rodzik@www

Warning: I was going to talk about how rough this last week of RHIT has been, but instead rambled my way into an immensely toolish discussion of games and E3. Proceed at your own risk of immense toolishness.

This week has been insane. I can't even begin to describe how nuts it's been, so I suppose I'll start with where I was a week ago from today. No matter how hard I try to work on school, I can't stop thinking about how much fun last week was. Sure, it was an absolutely insane amount of work, but there's something special that happens when the work you're doing is fun - you can do a lot more work and not get burned out or hate what you're doing. At this exact time last week I was sitting in the Pike house at USC writing up articles about the games I had seen that day and the day before. I was flipping through pictures, deleting the bad ones and uploading the hundreds of good ones. I was so tired yet so full of energy for the final day of E3 that lay ahead.

This year was the third E3 I've ever attended, but it may as well have only been my second. I first attended E3 not even knowing what it truly was when it was in Atlanta in 1998. I wasn't even a teenager at the time, and simply spending a few hours on the show floor was simply something that was "cool" for me. But a few years later, when I stumbled upon an article on level design for video games in PC Gamer, I was sent through a chain reaction of events which lead to me becoming heavily interested in video game programming as a full-time job and heavily invested in a multitude of gaming projects. Only then did I truly realize what E3 was, and anxiously awaited attending the 2005 conference.

Of course, in 2005 I had one main objective, and once I completed it I really had no idea what I was in for with the rest of the chaos that engulfed Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo's announcements of their next consoles. The two hour bus ride to and from the convention center each day didn't help either, nor did my lack of experience covering an event of such magnitude single-handedly.

The funny thing is, for the 2005 E3, I planned on going a good 6 months in advance, while for E3 2006 I didn't commit 100% to attending until a week before I needed to fly out, yet I was 1000% more prepared. I packed two cameras, a digital audio recorder, a camcorder, a PDA, extra memory cards, a laptop, DVD-Rs, business cards, my E3 Media 2005 hat, and the previous year's experience, along with a helpful companion, Vince, who brought along his own camera and laptop. We plowed through game after game, snapping picture after picture and hundreds of megabytes of videos, and writing up tons of game impressions every night. I knew I'd done a phenomenally better job of managing everything this year than the year before, but it never really hit me until I saw a post on ShackNews commending me for my work. After seeing it, I stepped back from the chaos for just long enough to realize that without the backing of any company of notable size (unlike the masses of journalists at E3 from IGN, Gamestop, E3Insider, etc, etc) I managed to preview more than a dozen and a half new games across four platforms, two of which had never before been playable, and record nearly 1,000 pictures and hours of video.

As I sat listening to Doug Lowenstein, president of the Entertainment Software Association, deliver his state of the industry address to us at a media briefing last Wednesday morning, it reinvigorated the game developer in me and really made me question whether I wanted to delve into my current interests in corporate and defense CS/SE jobs, or whether I want to undertake the heavy burden that the gaming industry places on its workers.

Then again, I've got a whopping 7 years of self-employed journalism under my belt, so maybe I'll end up writing for GameSpot or something some day. I'm still set on a certain place in Baltimore next summer, but I think it might be time to start getting in touch with some old friends in the gaming industry about the possibilities I'm interested in...