The new iPhone operating system, iOS4, is available now for iPhone owners, requiring a big new download of a bunch of applications and add-ons, including a new iTunes... so give yourself time, Apple owners. You get multi-tasking on your phone for your troubles.

Conventional wisdom holds that EA Sports saw UFC Undisputed's success, said wait a minute, we're the Fight Night guys, and started hustling out a competitor. That's crap, says Peter Moore, and EA Sports MMA's floor demo backs him up.

At E3, Moore, the EA Sports president, told me this project was greenlit back in 2007. Three years may seem like an eternity for the annualized sports genre, but it's a common development cycle, especially for a completely new game. What I saw isn't a rushed product. The development team at EA Tiburon has put a good deal of thought into game balance and defense - not shorting the impact or visual appeal of mixed martial arts offense, but not giving it undue primacy either.

My biggest takeaway - a considerate defense will be your key to consistent winning. EA Sports MMA flipflops UFC Undisputed in a basic control mapping - defense in UFC is on the right analog, in MMA it's on the face buttons, specifically B or circle. Punching/kicking in UFC is a face-button control; in MMA it's a right-analog control with an execution similar to Fight Night. B (or circle) will be your best friend in a jam-up. It will automatically deny a takedown or bodyslam, regardless of stamina or attribute. It'll defeat a transition when you're on the ground. I'm not familiar with technique on a personal level yet, but transitions are when your foe gets into a posture to kick your ass, bad. At the same time, getting into one on offense is also a face-button control. You (or your opponent) will be alerted to a transition by a vibrating controller - that's when it's time to hit the block. Not to make this too comparative to UFC Undisputed but the control set made more sense to me on a button than an analog, where you can't be entirely sure you executed the move correctly.

The caveat: Spamming any control is a recipe for defeat. Spamming a defense will tire you out as much, if not more, than spamming an attack. So keep your guard up, but jitting on the B button is going to deplete your stamina, which leads to telegraphed punches and less effective moves overall.

The other control that just seems to make innate sense - but it takes some getting used to - are the submission holds. You get into one with a face button, provided you're on the ground, of course. Applying the pressure isn't a jam-on-it control, though, you'll see a meter deplete and recharge, so you have to battle against it - run it down, pause, and hammer back on the pressure, very much akin to arm wrestling. Just laying on the submission control will wear you out and break your hold, possibly even initiating a reversal.

If it's a choke-hold, you go into a minigame where both players are seeking out a constantly moving location on a wheel with their right thumbstick - if they've found it, it vibrates, more strongly if they're directly on it. Holding your stick in the correct position longer equals success. Again, it's skill based, so finding the correct location will always win the day, but the range you're looking for is larger or smaller depending on where you are in the fight - both in attributes and stamina.

I didn't hear much of the audio, but the rest of the game offers strong detail - I saw different cage layouts (circle vs. octagon) that, presumably, echo the multiple rule sets EA MMA promises to incorporate. Clocking your opponent (or getting clocked by him) close to the cage can create a nice rebound effect that works to your advantage. The team has also included a catch-punch control that's a nice assist to active defenders looking to carry over their counterpunch methodology from Fight Night.

The drawbacks? Some stray or spammed punches landed a little too solidly for my taste - but that's in the physics only. With the HUD up you can see they don't wildly move the stamina or damage. Fighting back from a submissive position on the mat is more effective than in UFC Undisputed, but seemed a little too strong for the context. I'm also not sure I like the fact that takedowns can be executed (provided they aren't blocked) at almost any point standing up. While the balance definitely encourages defense, in multiplayer, this will still be a strong advantage to ground-and-pounders with surprise reflexes.

All that said, EA Sports MMA has serious potential to elevate the sport within video gaming. I grasp its controls in a more innate way, but it's possible that's because of prior exposure to Fight Night. Whatever the case, EA Sports will bring heavyweight marketing to a challenger product with an underdog license. All of that places a premium on game fundamentals, and what I saw inspires confidence in this as a real contender for 2010's sports gaming champion.

