We are all for gaming being embraced by the rest of the world. In fact, we think it is a fact of life that it will be, but that progress has been extremely slow coming. While many of us played Halo or Counter-Strike in high school, the rest of the world still treated those things as hobbies to eventually be put away. So when the LA County Fair – an event that boasts over a million visitors annually – decided to house a gaming section, we were all for it.

Disappointment is perhaps not strong enough a word for what the county fair brought to gaming. What it promised was:

“-Exhibitions and appearances by top professional esports organizations including Counter Logic  Gaming and the LA Immortals”
“Cutting edge virtual reality stations”
“Upcoming releases from indie developers”
-“Over 40 gaming retail & entertainment vendors”

However, what we got was much less. While CLG had a booth selling a very small amount of gear, no representatives from the organization seemed present. Supposedly IMT was going to arrive around 6-9pm (according to a post on their instagram), but the event itself had none of this information available. Similarly, indie developers as a plural is a bit off as there was only a single developer offering testing for two of their games. When we tested one game, we were surprised to find that despite being a game their studio made, they weren’t sure of the buttons or what the items even did.

If we said there were twenty vendors, we would probably be being generous, but they also varied pretty wildly from video games. One booth sold anime goods, another was a woman’s personal art, and another was a cosplay group for Star Wars.