I thought I’d start off 2007 with something fun. That said, check out my recent interview with Trip Hawkins, the Chairman and CEO of Digital Chocolate. Prior to founding Digital Chocolate, Trip also just happened to found Electronic Arts and 3DO. Interest piqued? Let’s get on to the Q&A.  :-)

You’re best-known for your central role in the founding of Electronic Arts. Would you mind sharing a few little-known stories about the birth of EA? How did decisions made in the early days set the stage for what EA would become?

I came up with the idea for EA when I was a teenager and saw my first computer in 1971. I had already started designing simulation games but they were complicated to play. The instant I saw that computer I realized I could put the complicated stuff inside the computer and create “real life in a box.” I then laid the groundwork by studying computer science and other relevant topics in college. It was during a summer computer programming job in 1975 that I thought it out and decided to start my computer game company in 1982. I really did plan it that far in advance. Again, I continued from 1975 to shape my experience to support EA’s eventual birth, including getting an MBA to learn more about business and going to work for Apple to help build the market for computers in the home so that I could then sell games to play on them.

When 1982 rolled around, I went to see Don Valentine in February, and he encouraged me to leave Apple and offered me space in his office to incubate EA. I left Apple in April and incorporated what became Electronic Arts on May 28, 1982. I funded the company myself for more than six months. In August, I began hiring employees, starting with Rich Melmon and a few of my co-workers from Apple, Dave Evans and Pat Marriott. By that time I had been developing the core ideas for the business for a decade and had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to do. I personally went out and found and signed the first several artists, including Bill Budge.

By 1980, I knew I was going to be starting the company but I felt like I needed “the big idea.” From working with ingenious but egotistical software titans at Apple, I realized that the big idea was to be the first guy to bring Hollywood principals of artist management and promotion to the software industry. So the big idea was to treat software as an art form and to promote developers as artists. Also by 1980 I had participated in a difficult transition for Apple in going from two-step distribution to direct retail relationships. I realized that great Hollywood companies all had strong direct distribution, and after what Apple had gone through, I decided to do it that way from the beginning, even though it had never been done before with computer software. The last key strategic piece was the concept of an “artists workstation.” This began with my idea that I could attract the best developers if we had the equivalent of a Hollywood recording studio. You have to realize that developers in those days had to use consumer products for development. There were no serious tools for game development. We also had numerous platforms and I wanted a technology strategy that would enable us to help developers leverage their work more automatically across multiple platforms. Tim Mott was a key early hire because I needed a strong technologist to put the artist workstation together, and Tim had great experience from Xerox. Finally, after enjoying the ride at Apple I appreciated what a difference it makes when you do things in a first-class way. For that reason, I recruited the smartest venture capitalists in the world, raised plenty of money, got the best outside agencies and advisors, and found strong independent board members.

I ran the business with a pretty iron fist for several years, but rather than just giving orders I would have a lot of discussions with my management team, and we had a lot of famous arguments. But I always made the final decisions and a lot of them were stressful and controversial at the time. Yet that was the crucible in which a great company was built, and you can see in the history of the company how critical these early strategies turned out to be.

It’s been a few years since you first declared your intention to found a mobile game company that would emphasize community and make users feel connected to something “alive.” How’s the plan worked out, thus far?

We really blossomed in 2006, proving the viability of our strategy. When I founded Digital Chocolate, I didn’t think it had to ever be # 1, but we have risen fast through the ranks of more than 500 contenders and are now legitimate leaders in many respects. A big turning point came when the mobile carriers decided to give our product strategy a chance. They had been focused more on games based on licenses of known brands, whereas our goal has been to deliver original games that prove that the mobile phone is a first-rate platform, not just a second-rate game console or TV. Now they realize the benefit in giving featured placement to innovative games like Tower Bloxx, Nightclub Empire, and Rollercoaster Rush. These games create buzz that expands the market, and generate repeat purchase patterns.