To: Brian
From: Stephen
Re: I'm (Not) Afraid of Americans

You love L.A.? That's weird. I don't understand how anyone could love L.A. But that is just the thing a New Yorker would say, isn't it?

Is L.A. awesome enough to host a real-life version of Pilotwings?

New York is! (That was from last week.)

Stuff You Slept Through
The Unexpected Gamer Who Runs EA
No Controller? No Glasses? No Problem
I Seem To Have An Invizimal Touch
The Sly Collection Is All HD, Only A Little 3D
Deus Ex: Human Revolution Plays Best Behind Shades
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow Hands-on: Whipping Evil A New One
The Day Kinectimals Works
How Developers See The PlayStation Move
Magic: The Gathering - Duels Of The Planeswalkers PC Review: I'd Tap That

Having a fondness for Brad Pitt is not required to enjoy the latest tactical hack and slash from the Koei side of Tecmo Koei. Liking the Dynasty Warriors series may be enough to enjoy. Warriors: Legends of Troy as well.

Developed by Koei Canada, the team responsible for futuristic racing game Fatal Inertia and Warriors Orochi games for the PSP, Warriors: Legends of Troy lets players battle as a Greek or Trojan soldier. The E3 demo put us in the shoes, sword and shield of Achilles, but Odysseus on the Greek Side will also be available, as will Hektor and Paris from Troy.

Playing as Achilles, we pulled off the dramatic, speedy and understated stab-to-the-shoulder that Brad Pitt made memorable from the movie Troy when he took down that giant. It was one of many moves from a game where variety in attacks and strategy in employing stabs, parries, guards and throws is important. Sadly, though, Brad's not in the game. You'd likely have heard more about it if he was.

Control-wise, Legends of Troy is easy to latch onto, even for the person whose last Koei made game might have been Samurai Warriors on the PlayStation 2.

The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 game looks sharp, more muted and more sepia toned than your most recent Samurai Warriors or Dynasty Warriors game. As Achilles, we marched through legions of foot soldiers and their commanders, carefully shattering their shields with focused attacks, stabbing them to death with our swords using more carefree attacks.

Along the way, we encountered higher ranked Greek army squads, including a bulky spear master who required more than just hack and slash action, but careful planning. He, like many of the dead before him, dropped weapons we could use on other foes.

The good thing about Warriors: Legend of Troy, beyond giving the Dynasty Warriors enthusiast something different to experience, is that it's combat felt more subdued, less like we were sweeping through hordes of sword fodder along the way. Combat felt fun and immediately immersive, if eventually repetitive as some of us feel about the Warriors franchise.

AI that seemed smarter—running away when it was clearly outmatched after squad leaders were killed—and a Fury power-up that made Achilles a more satisfying killing machine to control were also in the "good" column. The fact that what we played felt like a very small portion of what Warriors: Legends of Troy will offer in terms of a long and storied campaign is also promising.

The bad thing is that it's single-player and offline only, as it's the type of game we wouldn't mind sharing with a friend cooperatively or competitively.

Warriors: Legends of Troy will give the Warriors fan in you something fresher to enjoy this fall, when Tecmo Koei also releases Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage and Samurai Warriors 3 for the Wii, ensuring that we won't be lacking in hacking and slashing in 2010.

After a highly-successful run on Xbox Live Arcade, the collectible card game craze visits Steam with the PC version of Magic: the Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers.

We didn't get a chance to squeeze in a review for the original release of Duels of the Planeswalkers on Xbox Live Arcade last year, and that's a pity. Since its release, the card-based strategy game has maintained a position on the top ten most-played Xbox Live Arcade game charts, which would indicate to us that someone really enjoys playing this game.

Now that the game has dropped for PC users on Steam, we have an opportunity to see what the buzz is all about. Should you tap it?

