The 14th annual Electronic Entertainment Expo, or “E3” — the world’s premiere video gaming convention held each July — once again served as a glimpse into the future of the multibillion dollar interactive entertainment industry. Media, retailers and analysts packed the invite-only industry event held at the Los Angeles Convention Center to play games coming soon to a platform near you.

On that note, E3 ’08 was less about the “console wars” between Sony’s PlayStation 3, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii, and more about the video games themselves — most of which are available on multiple systems anyway. And after playing more than 100 games over the three days it’s easy to see key trends shaping up in the video game industry. Here’s a look at a few big ones.

First there were single-player adventures against A.I.-controlled enemies. Then along came head-to-head online matches, which evolved into team-based competitions. Today, many game publishers are giving players the options to play with — rather than against — friends, either in front of the same TV or online.

Co-op is showing up in everything from first-person shooters, such as Microsoft Game Studios’ Gears of War 2 and Sony Computer Entertainment America’s (SCEA) Resistance 2 (both of which are due out this November for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, respectively) to role-playing games such as Capcom’s Resident Evil 5 and Microsoft’s Fable 2 to puzzle/platformers including the ingenious LittleBigPlanet from SCEA for the PS3.

Some games, including Ubisoft’s upcoming Prince of Persia sequel, make co-op a main game-play component, though in this case the Montreal-based developers let the player only trigger the co-op sequences rather than controlling the prince’s partner’s moves.

Speaking of co-op, music games such as Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith and Rock Band are a very popular pastime for friends to jam together in front of the same television on any of the Big Three consoles or over the Internet (with Wii owners left out of the online mix).

E3 showed the next installments of these huge franchises — namely, Rock Band 2 from MTV Games and Electronic Arts (EA) and Guitar Hero: World Tour from Activision. Technically speaking, Activision wasn’t part of E3 this year but they held their own media events near the convention center.

Next: Rock Band 2

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