Each week Dennis McCauley contributes The Political Game, a column on the collision of politics and video games:
For more than a decade the Electronic Entertainment Expo was a must-see event for game retailers and media types. While it's true that in recent years E3 had become an exercise in wretched excess, that was, in fact, a large part of its charm. By day E3 featured massive, massively noisy game displays laid out end to end to end in the cavernous main halls of the Los Angeles Convention Center . By night dozens of game industry parties kept L.A.'s bartenders and sushi makers off the unemployment lines and gave a generation of scruffy game journalists an all-too-brief taste of the good life. In 2006, its final year as an extravaganza, a reported 80,000 people streamed past E3's exhibits.

But beyond that, E3 put the modern video game business on the map. You could be certain of national T.V. coverage from all of the major networks. The top newspapers were there as well. The media coverage of the show's bright lights, booth babes and nonstop bells and whistles made mainstream America sit up and take notice of a form of entertainment it had previously held to be child's play, and for geeky children at that. Of course, the gaming press went absolutely nuts during E3 week, pushing screen shots and trailers and interviews and whatever else it could get hold of to millions of eager readers.

To paraphrase Mick Jagger, I used to love you, E3, but it's all over now.