Loved
Starter Deck: It's not easy for a new player to get into Magic: The Gathering. The game has been around for 17 years, with countless expansion packs and rules updates providing further barrier to entry. You can't simply wander into a gaming store, pick up a starter deck and start playing anymore. At least not the actual card game itself. Duels of the Planeswalkers neatly circumvents these barriers, providing new players with a series of decks, slightly simplified rules, contextual in-game help, and an assortment of computer opponents to go up against before taking your battles online. It's probably the easiest way to experience Magic: The Gathering.

Nothing More To Buy: Not only is Duels of the Planeswalkers the easiest way to get into Magic: The Gathering, it's also the cheapest. Unlike older PC entries in the series or the physical game, you don't have to worry about picking up booster packs each time a new set comes out, or losing to another player because they had to money to create a more powerful deck than you did. The decks in the game are set. You'll unlock more decks as you play, along with additional cards to help customize those decks, but for the most part you get what you need right out of the box.

A Level Playing Field: Ease of use plus no additional cost equals a level playing field, at least in terms of the monsters you'll be facing and cards your opponents will pull out of their decks. Other players might have more insight into the strategy behind the cards, but seeing as you have the same cards at your disposal, each loss is a learning experience you can readily apply.

Rising To The Challenge: Speaking of learning experiences, Duels of the Planeswalkers contains a series of mind-bending challenges that place you in dangerous situations and task you with using only the cards in your hand to come away victorious. It's like a scenario from a war game. The sides are set, you have limited resources, and you have to think strategically to battle your way out of what oftentimes seems like an impossible situation. If anything is going to get you into the Magic mindset, it's these challenges. It's just a pity there aren't more of them; I'd gladly shell out money for a large compilation of them.

Hated
Nothing More To Buy: Wait, wasn't this a loved just a few paragraphs ago? Yes, it was. It's also a hated, because let's face it, limiting the card set takes the ‘collectible' out of ‘collectible card game.' The core game is good enough to satiate my Magic itch on a short term basis, but soon I find myself missing some of the game's more creative cards, wishing I had some sort of code system to add them in, similar to the way many Yu-Gi-Oh games handle card adding. Regular expansions help somewhat (the first Xbox Live expansion is already available in the Steam version), but ultimately I long for more flexibility. I'm sure many of the more hardcore Magic players feel the same way.

Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers might not be the ultimate video game based on the popular collectible card game, but it's certainly an excellent place for players to start. It covers the basics, delves into advanced strategy, and online duels are a great way to experience the wiles of other players without worrying about them seeing the pain in your eyes as they trounce you soundly. As an added bonus, Wizards of the Coast recently released a series of decks based on the ones in the game, so once you've mastered all there is to do virtually, you can easily take your newly found skills into the real world.

After seventeen years of Magic: The Gathering, Wizards of the Coast and Stainless Games may have finally stumbled upon a winning formula for a video game based on the franchise. Instead of a complicated game meant to appease the hardcore Magic player, they've delivered a simple experience guaranteed to leave players hungry for more.

Magic the Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers was developed by Stainless Games and published by Wizards of the Coast on June 15, 2010 for the PC, June 17, 2009 for Xbox Live Arcade. A PlayStation Network version is forthcoming. Retails for $9.99 USD. A copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Played through single player campaign, completed all challenges, and played multiple rounds online with varying degrees of success.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

Madden NFL Arcade, the downloadable football shootout that released last Thanksgiving, won't be getting a second version this year. Instead, EA Sports today pushed out a comprehensive roster update tracking more than 100 player moves, roster promotions and draft choices.

That means this game is your first chance to play with first-rounders like Rams quarterback Sam Bradford, Lions defensive lineman Ndamukong Suh, and Broncos quarterback (and NCAA Football 11 cover boy) Tim Tebow. I just played with Tebow and Denver - in the pocket he is the proverbial statue with pigeon shit on his shoulders. Lay on that right trigger, though, and he has some running speed and mass. Call deep passes and take off like a draw play, it's reasonably effective.

To get the roster, you're going to have to check into an online match against live competition. The game will prompt you to approve a download the online roster saved to your hard drive. Once you do that, it's all yours, Just keep in mind, this wipes out last year's online rosters, so Cardinals fans will be stuck with Matt Leinart at quarterback and not the recently retired Kurt Warner.