Digital Chocolate is somewhat of an outlier in the mobile game industry: a company dedicated to (and lauded for) its creativity, in a market dominated by retro game clones. What do you think needs to happen before innovative new games finally take the lead? When do you think that will finally occur?

If you look at Japan and Korea, you can see where the world will go. Several years ago the leading mobile games in Japan were retro titles like Pacman, but since then the market has moved on to more innovative and original mobile applications, and the platform is better established as a social computer. As one example, there is now more email sent in Japan by mobile phones than by PCs. This market transition is underway in the West. What is also exciting for us is that when we show our games in Japan, people tell us they have nothing like them there. We’re ahead of the curve.

Is the wild success of the Nintendo DS (and failure of all hybrid phone-game devices) an indication that perhaps gaming is best suited for dedicated gaming devices?

There are important differences between a good phone and a good game console, even a handheld one. The phone needs to fit in your pocket, be comfortable to hold up to your ear, and cost less than $100. What it can do as a computer on the world’s largest network is today perceived as a bonus, but again the consumer’s bias is on social value, not entertainment fidelity. Since there are more than 2 billion of these devices, we can make a living, and it is a mass market consumer. When you turn to game consoles, the customer wants a high fidelity way to kill time playing a game, often alone. This calls for a larger, heavier, and more costly device that pretty quickly does not make a very good phone. And the program sizes are so huge that it is not practical to transmit them over the cell network. Nintendo did a great job with the DS, using Nintendogs to define it as a first-rate platform. Nintendo grasps many of the requirements of mobile lifestyle without it having anything to do with phones. But these are pretty separate markets today. Some of our products, like AvaPeeps, Tornado Mania, and Brain Juice, approach the tempo and rhythm of mobile life in the same way that Nintendo does with the DS. You get a “taste” of what I mean from our company name and our slogan, “Seize the Minute.”

Do you believe that the technological constraints of phones (i.e. processing power, small displays, etc) foster creativity as much as hamper it?

It’s a craftsmen’s trade. The best mobile developers are passionate and ingenious at working around the constraints and having vision about new user behaviors. Some console developers are so accustomed to the high-powered environment that they cannot adapt to mobile; they need that larger canvas. To each his own.

Why do you think American mobile game developers have failed to make major inroads into many foreign markets? What will it take to change that?

The markets of Japan, Korea, and China are relatively closed. You can only really do business if you are located there, and you also have to be pretty intimate with the cultures. Most mobile companies are not large enough to operate like a Microsoft. As a result, the biggest companies in these Asian markets do not do much in the West, or vice-versa. However, when you look at the rest of the world, there are many countries where you can do business virtually. We have only two main offices but we do business directly in more than 70 countries and in fact a minority of our revenue is in the US.

You’re about to launch a new mobile social networking / avatar system called “AvaPeeps” that will automatically integrate with MySpace, Facebook, etc. What are your goals for this service? How do you hope to make it shine through the ever-increasing clutter of social networking tools and services available to consumers?

For a few years now I’ve been calling mobile phones, “the social computer.” We want to innovate new kinds of mobile social applications and AvaPeeps is a good example. You create an avatar and then send it out on dates with other avatars, and get stories about it’s life. And you can chat with the owners of the other avatars and build up relationships both virtual and real. It’s a blend between an “adult Tamagochi” and a chat/flirting service. We’re breaking new ground in many ways.

Do you believe the mobile carriers will always have such tremendous control over what game content is available to consumers? What factors might change that, and how can mobile developers take advantage of those factors?

The mobile carriers create tremendous value by getting the public to adopt new mobile services and handsets. Distribution models for mobile content will continue to proliferate, especially with growth in WiFi, premium SMS, and HTML browsers. Going forward, the carriers’ biggest contribution is the fact that they now have an automated billing relationship with their customers.

Are you ever tempted to return to AAA console game development and/or publishing?

