Picture for a second being locked in a teenage boy's bedroom for three days – except this bedroom is occupied by 30,000 teenage boys and they're listening to loud and terrible rock music. You are imagining E3, the world's largest video game exhibition.
Over the next four days, the interactive entertainment industry will descend on the Los Angeles convention centre for a mammoth Bacchanalian celebration of mainstream games culture. Global corporations will present themselves behind multimillion-dollar stands, gaming websites will ship in hundreds of reporters and film crews and fans will queue for hours to see beloved titles. The sound of simulated gunfire or heavy rock, or both, will accompany it all.
"It is a kind of Frankenstein's event," says James McQuivey, a principle analyst at Forrester, a technology and market research company. "It's part tech trade show, part Hollywood and part Star Trek convention. It attracts the hardcore of the gaming world, the people who care about how many polygons your game can render in a second or how effectively your algorithms can create realistic hair on a mountain troll. The people who attend E3 care about games the way other people care about sports – or, perhaps, their children."
This ritual has been going on since 1995. This year's E3 is big because Sony and Microsoft will show their brand new consoles, the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One. The former is being pushed as an ultra-powerful gaming beast, boasting unfathomable processing grunt and a strange new controller with a touch pad on it for when you want to stroke things on screen. Microsoft's Xbox One is pitched as a do-it-all living room entertainment commando, capable of playing live TV and connecting you with friends via Skype, as well as actually recognising you via its built-in camera. Nintendo, which has dominated console gaming for the last five years with its Wii console, which has sold 100m units, is set to sulk in a corner thanks to disastrous sales of its Wii U machine. The games industry can be a cruel and capricious mistress.
Monday will be when all the big hitters of the industry – Sony, Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft and Activision – hold press conferences to reveal their fresh and innovative new games. Not really. It will all be about sequels: Battlefield 4, Forza Motorsports 5 and Call of Duty: Ghosts. But look out for fiendish indie puzzle titles The Witness, and Watch Dogs, a surveillance thriller in which players can hack into a city's computer mainframe and dig dirt on any of its inhabitants. From Tuesday until Thursday it's all about the vast show floor, where multiple demo pods blare out franchise sequels.
At the same time, Apple is holding its annual worldwide developers conference in San Francisco, where the big news will be new versions of iOS, its mobile operating system and OS X, its computer software. There are persistent rumours that the company will broaden its AppleTV set-top box to feature games and other apps. If that happens, those console manufacturers at E3 have a serious new rival to worry about.
These events are happening while gaming itself is changing. "E3 is about big, expensive-looking, overproduced action, sports and driving games being pitched as the reinvention of the wheel," says Tom Bramwell, the editor-in-chief of the gaming site Eurogamer. "But often, it's the last place to find out what's really going on in the games industry at large. The rise of independent development has taken place almost completely outside its halls, as has the ascent of giant social gaming companies."
One corner of the E3 megaplex, known as IndieCade, shows off titles produced by tiny studios and lone programmers, usually on small budgets. Here you will find That Dragon, Cancer, which is about parents struggling to cope with their child's terminal illness, and Spaceteam, an ingenious multi-player iPhone game that allows groups of friends to pretend they are on the bridge of a starship while shouting technobabble at each other. Like Hollywood, E3 is a bubble that reveals just one facet of a diverse and exciting medium – and like Hollywood, it shouts really loud and doesn't like original thinking.
Still, E3 is important because games are everywhere now. The industry is predicted to be worth more than $80bn (£51bn) a year by 2017. A report published in 2012 by the Interactive Software Federation of Europe suggested that 40% of the UK population regularly plays video games. An increasing number of films and stage plays are being inspired by videogame design. The Dundee Rep Theatre's current production of the vampire chiller Let The Right One In is accompanied by its own iPhone game, Other, which transfers the ghoulish themes into a walking tour of the city. Hollywood is watching – and now we have Stephen Spielberg producing a TV series based on the game Halo, which will be viewable on Xbox One.
E3 is somehow both a relic of what games were and a demonstration of how pervasive and confident game culture is becoming. The door to this teenager's bedroom is opening, and everything is tumbling out.