Interestingly, the Minnesota Vikings are the only team with zero lineup changes. Of course Brett Favre's return is not assured, but the most current information out there is he's active. So in addition to Arcade being your first chance to see how Jimmy Clausen handles the Carolina Pampers offense, it might be your last shot to just go have fun out there with No. 4.

And if you don't have the game, EA's hoping a 33 percent off deal on Xbox Live will entice you. Madden NFL Arcade is 800 Microsoft Points until June 27.

Mario and Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto has apparently given his blessing to the movie adaptation of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, based on the heavily video game-influenced comic of the same name, specifically for its use of video game music.

According to a new interview with Scott Pilgrim director Edgar Wright conducted by star Michael Cera in the new issue of Wired magazine, via GoNintendo, Miyamoto had to screen the action flick in order for some Nintendo music to be used in the film. Wright says he lobbied Nintendo to get the rights to use music from The Legend of Zelda in the movie during a dream sequence.

Wright says he wrote to Nintendo that the Zelda tune in question was "like nursery rhymes to a generation." Cera would probably agree, telling Wright that Super Mario Bros. 3 was a Nintendo classic "deep in my DNA."

In other Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World music news via Pitchfork, the movie's official soundtrack will feature both Beck and Broken Social Scene playing the music for fictional video game-inspired bands Sex Bob-omb and Crash and the Boys, respectively. Wonder if Miyamoto had any quibbles with the name of the first band's name based on the classic Super Mario Bros. 2 enemy.

Surely there must be something wrong with this movie, right? Like it causes shoulder cancer or something if viewed more than once? It all sounds too good...

Beck, Broken Social Scene Play Fake Bands on Scott Pilgrim Soundtrack [Pitchfork]

Seeing the tools developers use to create games on the PlayStation Move could be the key to understanding the device's full potential. Move research and development lead Dr. Richard Marks walks us through the tools of the trade.

While we've barely scratched the surface in terms of what the PlayStation Move motion controller is capable of, Dr. Marks' presentation at E3 2010 surely gave us some ideas. During the course of a half hour, Marks showed off several technical demos straight out of the developers' toolkit; simple little tools that open up a world of possibilities.

Tools like this simple shoot demo. A point of light appears on the screen as your crosshairs, and all you have to do is move the Move to the appropriate location and click the button. Bang, the target is dead. It's a primitive application, but Marks tells us, "This is what we give them, and they give us SOCOM 4."

Some of the demos are deceptively simple. Take the paint demo, seen above. All it does it use the Move controller to allow Marks to write on the screen. From this, developers can simply stick with the painting mechanic, or use it for more complex actions, such as casting spells or solving puzzles.

Then things got really impressive.

The frame tool allows developers to generate a skeletal frame around the player's image in the camera. With the push of a button, Mark's on-screen body was covered with a framework that moved as he moved. Using button combinations he could make it bigger and smaller, fat or thin.

Adding walls and a floor, Marks was soon navigating a primitive 3D environment, his image replaced with the frame, reacting as he moved with fluid grace.

This tool was used to animate the player's avatar in The Fight.

Just as impressive is the dummy tool, which spawns, as you'd expect, a wooden dummy. Using the Move, Marks walks us through manipulating the dummy, bumping its limbs and making its body sway. The tool gives developers a better idea of the precision interactions possible with the technology, making actions like sword fighting or the mini-games in Sports Champion much more realistic.

In the sparks demo, two Move controllers are used, with a shower of sparks arcing between them. It's a gorgeous effect, though I'm not sure what the practical applications might be.

Lighting and shadows were highlighted in the shadow demo, later used to show off the 3D effects in move. The move is used as a light source, playing across an octopus-like creature as the angle changes.

Nothing says building quite like LEGO blocks.

Carve is perhaps the most impressive tool, though less likely to be utilized by end-users. Using two Moves, a 3D object is manipulated, stretched, and trimmed, bits coming off in long strips like wood shavings from a branch. Skilled Move users could easily use the tool to create complex, lifelike shapes.

