Electronic Entertainment Expo

Welcome back, booth babes, er, models. The Electronic Entertainment Expo, known as E3, is expected to return to its roaring roots in June after two years of flirting with the somber side. The show has traditionally been the video game industry's most important convention, drawing as many as 70,000 attendees to Los Angeles to admire the displays, go temporarily deaf from the thundering sound systems and gawk at the scantily clothed models.

For 11 years, the ogres and elves roaming Figueroa Street sent a clear message: The video game geeks were back in town, selling out hotels, packing restaurants and keeping taxi meters clicking. But the monsters, booth babes and celebrities that were hallmarks of the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo, known as E3, are gone from downtown Los Angeles. The convention attracted 65,000 people last year, making it the city's best-attended conference, according to LA Inc.

Days after Disney Interactive Studios launched "Spectrobes" for the Nintendo DS hand-held game system this spring, it discovered that fans had posted hacks to the video game on the Web. But instead of calling their colleagues in the legal department, the Disney executives were thrilled. "Nobody goes to that amount of trouble to decode something unless they really liked it," said Graham Hopper, a Walt Disney Co. executive vice president and general manager of its game studio in Glendale.

Nintendo Co. wants people to remember why they play video games: Because they're fun. While Sony Corp. and Microsoft Corp. position their next-generation game consoles in an all-out fight for control of the living room, Nintendo hopes to emerge the big winner with a cheaper, simpler machine whimsically called Wii.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. As the video game industry gathers at the Los Angeles Convention Center this week for the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo, a devout group of publishers is praying for a direct strike on their elusive target: the eternal souls of game players.

Nothing reflects the video game business' new maturity like the edicts imposed on this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo: Turn down the music and, for Pete's sake, put some clothes on! For years, the annual trade show, called E3, has played out at the Los Angeles Convention Center like a teenage boy's naughty dream: acres of video games accompanied by ear-splitting rock and impossibly proportioned, navel-baring women pretending to like you.

At daybreak Wednesday, with just hours to go before the Electronic Entertainment Expo's fashion police hit the beat, their effect was already being felt: alterations. In a conference room above the exhibit floor, a model named Jackie assessed the Greek tunic-like costume she was supposed to wear to promote THQ's video game "Titan Quest." It was red, see-through, skimpy and, according to the new rules of the video game trade show known as E3, out of bounds.

Is there any event as brazenly inattentive to the coolness of Los Angeles as the Electronic Entertainment Expo (or E3) week? Like mayflies, armies of suited video game industry executives and programmers and all other manner of power-geek descend on L.A. to callous their thumbs testing newer and better ways of slaying aliens and fighting the Battle of the Bulge. "Hey, guys," one wants to yell at them, "we're trying to run a hipper-than-thou city here! At least put on a trucker hat!"

AMID the marketing decadence and general cacophony of the video game bacchanal known as E3, there was also hushed reverence, the sort of wonder historically reserved for the Holy Grail. Outside Nintendo's Space Age exhibit at the Los Angeles Convention Center this week, a line snaked for city blocks. Inside, eager young men surrounded a museum-style display case, gazing quietly at the sleek consoles perched there. Some took photos.

For E3, it's game over as many gamers know it. The Electronic Entertainment Expo, the video game industry's annual trade show in Los Angeles that had morphed into a mecca for fanatics and a spectacle complete with "booth babes" and Lara Croft look-alikes, will be scaled down, a move that could hurt the city's tourism economy. Organizers announced Monday that the 2007 event would be held at hotels throughout Los Angeles, rather than in the downtown convention center.