No. I have great respect and admiration for the purveyors of new inventions ranging from the Wii to Grand Theft Auto, but it is a difficult road to hoe. The 3D arms race has been so punishing that most companies lose money trying to keep up. For this reason, publishers are afraid to experiment and innovate because it is so expensive to do so. I think this means the golden age for console is over. However, it is thriving on the Internet, as evidenced by entrepreneurial companies like NeoPets, Sportsline, and PopCap Games. These guys have been willing to think outside the box.

What is the single greatest surprise you have experienced in your time working on Digital Chocolate?

IGN.com just gave out 17 Game of the Year Awards, and we won 9 of them. I would not have imagined that to be possible. It is very gratifying.

What is the single greatest disappointment?

Mobile is like the Internet was at the 9600 baud dialup stage. In theory it’s all there, but it is a rare day when you can get everything to work the way you would like. But the infrastructure is good enough now and it is steadily improving, and we know what great things we have to look forward to.

Michael Gluck is a Senior Sales Analyst for EA’s sales team. In his spare time, Michael composes and performs video game music in concert; his shows often attract thousands of people at a time. Given his dual business and creative activities, as well as his remarkable immersion in gamer fan culture, I felt that Michael’s take on music’s place in the video game industry would be interesting…

Please say a little about your concert playing.

I am a pianist specializing in the performance of music from video games. Under the stage name “Piano Squall”, I gave my first concert in 2003 and currently perform about fifteen shows each year.

My only goal as a performer is to share my love of game music with as many people as possible, while raising as much money for charity as possible. I donate everything I make from concerts to The National Multiple Sclerosis Society, which is fighting the disease to which my grandmother succumbed. I also provide Benefit Concerts that support a diversity of charitable causes, such as cancer research, literacy programs, and food drives.

What defines “good” video game music, if such a question can even be asked?

Game music draws upon a variety of musical influences — both modern and classical — and infuses them with a new purpose. The goal is to convey the emotion of a scene, and whether we find ourselves fighting an epic battle, racing a cart, or witnessing the death of our favorite character, the music pulls ours heart into the game and allows us to fully partake in the drama.

When we hear video game music by itself, it carries all of the emotions associated with the original gameplay experience. Good music reminds us of the plot, the characters, the art… it all comes back to us. That’s the true power of video game music — what makes it so different and so special.

To what extent are video game consumers beginning to value game music in and of itself, and how so?

People are coming out in substantial numbers to attend live performances of video game music. Over the last few years, we’ve seen the rise of numerous concert series devoted exclusively to game music — organizations such as Dear Friends, Play!, and Video Games Live have expanded into traditionally classical concert halls, where game music is performed by world renowned orchestras. It’s very exciting to see how this movement has connected fans across continents and brought international attention to this new genre.

How likely is concert attendance to ever break out of the ultra-hardcore consumer segment — or is that irrelevant?

Most of the people who attend my concerts are hardcore gamers between the ages of 16-21. They have all the soundtracks, and they are coming to hear a live performance of music they already know and love.

However, game music is a fusion of many different musical styles, so it can certainly appeal to a diverse audience. There is always a segment of the audience that does not play games, and I meet them at every show. These are music-loving people who read about a piano show in the local paper and just come to check it out. Or sometimes they are parents accompanying their hardcore gamer kids.

The interesting thing is that non-gaming audience members tend to be just as enthusiastic about the show as the gamers are. The only difference? They often tell me how surprised they are to discover that music from a video game can be so beautiful.

Where do you perform in concert, and what was your largest crowd ever?

My concerts have taken me to eighteen different states, and I have had the privilege of performing for audiences as large as three thousand people. Concerts take place at gaming and anime conventions, college campuses, or anywhere fans of gaming live.

How important is music to the success of a video game?

The payoff for developers who invest in high-quality music is tremendous. Perhaps the best example is the music of Square-Enix’s Final Fantasy series, composed by Nobuo Uematsu. For many years, Square-Enix has successfully monetized Final Fantasy music through the sale of soundtracks and sheet music, which are easily accessible both online and in retail stores throughout Asia. In fact, the demand for Master Uematsu’s music reached such a substantial level that it gave rise to a national concert series devoted exclusively to the performance of Final Fantasy music.