At the end of the presentation, Marks and crew pass around a couple of pairs of3D glasses, a seeming requirement for E3 presentations this year, and while the purple octopus does seem to be reaching out from the screen, no visual gimmick can rival the excitement generated by these simple little technical demos.

If developers feel as excited as I do after seeing these tools in action, we could be in for some truly amazing Move games this fall and beyond.

If we ran a video game company, maybe, just maybe, those of us who play video games would be like John Riccitiello. We really could be a boss. We could believe we're the good guy. And we would know things about video games.

We would possess in our core the knowledge absorbed by holding a controller for many minutes of our life.

We would be able to tell anyone what is (obviously) good about being able to have brick walls break in a first-person shooter. We could tell everyone what was (not so obviously) wrong with Mirror's Edge.

We would know these things, because we play video games.

But would knowing things about games make us a better gaming CEO?

That's the John Riccitiello question, the question of what happens when a guy who "gets" games, a guy who can hold his own talking about them, is in charge of one of the biggest gaming companies in the world. It's not that John Riccitiello is some gamer who got lucky. He's a former executive from Pepsi and Sara Lee on his second tour at Electronic Arts. That would be EA, the company that before Riccitiello's return was considered an evil empire, an assembly line for games that could be simultaneously shiny and dull, the company that overworked its employees and never even made the second-best game of the year. That company, gamer John Riccitiello believes, is capable of making the best games in the world.

What The Boss Plays

This is the funny thing: The boss of one of the biggest video game companies on Earth plays video games. The driver of the Electronic Arts behemoth that bellows a new Madden, a Need For Speed and dozens of other games into the gaming market each year is a gamer. Maybe you would find it funny that it is funny. I have interviewed top gaming executives at Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft and Sega during my nine years covering games — many of them smart, insightful men and women — and I can confidently say that few betrayed more symptoms of having played lots of good video games and having thought deeply about them than EA's John Riccitiello.

When we spoke earlier this month, Riccitiello told me that being a gamer wasn't the only thing that matters when proving one's qualifications as a gaming CEO. A boss in his field could maybe even do without it. But, he added, "Could you imagine, say running a book publisher if you didn't read? Or running a movie studio if you don't watch TV or go to the movies?" These are not the words that come from the mouth of Riccitiello's successful chief competitor, Activision boss Bobby Kotick, who had to explain to Kotaku in June that he didn't mean it when he told a crowd of game creators in February that he doesn't play video games.

"I don't consider myself a hardcore gamer," Riccitiello told me during the same interview, threatening to shatter the thesis I had formed from the several lengthy of conversations we have had over the past few years, all conducted during his second and current stint at EA where he serves as CEO. "But I play a lot of products."

Riccitiello used to talk about playing BioShock — about having finished it, but maybe he was just studying it on the eve of trying to buy the company that made it. He has finished Portal, if watching the ending on YouTube counts as finishing the game (It doesn't; but cheating is a gamer tradition). He is a self-professed lapsed Madden player, which means he used to, at least, be there.

Here's some proof of the concentration of video games in his veins. It's the thing he said to me last December when — without warning — I asked him whether EA would make a sequel to the experimental and admired, though critically and commercially shaky, first-person action game Mirror's Edge:

"I think Mirror's Edge was a fascinatingly original world. Fascinatingly original art direction. Music and sound design was great. I think the gameplay mechanic was a blast, but was intermittent and the levels didn't work. You found yourself scratching at walls at times, looking for what to do. Sometimes you had a roll going, downhill, slide, jump, slide, jump and then you just got stopped. It sort of got in the way of the fun…It was like we couldn't quite decide if we were building Portal or a runner."

That sounded to me like someone who is comfortable playing games or at least capable of understanding the gaming experiences of others.

The Impact Of A Player

Riccitiello plays enough to talk the talk and to make a convincing display that he is one of us, a person who just might know where the X button is without looking. That puts a different spin on the truth that, as a gaming CEO, he is determined to please his stockholders by getting the gamers of the world to part with more money.

