E3 Presenters Faced A Well Known Challenge: Their Hands

E3 Presenters Faced A Well Known Challenge: Their Hands

Public speaking isn’t easy. (I’m not good at it at all.) One of the hardest things to do when you’re on stage in front of a lot of people is figure out what the hell to do with your hands. A lot of people at E3 don’t seem to have figured this out.

Electronic 3 is an event that thrusts a lot of people who aren’t necessarily used to talking to the public onto a giant stage where they are forced to do exactly that. Viewers scrutinise these poor unfortunate souls just because they happen to be on a stage or livestream. Now – what the hell was Chris Avellone doing with his hands?

E3 Presenters Faced A Well Known Challenge: Their Hands

Avellone is one of my favourite writers in games, and I respect him a lot. He also looks just as nervous as I would in this circumstance, which humanises him for me.

After I noticed Avellone’s weird hand position, I started noticing everyone else’s. Phil Spencer clearly does not know where his hands are supposed to go when he’s talking.

E3 Presenters Faced A Well Known Challenge: Their Hands

I was also really feeling for this community manager for Elder Scrolls Legends on stage at Bethesda’s conference, who looks like he realised he had hands exactly at this moment.

E3 Presenters Faced A Well Known Challenge: Their Hands

In my experience when you’re holding your hands this close to your pockets, what you’re thinking is, “Should I just put my hands in my pockets?” You probably should. But now you haven’t because you missed the moment when it would have been normal and no one would have noticed.

E3 Presenters Faced A Well Known Challenge: Their Hands

This community developer on Rainbow Six Siege saw what Avellone was doing with his hands and decided to try it at Ubisoft’s press conference.

E3 Presenters Faced A Well Known Challenge: Their Hands

Laurent Malville, creative director at Ubisoft Montreal, mostly just held his hands out like he was holding a medium-sized box, which isn’t a bad strategy.

E3 Presenters Faced A Well Known Challenge: Their Hands

Not everyone looked like a deer in headlights up on stage. Unsurprisingly, people like Shawn Layden, the president and CEO of Sony Interactive America, did not seem all that uncomfortable addressing a large group of people. But I was honestly most impressed by Todd Howard. He walked around, addressed the crowd, and knew when to use a gesture to punctuate a sentence.

E3 Presenters Faced A Well Known Challenge: Their Hands

The next time I do public speaking, which is hopefully never, I’ll try to take some tips from Howard. In the meantime, I don’t want to think about how weird hands are for a while.


The Cheapest NBN 1000 Plans

Looking to bump up your internet connection and save a few bucks? Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Kotaku, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

Comments


7 responses to “E3 Presenters Faced A Well Known Challenge: Their Hands”