We're sitting in the Intel Viiv gaming party at Moroccan-themed Rick's Place, on the ground floor of the Hotel Figueroa in downtown Los Angeles, putting our feet up and taking stock of the video-game sensory overload just a few blocks away.

That would be where the entire convention center has been taken over by what is possibly the world's noisiest, if not biggest trade show, E3, or the Electronic Entertainment Expo. (Yeah, it really is that big - last year's show blew out the entire convention center's power on opening day.)

We know, we know, you really want to hear about the show, but no surprise, where there are gamers there are lots of parties. In addition to three nine-hour days of monster sound from armies attacking and aliens destroying, entire civilizations being built and destroyed, not to mention hardware hawking that would put a Moroccan bazaar to shame, parties here rage 'til at least 2 a.m. This being L.A., as much biz gets done at the offsite parties as on the floor of the show.

So here we are with the scruffy gamers (we know games have gone mainstream, but the hard-core types are still pretty scruffy) at Rick's place, where a serious four-way game takes place between members of the "hot" game team, "Fatal1ty." The gamers mumble as they "frag" each other in Quake4, but trust us, they are really excited. We enjoyed the bougainvillea beneath the billowing, brightly colored silk sheets, and scarfed the great food (tender beef sate and fragrant rice) while everyone else buried their party heads in - what else? - more computers and their games.

Clash of the Titans

So enough about the parties - and there are a lot of them - from the exclusive Sony blowout to the cozy Intellivision Retrotopia affair over in Santa Monica. E3 is really about the games and, of course, the relentless competition for hardware bragging rights between the three biggies: Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony.

Covering some half-a-million square feet, the show is set up in two huge halls, the South and West. Each year, the hardware and software biggies stake out vast tracts of square footage to show off their latest stuff. The smaller guys fill in everything else from the concourse connecting the two halls to the smaller halls nearby, and whatever floor space is leftover. This year, Sony and Nintendo anchor the West Hall and Microsoft and EA dominate the South. 

A new game is spawned

The big games this year? Depends on who you're eavesdropping on, but for our money, Spore takes the prize hands down. This is the latest brainchild of Will Wright, the computer genius who developed the Sims franchise for EA, and, oh yeah, changed videogames forever. Scratch that, changed the world of popular entertainment. We sat through a private, 20-minute demo behind closed doors with Mr. Wright himself, free-associating his way through his own new game over on the EA real estate.

Spore is his personal world-creation tool. He showed us how, starting next summer (2007), we'll all be able to start little civilizations from slime, watch them go through all the stages of evolution on one planet and then branch out into space to interact with others. It's a massive online game as well, so as you're creating your creatures and home worlds, you can then interact with the worlds created by everyone else in Will Wright's Spore universe.

Throw out your old controls...

The next-coolest thing this year is without any other doubts, and goofy name aside, the Nintendo Wii. Hmm, the company knows the name (pronounced "wee") is just asking for jokes, but they're sticking with it, so we'll be good and move past it to the actual gameplay.

Nintendo is promising it'll be transformational. It is. Nintendo decided to make the game play intuitive by getting gamers on their feet to make the controls more natural. The result is a two-fisted set of white controllers that you shake, rattle, and roll at the screen to make things happen - it's worlds away from old game-control consoles with zillions of buttons and joysticks.

We played Madden NFL, one of the best sports games ever invented, and discovered that jumping around and throwing things in the air is just about the right way to play a sports game, even if it is a simulation.

Transforming the world, one game at a time

No trade show touting the virtues of a roughly $30 billion industry would be worth its salt without a few insiders raving about the world-changing impact of its products. Doug Lowenstein, head of the Entertainment Software Association, the trade group behind E3, laid out just how big and important videogames are:

• They are the engine driving the technological progress of the US economy. The drive for better phones, more powerful broadband in your home, ever more powerful computers on your desktop.
• They are the moving force behind a renewed commitment to - and interest in - science and math in high school and college. More and more colleges are offering courses in video-game creation, and teenage kids are all finding out that they need that technical stuff if they want to go into writing computer code.
• They are changing the way we as a nation see ourselves (we are all part of the story we're telling, no longer just passive consumers), not to mention the way we train our emergency and military personnel. Emergency services and Army personnel are here right alongside the LucasArts and ILM folks, not to mention a small army of mobile-phone companies. 

And P.S., if you thought games were just for the privacy of your home, think again. They're everywhere, and that phone you hold in your hand is one of the next battlefronts being fought over. Once again, this being L.A., celeb sightings are at least one barometer of what's considered of some importance. This year, both Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton showed up to endorse their favorite games - located, you guessed it, on their cell phones.

By Gloria Goodale, with contributions by Monitor intern Alex Huf