Gamers can hope that this gaming CEO understands what it's like to play. They can hope he remembers how it feels wielding a controller in a moment when nothing else seems to matter. He seems to. And that appears to infuse him with a restless dissatisfaction with today's video games understood by only the most passionate of gamers — the ones who are hooked but want better-tasting bait.

"When I played games a decade ago or 15 years ago, I was a lot more forgiving," he told me during our interview this month. "Part of it was, if you could sort of simulate [something] in software, almost anything, it was the first time you saw it. If you could just pull off the technology and engineering, you didn't necessarily need the same artful insight, and you certainly didn't need the polish. A lot of it, if you remember games going back to like GoldenEye on the N64, is that we remember them as a lot better than they are."

He sees in his customers, the gamers, some of the same gaming habits he sees in himself. We treat games differently these days, he says: "I think consumers are consuming them differently and I am too. I'm probably playing fewer titles, but spending more time with them — they have to earn my respect to get that time."

Was it something other than his gamer instincts that instilled this idea in Riccitiello? It could be sales trends that inspired Riccitiello to re-engineer the EA factory in the last year or so to make fewer, better games. They've halved the output and will only (!) release 36 games this year that were made in-house. With that they've also shut down studios and laid off many developers, it should be noted, some of the cuts are ascribed to rising cost of doing business in certain regions.

Why make fewer but better games? It could be that it seems less important to make your 37th game of the year after the beating Activision's Modern Warfare 2 and Nintendo's New Super Mario Bros. Wii gave most other games last November.

But there's something else to this EA effort for fewer, better games, something articulated by Riccitiello the gamer when he talks about what he wants in a new video game: "I myself realize that ... I have a much higher standard. [A game] needs to be both exceptionally well executed and very artful. If graphics are relevant to the game in a meaningful way, it's gotta be somewhere near the leading edge of what people are able to display on that particular system ... or it feels to me that I'm just accepting something put together too lazily." The old quality standards don't cut it, he says. Surely, gamers nod with him.

The reader of a Riccitiello profile may cry out that every aspect of the EA CEO's quoted gaming habits just so happens to be the expression of an appetite EA's business plan is designed to feed. Skepticism aside, try out his praise for the smaller, portable games EA makes — specifically, Boggle on the iPad during a flight from Vancouver to California — and see if it doesn't resonate with your gaming life or that of someone you know: "I've got room in my life for five-minute games too, when they're well executed. Most of the time I don't like the cheesy easy stuff but if it's well executed it's fine and I'm having a blast with it."

Maybe he does know what a gamer wants.

The Player's Money

John Riccitiello sometimes buys his games in real stores, the way you or I would. That does not keep him in touch with Joe Gamer. "To be fair, I probably have more economic resources than most gamers," he says. "So even if I were buying them at retail — and I do — I don't know that that would accomplish anything."

Money is the breaking point. Money is the matter about which the CEO gamer's experience might most differ from the regular gamer's experience. A $60 credit card charge hasn't stung the CEO in a long time. Should we the gamer be in charge, we would like to think we would remember. And we would be loathe to raise the price of a game higher. Yes? We would remember how it felt to be the little guy, wouldn't we?

As CEO and gamer, Riccitiello is at the forefront of finding new ways for gamers to pay more. He has not advocated higher game prices. But he has pushed for gamers to spend more on the games they buy. He stresses value. Why encourage the player not to pirate? Because, if they pay, they'll get more, he says. Why encourage the player to buy a game new instead of used? Because they'll get more for buying new.

It's all about a transformation Riccitiello has mentioned in most of the interviews I have done with him in the past three years, the transition from selling games (in CEO-speak, he says "packaged goods") to selling services.

Riccitiello, a lover of metaphors, hasn't found one that quite works to explain this transition yet. This month he tried on me the notion that "We don't sell toasters anymore we sell toast." Not quite. True, EA doesn't want to sell you just one thing that you don't replace for a long time, you know, like a toaster. They would rather keep providing you with new slices of content after you buy a loaf. But, well, no, this metaphor crumbles to a crisp.

