The game industry, not to mention gamers themselves, relies on blogs to disseminate information: most of it inside-baseball, much but not all of it accurate, a lot of it quite funny - if you follow the industry and consider Will Wright a rock star. (Wright is the genius behind The Sims.) Some blogs are owned by corporations; many are independently (and cheaply) operated. Whatever the case, the game publishers and developers who run E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, realized their influence and this year allowed more of them in the press room. That is, if they could prove they were legit.

“You can’t just have a blog on Friendster or MySpace and say you’re blogging about games,” says John Fowler, an E3 spokesman.