I decided this year that instead of trying to cover all the cool things I witnessed at E3, I’d narrow the list down to about five.

Not as easy as you might think. I saw dozens of games and products that got me thinking far beyond the usual “cool, wow” response. Still, I did my best to distill things a bit.

My picks for the Best of E3 2009, then, have published in today’s Georgia Straight.

Every spring, the video-game industry converges on Los Angeles to make announcements, make merry, and generally show off. The Electronic Entertainment Expo is a week of flashy press briefings, multimedia demonstrations, and extravagant parties.

In thinking about Project Natal, I wrote quite a bit more than we had room for in the Straight, and the big idea that I edited out is important. So here, and cross-posted at the Straight‘s tech blog, are those additional thoughts.

At Microsoft’s Xbox 360 media briefing at E3 2009 last week, the unveiling of Project Natal included a video presentation from Lionhead Studios, one of the Microsoft Game Studios developers.

In the video, a woman, Claire, interacts with a digital character of a young boy, Milo, on the screen. Aside from the digital boy responding to the emotional intonation in the woman’s voice—itself a paradigm-changing interaction—the most compelling moment of the demonstration is when the boy throws a pair of goggles at the woman. The woman instinctively reaches out to catch them.

In the video, Lionhead’s Peter Molyneux says that the demonstration was not acted. “She felt the need to reach down for those goggles. Everybody—every single person—that has experienced this reaches down.”

Let’s be clear. The goggles aren’t there. But because our interaction with the digital character is so life-like, we react to the interaction as if it was real life. To the point where we are instinctively attempting to catch an object that doesn’t exist.

This is the element of Natal that is so groundbreaking.

The interaction between Claire and Milo makes it clear that we don’t need to plug ourselves in, or wear headsets and visors to become immersed in an experience. Virtual reality can be attained with Natal.

All we need is to be convinced that an interaction is real and our brains take care of the rest.

In this week’s issue of Calgary’s Fast Forward Weekly is my review of Nintendo’s newest update to its handheld game system, the DSi.

The new model, dubbed the DSi, is available for $199.95. It’s slightly thinner and longer than its predecessor, but still fits nicely in the palm.

Got so caught up in being in L.A. for E3 last week that I plum forgot to post the “Trigger Happy” column that ran in the Georgia Straight. It was a round-up of smaller, downloadable games that have been released for the three consoles.

The number and variety of short video games that can be downloaded directly to your favourite console are rapidly expanding. They’re cheaper than the typical $60 console game, too, usually running between $10 and $20 on the PlayStation Network, WiiWare, and Xbox Live Arcade. Here’s a look at six recent offerings.

Extra bonus, a review of Duke Nukem 3D.

Good thoughts from Pat Thornton on how news organizations – newspapers in particular – should frame their thinking about trying to charge for the delivery of news online.

A couple of salient bullet points:

• You can’t charge for something that has been free for years without drastically improving it
• It’s much easier to charge for a new product or feature that was never freely available
• Even if a news org develops products & content worth paying for, it still needs plenty of good, free content

Read Thornton’s entire post.

Smoking Gun Interactive, a Vancouver-based video game studio, today announced that it has signed author Douglas Rushkoff to assist with the development of the studio’s first title.

Rushkoff, a New York writer and new media scholar, will be working with Smoking Gun “to develop story narratives across a range of media formats that can feed off one another and exist concurrently,” according to a release on the partnership.

Smoking Gun was founded in 2007 by Relic Entertainment veterans John Johnson, Drew Dunlop, and Angie Pytlewski. The independently financed developer has not yet announced the title currently in development. When I spoke with Johnson, CEO and creative director, in February, he said Smoking Gun would be looking to sign a publishing or co-publishing deal for the upcoming title.

In the release, Rushkoff said that he looked forward to collaborating with Smoking Gun, “the first developers I’ve encountered who really understand the difference and potential marriage between narrative and game – between storytelling and total immersion. I’m going to get to work closely with them, writing narrative pathways that carry readers through the universe of the game world. We’ll all be writing for and stealing from one another, developing plot points, set pieces, and characters that have both stories in the books, and purposes in the games. Players who have read the books will have a richer game experience; readers who play the game will come to understand the stories from the inside.“ 

I’m intrigued by this announcement and by Rushkoff’s explanation of what’s planned. Creating a world and telling stories within it should not be limited to a particular medium. It sounds like Smoking Gun and Rushkoff have a plan to create stories and characters that go beyond a video game or a comic or a novel, and to tell those stories while weaving back and forth between the various media.

It’s a tricky thing to do because either those stories must exist independent of all others, or the creators have to assume that the audience will follow the story from medium to medium, getting a chapter of the story by reading a short story this week, and by playing a video game next week.

Whatever they are up to, I say bring it on. Having a writer and thinker like Rushkoff participating in the development of a new interactive experience is loaded with potential. I’ll be over here, waiting to see what they come up with.

Cross posted at the Georgia Straight