(More successful is Riccitiello's go-to metaphor about the console wars — "They make the war. We make the bullets. We'll sell to any of them.")

Forget toast metaphors. What feels more correct is Riccitiello's expression of how gamers play in 2010 and how EA is changing its workflow to accommodate them. "I used to buy a whole bunch of titles and play them for three weeks and move on and never look at them again," he said, before switching from what he does to what you or I might do — "Today, firstly everyone goes online" — and then settling on what his developers do — "five years ago, the standard at every game company was when the game goes gold [and is sent to manufacturing], the 60 people on the title or 160 people, depending on the title, all of them [would be done working on that game] except maybe one or two guys who were gonna take a phone call, when you find out there's a video card from some Taiwanese hardware manufacturer you didn't have ideal compatibility with. ... For the most part today, for most games, the entire team remains intact post-ship[ping of the game] for a combination of free and paid [downloadable content], services, server management, code patches, figuring out exactly where people are dying and bunching up in the map, fixing that and improving the experience."

All of that post-release work the developer do after they are "done" with the game provides gamers the new slices of that toast Riccitiello was talking about. That is the new product EA is selling, the thing that would keep a gamer satisfied longer with a game and for which, Riccitiello hopes, they'd be willing in some way to pay. This initiative used to be called Project $10 and some gamers have complained its a rip-off for things the basic price of a game should give them. Riccitiello, proud already of the breadth of post-release content offered for free and for charge across games such as Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age, believes he is selling more value.

What Riccitiello seems to want to do with gamers' money is give them more for it, as sound a pitch as ever there was one. Skepticism again put aside, let's engage in some CEO-dreamed specifics of what a big game company like EA could get you to pay for. "I won't be surprised," he said, "if five years from now we're going to say to somebody, 'Hey look you're a Madden user' — at that point you might have a PS3 and a Wii and a PC and an iPhone and an iPad and a Facebook, and, you know, maybe two other game services, and we say 'Hey, give us this X amount of money, and we'll give you [Madden on] all of these things for a year...

"Right now I make [a] FIFA [game] on Facebook. I've got FIFA on iPad, FIFA on iPhone, three consoles, PC, I've got an online games service, and I don't think many people are going to buy every instance of that game. First off, it just adds up to a boatload of money. But I bet you've got most of that hardware, right? So why wouldn't I license you at some advantageous price all of what I'm making?

"The point I'm making isn't that we're going to do that tomorrow, that's not the point I'm making. The point I'm making is the fact that the business model needs to evolve and recognize a little bit that there's a big service component." That's one possible Riccitiello future to a present that just had his EA introduce Online Pass, a service paid for either with the purchase of a new game or as an extra charge with the purchase of a used game. The Online Pass system is designed to transition gamers into a service relationship with the EA sports games they buy and to finance that service. Adds Riccitiello, "The model is going to keep evolving in ways that I'm hopeful most gamers are going to find it positive. "

Not a radical enough future? How about this possible use of a gamer's money: "Think about the fact that at our company, I spend a billion dollars a year creating content and most consumers get the benefit of 1/20th of that. Now over time I've got a lot more to offer you than you're getting and I'd like you to get more of it. I've got an opportunity to give you more value for money. As we wind our way through all the changes that are being made in our marketplace I don't know whether we're going to get to a Rhapsody model where it's all-you-can-eat for 10 bucks a month. I don't know that I know the answer to that." Clearly, that would be a good deal on toast.

The EA CEO doesn't see himself only making subscription-based games in the future. He isn't turning his company into a factory of World of Warcraft-wannabes, each and every game something you pay for each and every month. That, any gamer knows, would be ridiculous. But we would pay differently because we now play differently, because, in part, he knows we do since he plays differently too.

The Coke Commercial Revolution

There are times when Riccitiello has snapped at me during interviews, such as when I asked him a couple of years ago about the seemingly low sales of an EA Steven Spielberg game for the Wii called Boom Blox. Referring to my previous employer for whom I was interviewing the EA boss, he said "last time I checked MTV wasn't a financial network."

