Nowhere to be seen are companies and , which are selling boatloads of electronic versions of board games on tablets. If it doesn't run on a console made by the Nintendo-Sony-Microsoft trinity, it's hard to find at E3. PC games get some love, mostly on the massively multiplayer side, but for the most part, E3 is still a console show.

The disparity is shown in E3's South Hall. One of the big landmarks at one end is a giant inflatable cow. The cow is there to bring people to look at [PDF], the latest iteration of the iconic farming simulator that launched a legion of imitators, including Zynga's FarmVille.

At the other end is a huge sculpture of four heavily armed characters from Gearbox's upcoming , a violent first-person shooter set on another planet with post-apocalyptic trappings.

Those E3 bookends illustrate the diversity of the authors and audiences for games in the 21st century. Epic Games showed the latest iteration of its behind closed doors--the game engine that is behind hugely successful AAA titles like and .

In a small booth several hundred yards away, dice.pl (not to be confused with EA studio DICE, who makes Battlefield 3) showed an electronic die that allows you to roll physical dice to generate results in a tablet or PC game title.