23 Biggest WTF Moments From E3 2016

Following Sunday's devastating Orlando shooting, most of the E3 conferences referenced the event in some form or another, either through the wearing of colored pins or directly offering their condolences before the festivities kicked off.

This was all well and good, though it did come off as a little tone-deaf, as offering sympathies for a mass shooting moments before trying to sell video games promoting the power fantasy of being, in some cases, a mass murderer, is rather awkward.

This was particularly noticeable in Microsoft's conference, which switched from Major Nelson offering his condolences to showing off Gears of War 4 footage in the span of about five minutes.

The inherent awkwardness is probably why the ribbons were a better idea, because isn't it assumed that most empathetic, sensible people offer their condolences anyway? After the first conferences began formally doing it, the rest most likely felt obliged for the sake of PR to follow suit, because otherwise, agenda-driven websites would criticise them as "insensitive" for not doing so.

At least we can all agree the shooting was a terrible tragedy, which is really the point here, even if an industry that makes billions of dollars annually from fetishising machine gun imagery probably isn't the best place to talk about it.