There are times when he's been aggravated by a fusillade of skeptical questions regarding whether his comments about quality games fueling EA to success would be proven true or discredited as wishful thinking. (He would point at the strong acclaim and sales of Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 as realization of his vision.)

There was only one time, however, when Riccitiello heard me out and then said I had just asked "the best question I've had from a journalist in the better part of three years." Let's assume it was not the phrasing that won this praise but the topic, one about the repercussions of the divides among gamers who hate or are threatened by what other gamers play. The Xbox fans have anxiety about the Wii players, who, the worst snobs say, aren't playing real games. The Wii players sigh at the Facebook FarmVille players who, well... are they even playing a video game? What effect does this have?

To answer, Riccitiello recalled his first stint at EA and the purchase of a casual games company called Pogo that made simple puzzle and mystery games designed to be played on computers by moms and kids. "I was involved in the team that bought Pogo in 2001," he said. "For about five years, I swear to God, if they had had leprosy I don't think they could have been a more disdained organization [within EA] because they made cheesy little toy crap from the perspective of people that worked out of Madden or another games title. That prejudice existed up until I'd say a few years ago."

Riccitiello didn't see the snobbery about Pogo hurting gamers but he saw it damaging game development. It made developers look down on each other.

Today at EA, those groups are mixing. Some teams from the recently-EA-purchased Playfish, which makes games for Facebook, and teams that have made big-budget EA games are being forced to make some games together. "You take a team of people that's used to making the equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster," Riccitiello says, "and now they're told to report to the guy that makes videos for YouTube. That's the way they think about it and it seems like a step backwards. And what I'm watching here is really fascinating. One thing is that the guy that's making videos from YouTube is saying, 'Hey I can get way better production values if I do this,' because they keep hearing that from the guys who are building it which is how you get a product like [EA Playfish's Facebook game] FIFA Superstars to look so cool. It does look pretty cool. The second thing you get is that the people who are building these [big] products live through one and two year dev cycles and the primary orientation in life is you sort of master it and it's done... Look at a [Playfish] team that publishes and republishes content every single week. And they use the telemetry to tweak and adjust and improve and they think that what they're doing is a service... What Playfish does is every title, every Tuesday gets republished based on the telemetry data from two weeks ago, a week to fix it, a week to publish it, and you do it again."

The cultures clash. And the cultures learn from each other. The big-budget game developers discover the power of updating a game constantly. The Facebook developers discover the power of making better-looking games.

To cap his answer, Riccitiello tried a new metaphor. "What's happening inside of EA for the first time ever feels like the 'I want to teach the world to sing' Coke commercials where people that build mobile games and people that do telemetry and people that are game designers on core games and people that are building MMOs finally — and for the first time — feel like peers. I think maybe we're a little ahead of the game industry consumer relative to that."

Would we as gamers-turned-CEOs be able to get over our snobbery? Would we pair the Wii guy with the PS3 lady? The Facebook expert with the cut-scene crafter? Would we try to teach the gaming world — or at least the game-making world — to sing in perfect harmony?

I don't know.

But I do know that we the gamers and John Riccitiello, the CEO who plays a game or two, would at least probably both say we had the same general goals for our video game behemoth. I think you'd say the kind of thing that any gaming CEO would probably say, of course, because when they offer their grand vision they say appealing things. But if you were a gamer, maybe it would mean a little something extra.

Out of Riccitiello's mouth, the goals sound like this: "I'm a gamer. I'm deeply engaged in the process of making sure we make the world's best games. That's that thing that's most important to me: Making the world's best games and services, stuff I want to be proud of, stuff I want to believe 10 years from now people will still be thinking about, stuff that changes the way the industry perceives what a game can be, new intellectual property, sequels that matter, that aren't just simply the next notch in an annual series of iterations. You don't get it right every single time, but basically we're trying to do great things."

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Part two in a series of one-on-one interviews with the most powerful people in gaming.