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LOS ANGELES -- When videogame executives boast, as they often do, that their industry is as big as Hollywood, they want you to be impressed. After all, the money being spent each year on game software is rapidly closing in on what people spend attending the movies.

But after two days here last week at E3, the annual videogame convention, one realizes that in acquiring the girth of the movie industry, videogame creators are picking up a lot of its bad habits, too.

E3 is the Cannes of videogames, a huge affair for which tens of thousands of people descend on the Los Angeles Convention Center. The crowd is younger than at the French movie festival, which also started last week, and while not as well-dressed, it tends to be more sincere.

What's immediately apparent at E3 is the Hollywood-like way that just a few genres dominate: first-person shooting games, fantasy multiplayer games, sports re-creations, movie tie-ins. And the game industry shares with movies the same blockbuster mentality. Now and then, mostly then, a new idea comes along. But it quickly spawns a host of me-too copies, all hoping to get their oars in the revenue stream.

Today's games are technically so demanding they often require teams of hundreds of people to produce. But alas, nowhere outside Hollywood is so much technical talent being expended on behalf of such limited imagination.

Doom, the "first-person shooter" game that helped invent the modern industry in the early 1990s, was a technical tour de force, as well as rather tongue-in-cheek in the way it served up its over-the-top violence. But wit seems to be the last thing on anyone's mind these days.

The coming game "Priest," for example, doesn't let you follow a kindly old cleric while he visits parishioners. Instead, it takes place in the American Old West, which, according to a game flier, has been inhabited by "the insidious archangel, Temozarela" and other supernatural bad guys. You play the priest of the game's title, and must smite them. The appeal? "Hard-gore graphics allow you to finish off your enemies with a gruesome and bloody flourish."

The game industry long ago introduced movie-like ratings for its products. But judging from trade-association news releases, it's still sensitive to the charge that it's producing a generation of twitching adolescents fixated on violence and gore -- to the extent their game-induced short attention spans allow them to fixate on anything at all.

"Two-thirds of parents say that games are a positive addition to their children's lives," says a news release, somewhat defensively, from the Interactive Digital Software Association.

Because of its enormous size, the game industry has spawned a huge industry of support services. You can hire companies to come in and salvage faltering game projects, much like Hollywood script doctors. And "localization" firms take games made, say, in the U.S. and prepare them for release abroad.

Usually, that just means translating to another language. But local laws and customs must be heeded, too. Swastikas, for example, are banned in Germany and must be removed from a game before it can be sold there.

There also is specialization. Interactive Data Visualization of Columbia, S.C., sells SpeedTree, an animation package that lets gamers easily add trees and other plants to their imaginary landscapes. "You'll soon start seeing a lot more trees in games," promises a spokesman.

Creativity isn't completely absent from the industry; it's just found in unusual places, like sprawled out on the floor. Michael Feldman, a young Angeleno, noticed that gamers in the act usually lie on the living room carpet, their head against the couch. So, he invented a kind of foam pad with a headrest and built-in speakers for use by supine players. It got a best-in-breed award at January's Consumer Electronics Show, and Mr. Feldman says orders to his company, Pyramat, are beginning to pour in.

Sometimes, efforts are made to get gamers up on their feet. Sony introduced the "Eye Toy" at E3, a camera that attaches to its PlayStation. Standing in front of the monitor, you watch yourself try to swat away critters that fly onto the screen. And a Korean company was selling a ping-pong game that lets you use a real paddle with embedded electronics to play ping pong against the computer, or a player at another station.

Both are impressive bits of technology, but one wonders if they are too strenuous for gamers, who seem reluctant to exercise any muscle outside their thumbs.

There is, of course, one art form at which both gamers and movie makers excel: that of The Deal. The hallways here were full of deal chatter. "We think our game has an awesome story line. You should consider it even if the retail component doesn't work out."

Clearly, this industry is big enough to have its own Cannes. But one sign of a large and mature creative business is that it produces not only megahits, but also intelligent or quirky independent releases. That hasn't happened yet in videogames. Gamers won't be really grown up until they get their own Sundance.

• Send your comments to lee.gomes@wsj.com1, and check back on Friday for some selected letters at WSJ.com/Portals2.

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