Anyone with even a passing familiarity of the videogames industry knows E3. It’s without a doubt the biggest day of the year for games PR, and if you’ve ever been you know the event has more in common with a circus than an industry event — Appeasing giveaways, flashy press conferences filled with plastic smiles and marketing rhetoric and scantily-clad women with corporate logos printed on their naughty bits are just a few of the reasons I said “no thanks” to a press pass this year, but it’s the last one in particular that really bothers me.There’s long been this troublesome idea that videogames are a male-dominated industry and that dressing up young ladies as cleavage-toting hussies to hawk whatever tenuously related corporate product is merely capitalizing on a demographic. The problem is, this may have been true of the videogame industry 10 years ago, but in America in the year 2011 it’s just, well, embarrassing.Even internet comedy troupe Mega64, known for force-injecting their own brand of irreverent low-budget humor into “serious” events like E3, must stare in dumbfounded awe at the sight of grown men getting into a blow-up bouncy castle with a skimpily-dressed female model.So there you have it, the state of videogames PR in the year 2011: A kid passing around a nudey magazine at a children’s birthday party.
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