The first mistake was not getting out of Los Angeles earlier. Sitting around for an early afternoon flight just extended the risk of serious jetlag.

The second mistake was then immediately comitting on an East Coast schedule and logging on to my computer to chat with friends I hadn't spoken to since I left for E3.

The third mistake was talking about E3.

It's great that everyone is so enthusiastic. I've been asked by a lot of people already about Alan Wake - my ride from the airport tried to pump me for information I didn't really have on hand.  Questions about the press conferences, the demos I saw,whether Aliens vs Predator is still awesome...it never ends.

And this is a very good thing.

I was beginning to be very tired of E3. Press conferences are broadcast across the internet and television so the media doesn't even really need to be in that room or reporting on it - anyone interested can see what Microsoft or Ubisoft have to say. The days of publishers showing games that are still two or three years away are mostly gone, with a very high percentage of titles on display being summer or early fall 2009 releases. With all the game trailers going up on Youtube almost as soon as we in the press see them, I had a growing sense that this trade show wasn't targeting us but the next month's NPD data. Streaming video and G4's 24 hour coverage almost made me - a humble wordsmith - feel redundant.

But people still want to know what intelligent commentators think. Even if they have read a thousand articles about Project NATAL and seen the The Old Republic trailer on an endless loop, there seems to be a hunger for more perspective, more analysis. Especially from a writer they have grown to trust or maybe just happen to know

With the games news and commentary industry now a seven days a week, 365 days a year non-stop churn of information, you would think that people would get tired of E3 or find no point in it whatsoever. Some companies have abandoned the convention for their own, and other cons have emerged to challenge the dominance of E3. But there is still a deeply ingrained sense in the gaming community that what happens at E3 matters and that what the games media says about E3 is worth listening to.

In an industry that seems to need a new buzzword every few years, it's never really a surprise when you hop from meeting to meeting and hear the same phrases over and over again. At E3 2009, the big word is "cinematic", as in "cinematic experience" or "cinematic dialog" or just plain "cinematic game."

So apparently games are movies again. But, depending on the game and the approach, "cinematic" has taken on a wealth of meanings.

Bioware's Mass Effect 2 is the most cinematic. It's cast as a trilogy, has a strong script and compelling protagonist. And we in the media got to see a lot of cutscenes. In fact, judging by the ratio of game action and talky bits on display, ME2 is as close to being a playable movie as any game can get. 

Supreme Commander 2, a brawny real time strategy game (one of very few on display at E3) has a story based campaign that Gas Powered Games compares to Saving Private Ryan.  For GPG's Chris Taylor, a strategy campaign needs characters and personalities to draw you into the world that is around you and your units.

WET from Artificial Mind and Movement, however, uses cinematic in the sense of appearance - it's a stylized spaghetti western filtered through the action lens of John Woo. The protagonist earns "style points" for acrobatic kills that look good on screen no matter how impractical they would be for an assassin. How many spinning dual wielding ass-kicking gunfights can you have in a single room? More than you would think.

The flexibility of the term speaks to both the power of film and the versatility of game designers. Many seem to make games based on the types of movies they want to star in. But make the actions too film-like and you risk pulling the player out of the game and into your vanity production. How far can an RPG or shooter push the movie analogy before it becomes a series of short action sequences interspersed with the epic story that the designer wants to tell?

The tension between gameplay, story and graphics in design is not new. And even as everyone becomes cinematic, we can take comfort in that the adjective turns out to be as vague and useless a descriptor as every other buzzword. The question is not whether games want to look like movies, but which parts of movies can be well integrated into a game.