The game industry prides itself on creating fantastic spaces that don’t necessarily coincide with reality. Rapture. Liberty City. The Capital Wasteland. The E3 show floor.

Screens scream video and gameplay. Wall-size LED displays. Spotlights. Utter visual chaos. Like an electronics store display floor, every image competes with every other image. Turn up the brightness, the color, and the volume so juxtaposition only makes the other guy look duller. Chaos that conspires to distract you from whatever you are playing at the moment.

The constantly changing visual stimuli is energizing and exhausting.

As you move around the floor, there’s always something new to look at – a company logo suspended from the ceiling, a giant screen, a large statue. You have to actively block out much of what you see so you can get to where you need to be. Competitors’ booths sit next to one another, competing for your attention. It’s a microcosm of cacophonic architectural design.

It seems odd to call them “booths”, when many of them cover more square footage than my apartment, span two stories, and probably use more electricity than several apartment buildings. Some of the companies define their boundaries using colored lights – OnLive’s booth is bathed in orange that matches their branding. The borders of Microsoft’s territory are awash in electric green.

Sony and EA use walls off to bound their booths – so while you still see many screens of their different games wherever you look, you don’t see as much of their competitors’. While there may be less to distract, it budges up the flow of traffic. EA suspends panels from the ceiling so the product-image can be above you as well as all around you (the Nintendo booth also did this, with the logo for The Legend of Zelda: The Skyward Sword scrolling along LED panels).