I was barley able to get a ticket to the first Final Fantasy Dear Friends concert in Los Angeles because all 2,400 tickets sold out in the first three days. Although I quickly secured my ticket for the second performance in Chicago, I recall waiting a full hour in a half-mile line that snaked around the side of the Rosemont Theatre just to get in the door.

It’s easy to see the payoff for Square-Enix’s investment in game music through sales of soundtracks, sheet music, and concert tickets, but perhaps the best evidence of payoff is the multitude of fan websites that exist solely to draw attention to the music. Online music-centric fan communities have turned into massive gathering places, which only serve to strengthen the loyalty that fans have towards a particular franchise and developer. I myself have been so inspired by Square-Enix music that I choose to spend my weekends performing it for no profit. When your own consumers love you so much that they become self-motivated evangelists, who needs ad spend?

Unfortunately, Michael was unable to publicly comment on more of my sales-related questions, so just imagine some really good dialogue in that vein… ;-)

If you’d like to learn more about Michael’s concerts, visit his homepage.

Todd Kerpelman is Creative Director for EA’s Pogo division, as well as one of Pogo’s most talented game designers. I’ve spent way too many hours playing his brainchild, Phlinx. Anyway, on to the interview:

In your experience, what are the most important elements of a fun *and* popular casual game?

Well, obviously, I think one the most important aspects to having a popular game _is_ that it’s fun. Honestly, if you’ve got a game that’s fun enough, a lot of the conventional wisdom around what players want and what kinds of games they like tend to go out the window.

But with that being said, I think accessibility is certainly one of the keys towards making a casual game successful. This is especially true in the downloadable space, where you only have an hour to get people to like your game, and there’s dozens of other games just waiting to be downloaded if the user gets frustrated with yours. In general, you want people to be able to pick up and play your game and feel like they’re doing something correct within the first minute. This doesn’t mean that games have to be simplistic, though. There’s a lot of really complex games out there, but the successful ones do a good job of easing the player into it.

The flip side to that, though, is being able to ensure that there’s still strategies that emerge over time. You want people to feel like there’s something to get better at in the long-term — if they’ve mastered the whole game in the first five minutes, there’s no reason for them to keep playing.

If you look at a game like Poppit, for instance, it’s clearly very easy to do something right within the first five seconds of the game — you click on a group of balloons, they pop, and you feel satisfied. Maybe you release some of the prizes, and even if you don’t win your first game, you feel like you’ve done something right. But it’s after playing the game several times that you start to realize some of the more complex strategies involved in winning the game, and there’s enough deeper strategy there for people to think that they haven’t mastered it all before their first hour of play is over.

Are there any elements that you think definitely make a game more “fun” (in your opinion), but don’t tend to make for popular games?

Well, I grew up on action games and first person shooters, so there’s plenty of stuff I think is fun (generally involving lots of crap blowing up) that isn’t particularly popular with our core audience. (Of course, if you’re talking the Xbox Live Arcade audience, that’s another story.)

If you want to focus more on casual games, I think it’s a common trap for game designers (myself included) to come up with some idea that’s innovative or clever, and we end up being so impressed by our cleverness, that we often overlook the fact that there’s a simpler (and probably more fun) solution out there. So maybe the issue isn’t that there’s “fun” stuff that doesn’t make for popular games, but there’s “clever” stuff that we often mistake for “fun”.

For example, back when I was prototyping Penguin Blocks (a game where you have to lay down blocks of ice to get your hero to pieces of seafood before evil penguins steal them), I had this feature where you could place down walls that would impede the Penguins’ progress. Our engineer and I both loved the feature, but nobody else did. Later, I realized that what I really liked was watching the Penguin correctly find a path around the walls. Playtesters, who didn’t care that I could remember enough from my college CompSci classes to implement basic pathfinding, found the feature confusing. In the end, I went with a much simpler power-up that “froze” a penguin for several turns, which ended up having the same effect, but was much simpler for everybody to use.

