come close." Especially when you consider that the electronic entertainment industry rivals that of the movie business, in terms of sales figures (just look at the figure of $5.1 billion, which E3 organizers have been tossing around as the size of the U.S. video and computer game market).

But when was the last time you saw a video game on the cover of Entertainment Weekly or Rolling Stone? You can mark your calendar by the appearance of a summer movie preview issue in mainstream mags but the annual electronic gaming preview ... Well, don't hold your breath.

What all the mainstream attention focused on E3 illuminates, though, is not the importance of video games to the mainstream public, however that might be defined. What it reveals is the importance of E3 to the video game industry.

What Comdex is to the computer industry as a whole, E3 has become to the electronic entertainment industry - a place to show off your upcoming products and soak up that all-important media attention. A place to garner publicity.

And for mainstream media outlets, it's hard to argue the cost effectiveness of E3 attendance. If you want to soak up a year's worth of video and computer game coverage in three days, what better way to do so than at E3? It's a lot of bang for the buck.

"[At E3] I expect to get many, many demos of stuff to be released this Christmas season, previews of stuff way off in the future, and face time with execs, " says Jennifer Tanaka, associate editor at Newsweek.

Of course, the coverage that's likely to come out of the mainstream media is likely to differ than that coming from the industry press. While Web sites like this one will be scrambling to provide the most comprehensive coverage of the conference as quickly as possible, and industry mags will feature large E3 wrap-up packages as soon as they can put them together, mainstream outlets are likely to pull from the information they garner at E3 for months to come.

Randy Chase is a game developer who pens a weekly column for the Portland Oregonian. "For the newspaper," he says, "I do very little 'long range' stories. My readers tend to forget about things unless it's something they can go right out and buy. So what's coming out next fall might interest the hard-cord gamer that reads the (gaming) magazines, but the typical newspaper reader is much more interested in things they can buy today."

Annette Cardwell, Cyberscene reporter for the Boston Herald, is heading to E3 for the first time. She says, "I'm going for the experience and to write a preview piece of what's coming up with game releases or whatever else I happen to find."

Chip Carter, a three-time veteran of E3 who pens a syndicated "Inside Video Games" column that appears in the Chicago Tribune and 150 other papers, says, "E3 lays the foundation of our coverage for months to come. For me, E3 is Christmas and New Year's and Halloween and my birthday all rolled into one. The same feeling I got as a kid from those holidays, I get as an adult at E3."

Carter says he has a keen interest in checking out the DVD games that will be shown at this year's show, but, when asked what he's most looking forward to at this year's conference, he laughs and says, "Foo Fighters playing at the Sony Party. I mean ... c'mon!"