The on-stage signage from E3 2021.
The Electronic Entertainment Expo is a controversial event for a variety of reasons, but it’s still something gamers all over the country look forward to year after year. And yet, this year marks the third year in a row the in-person event will be canceled, with all three cancellations citing the COVID-19 pandemic as justification. And I firmly believe that was the right call to make.
For almost two years now, America has been struggling to create a facsimile of life from before the pandemic. We’ve struggled to find toilet paper, struggled to make ends meet, and, in many cases, struggled to keep a roof over our heads. We’ve lived through lockdowns, mask mandates, and embarrassingly long lines at testing facilities. The rest of the world is fighting this, too, but I can only speak to the experience I’ve had here in the US, and it’s been a rough 48 months.
Somehow, through all of this turmoil, things have only gotten worse. New cases are higher than they’ve ever been, with the Omicron variant sweeping across the country like a new plague. Hospitals are once again overburdened with Covid patients, forcing them to turn away people with other life-threatening conditions.
Even as we backslide further and further into another, full-blown outbreak, the reaction is markedly different this time around. When Covid first showed up on the scene, everything shut down. From theme parks to movie theaters, any place where infection might occur closed its doors and prepared to weather out this pandemic. There were celebrations for essential workers amid a feeling of solidarity during the ordeal we were experiencing together.
Now, in the face of even worse conditions, nobody really seems to care. And it’s absolutely infuriating. Cases in Florida, the state where I live, hit new records almost every day over the past week. The seven-day average for the state is almost 70,000 new cases per day. In California, the state that hosts E3, that average is almost 90,000 new cases per day, with over 200,000 cases reported in a single day in the past week.
California Covid-19 case numbers for the past four months.
But we haven’t seen the return of statewide lockdowns. California has instituted a mask mandate for everyone regardless of vaccination status, but there’s nothing resembling a firm vaccine mandate. When roughly 40% of American adults still haven’t gotten a single dose of the vaccine, any large-scale event that brings people in from across the country is going to be a super-spreader event.
It doesn’t matter that sporting events, concerts, and political rallies are all happening in person again. It brings to mind an age-old adage: “If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump off too?” Of course, you wouldn’t! Those friends were idiots! The recklessness and stupidity of others don’t justify following their example yourself.
I have spent the last several weeks watching just about every friend of mine come down with Covid. I myself got it back in September. And even though I’ve since gotten a booster shot, I still wear a mask whenever I have to go indoors. I still try to keep my activities out of the house confined to grocery shopping and work. But I see how others treat this pandemic, especially the elected officials who are supposed to be leading us through this crisis, and it makes me feel like I’m losing my mind.
E3 2019 was the last year the event had a physical presence, and roughly 66,000 people attended. Many of them spent that time in packed auditoriums, coughing and sneezing on the people around them for hours at a time. All it would take today is one person to show up without realizing they’re sick (I’m giving them benefit of the doubt here) for the virus to spread through those 66,000 people like, well, the plague.
At the end of the day, there’s no way in the current climate to conduct an event on the scale of E3 that could be even remotely considered safe. There are too many people in too confined of space with little-to-no oversight for it to be worth the risk. Masks would be forgotten or worn improperly, and unvaccinated individuals would slip through the cracks.
I was happy to hear that E3’s in-person component was canceled because it gave me a small glimmer of hope that someone else was taking this pandemic seriously. Maybe if more of these events went all-digital, or just took the year off altogether, we could all celebrate the end of the pandemic together at next year’s E3.
