With no clear correspondence between booth babes and foot traffic, you have to wonder why they’re there at all — unless it’s financed by some kind of wink-wink slush fund for gaming company executives in the throes of midlife crises. Or put there on the reasoning that the babes make their games seem, well, sexy. “After all, sex sells!” an aggressively unctuous P.R. exec suggested to me helpfully. When I asked her why sex, which has nothing to do with the game it’s supposedly promoting, would make a guy plunk down $50 to buy it, her eyes went blank.

It’s really the same kind of logic that enables middle-aged aluminum siding salesmen with comb-overs to think that throwing down large at a strip joint makes them sexy. (Then again, when it comes to erotic self-delusion, the average game boy is probably their peer. “I was all flirting with her and I gave her my business card,” said a chunky, fish-lipped E3 attendee, proudly reporting back to his friends. “She said she’d send me some pictures, and call me.”)

As it stands, the whole jig is just one disgruntled female employee away from toppling under a sexual harassment suit. Very likely, the “hostile work environment” clause of the code is fulcrum enough to bring the entire embarrassing enterprise down around the industry’s ankles.

I asked a female GOD staffer how she felt about having to work among the hired babes. She insisted it didn’t faze her. In her company, she told me, “we’re like family, and these guys are like my brothers.” Still, she’s one of four females in a company of 34 — an entirely typical gender disparity in the industry. And while the ISDA claims that 43 percent of gamers are female — though I suspect it took some seriously creative jiggering of what counts as a “gamer” to derive that figure — female attendance at E3 seemed closer to between 5 and 20 percent. And since most of the women who were there were merely on hand to deliver the corporate equivalent of a fluff job, that ratio is likely to stay right where it is.

It’s the dearth of women, among other things, that consigns games to their geek ghetto, with no genuine celebrities, or pop-cult recognition outside its narrow subculture. So at E3, you’re treated to the sight of hot young developers swaggering across the floor, tricked out in pimp daddy raiment and boy-band hair, whose only groupies are mouth-breathing dudes in “Akira” T-shirts.

The game industry could really use a new generation of photogenic, media-friendly auteurs to join elder statesmen like Shigero Miyamoto, Warren Spector and Peter Molyneux, men who’ve finally managed to eke out a thread of mainstream acknowledgment. But that optimistically assumes there are enough young designers who are ready for the responsibility that would entail. A longtime P.R. rep recalled to me how she wanted to slide under the table when her top game-designer client made an offhand racist crack — during dinner with a journalist from a major magazine. A creative director for a leading development team cheerfully described to me how its Q.A. team made a prostitute sport a game’s logo on her body during a combination gonzo video/gangbang session. It only takes a couple of hours of floor gossip to grasp how deep the social retardation among most game developers runs — and how not ready for prime time they truly are.

To find developers at their best, it was really necessary to get off E3’s main floors. It’s there in Will Wright’s witty, closed-door demonstration of Sims Online, or at a talk on narrative in gaming, in which Irrational Games founder Ken Levine advises his younger peers to look for inspiration beyond their narrow sphere: “Read a book — and something besides a fantasy novel or a sci-fi novel.” Or down in the sparsely populated basement level, where an idealistic young French designer is showing off Arx Fatalis, an elegant role-playing game of crystalline beauty, hoping against hope that it can cut through the mass-market homogeneity that gaming has become. “Games should be treated as art, but they are becoming more and more like hamburger,” Rafael says with a sigh, pronouncing “hamburger” as only a Frenchman can.

Finally, providing that one could rip one’s eyes away from protruding bust lines, who will prevail in the console wars? Last year, I was sure that Xbox’s dominance was predetermined. But now, I’d say the odds lean slightly toward Nintendo, whose games generated the best buzz — especially Miyamoto’s Pikmin, a kind of Japanese cousin to Black & White, only more accessible. By contrast, Halo, Xbox’s vaunted killer app, seems like just another variation on the already popular Tribes 2 — and, more ominously for Microsoft, features a helmet-wearing protagonist without a name, or even a face. (This in a market where identifiable personalities, like Crash Bandicoot or Mario, are key to a console’s branding.) Meanwhile, Sony’s strongest character, Solid Snake, is looking more brand-enforcing badass than ever.

But whatever the outcome, the victor will dominate an industry that is still grossly unprepared for the mainstream, a disreputably grab-ass, twerpy adjunct to the real media. Billions of dollars will change millions of hands, as they always have, but in the end, it won’t have any impact on the larger culture going on without them outside their digitized walls. Just more money shuffled back and forth in an underground economy of lost boys.