The largest annual videogame conference in the Western Hemisphere, E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) was held this past week at the Los Angeles Convention Center, somewhat appropriately right next door to the Staples Center where the Los Angeles Lakers were beating the Boston Celtics for this year’s NBA Championship. While E3 has grown and morphed since the first one in 1995, it continues to be a hugely exciting event, where game publishers show their upcoming product both on the floor and behind closed doors.
The noise level is high, the visuals are dazzling and the celebrity sightings this year included Steven Spielberg (a perennial attendee), Olivia Munn (broadcasting live for G4 Media), Wu-Tang Clan member Method Man and the Celtics’ own Rasheed Wallace. This year’s mind-fragging stats included over 300 exhibitors and, yes, over 45,600 attendees.
With social media reaching critical mass this year in awareness and engagement, it’s natural that it would impact this most plugged-in of industries while some of these trends have been developing over the past year or longer, here’s what seemed to stand out as far as social media usage and integration at the show:
Social Gaming:
Companies like Zynga and Playdom are garnering huge numbers of users on Facebook. Notice all those FarmVille and Mafia Wars status updates from your friends? Or maybe from you, yourself?
The big question is whether, now that Facebook has added more privacy back into their privacy controls, will the success of these companies will continue at the same rate? Early anecdotal reports of a 20% drop in game use due to what is essential Facebook spam-blocking per the new controls.
Instant Info:
With almost every game publisher, developer and journalist tweeting regularly if not constantly, instant reactions to new games shown at the show were threading throughout Twitter streams all week long. Why bother braving the crowd or faking your credentials for an industry pass?
And since there’s no easier hashtag than #E3, it was easy to get overwhelmed with posts about this trending topic. Even the official site for the show ran timelines, an official timeline for GameTrailers as well as hashtag feeds for E3 Expo, Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo on the homepage (http://www.e3expo.com/).
Instant Media:
Twitpics, Tweetphoto, even links to pictures on traditional Websites – all were being passed as links during the show on both Twitter and Facebook. Check out this twitpic of EA’s Peter Moore and sport announcer extraordinaire Gus Johnson talk Madden 11 (including a replay/call repeating the Stokely/Broncos miracle comeback in last season’s opener), courtesy of NMS’ own @pwixted, who accompanied me at the show: http://tweetphoto.com/27549209.
Location:
When checking in on Foursquare the options included E3 Expo, West Hall, South Hall, and the various booths, i.e. Sony PlayStation Booth, SOE Booth, Capcom, EA, you name it. As I checked in several places some prizing notification popped up, i.e. for most check-ins over the course of the entire convention – Mayor of E3 2010, anyone?
Rewards:
Per the location-based prizing, videogames publishers have been using social media for both longer contests (Facebook) and instant wins (Twitter). Social media is also being used to publicize and drive to contests on official sites.
In-Game/Ex-Game Social Networking:
As anyone who’s played World of Warcraft or any other recent Massive Multiplayer Online game (MMO) already knows, a videogame can be a social network in and of itself. Instead of groups you may have guilds, and instead of sharing media, you’re coordinating an attack on a dragon’s lair.
In addition, game publishers have already been adding in-game capabilities to tweet out and update status. Last fall SCEA tried auto-updating in-game progress with Uncharted 2 but ended up toning down the frequency with which it pinged Twitter. As a fairly open system, there’s likely to be more social media integrations with PS3 games in the future.
Let’s say that the next big action-adventure title hits the street on a Friday – how about the race to be the first one(s) to complete the story mode over the course of the weekend? Or auto-updates on PvP matches – which map, who’s playing, who’s dominating. And eventually the ultimate: instant posts of in-game events like pix and replay video of boss kills or Easter Eggs.
With gaming expanding to include the PlayStation Move free-form controller and the Microsoft Kinect no-controller, there is no discernable limit to how far social media and games will grow together.
After all, gamers love to communicate with each other…especially if they don’t have to leave the couch to do so.