Do you believe that the *best* casual games generally become the most popular (distribution being held equal), or have marketing, brand recognition, graphics, etc become equally important, or more so?

In general, I do think good games naturally find an audience — one of the nice things about casual games is there’s very little barrier to entry. You don’t need to convince somebody to go to the store and plop 50 bucks on a game they may or may not have played. You just need to convince them that it’s worth the couple of minutes involved to download a 5 meg file.

These days, though, it is a little trickier. There are so many casual games in the market now, that it certainly helps to have something — a recognizable brand, a flashy screenshot, some prominent placement — just to get people to notice your game and try it out. But in the end, all the marketing in the world won’t help you if your game’s not good enough to convince players to buy it after their one-hour trial period.

And there’s still plenty of room for word-of-mouth to take a relatively unknown game and make it a hit. As far as I can remember, there wasn’t a huge marketing push, and certainly no license, around Mystery Case Files when it first game out (developed by Big Fish Studios, I believe). It was just a really well-done game. And so I’m glad to see that it became successful.

Many people claim that there will never be more than five or six successful types of casual game at any given time. I.e. the bejewelled variant, the snood variant, the tetris variant, etc. How do you feel about that?

Hmmmm… they’re probably correct, although I think it’s not really related to people getting overloaded on game variations. It’s simply due to the fact that there’s only so many games that people can talk about and share with their friends at any given time. And if you figure that out of that list of seven “hot” games, you’re bound to have one or two games of the same genre, I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if you only see five successful types of games at any given moment.

What is it about Pogo that keeps customers coming back for more? Why can’t it simply be copied by competitors?

I think Pogo’s popularity is probably a combination of two things…

One is all the “outside the game” enhancements — the community, token, and prize features that we add on to the experience. I think it helps to provide players with long-term rewards for staying on the site and also makes them feel like their time spent playing Pogo games has a greater purpose (whether that’s improving their standing within a community or just socializing with friends and family).

The second, really, is just attention to detail when it comes to the games. You have to remember; a lot of the people playing our games are there several hours a day — I’m sure they end up playing the games a lot more than I ever do. So things that seem like minor annoyances to us can be huge hassles to a hard-core player.

I’ll give you one example; we recently made a bunch of revisions to our Spades game that included some nice card animations. While most of our users really liked the new changes, the hardcore Spades players found that those fraction-of-a-second card animations were getting in the way of their game playing. We went back and added in a “Fast animation” option for those players, and they were satisfied. But it’s certainly a detail you’d overlook if you weren’t playing Spades several hours a day.

I don’t mean to suggest we’re the only people who are detail focused like this, by the way. I think if you look at the major game developers in the casual space, you’ll generally find that the ones that spend the most time balancing, playtesting, and tweaking their games before they release them to the general public tend to be the most successful.

As for why the Pogo model hasn’t been copied by other competitors… I’m not entirely sure; you’d probably have to ask them. I think partly, you’ve gotta sacrifice a lot of short term gains for the hopes that maybe, in the long term, things will pay off. Like I said, you’ve got to spend a good chunk of time polishing these games and making sure they’re fun over long periods of time. And when you’ve gone through all that work, it’s tough to then give it away for free in the hopes that maybe, if you’re able to repeat that process several more times, you’ll eventually build up critical mass and have a successful ad or subscription based community. If you compare that to simply focusing on the downloadable product and making a nice bundle of cash in the short-term, I can see why most companies haven’t tried to copy us.

What do you think is the future of the virtual economy within Pogo (and other, comparable sites?) Do you think it will evolve beyond the simple “play games, win prizes” system that currently exists?

Good question — I’m not really sure myself. There are sites out there like WorldWinner and King.com that have skill-based types of games where you compete for real money (i.e. I put in a buck, you put in a buck, and the winner gets $1.50), but I’m not sure that’s where Pogo wants to go. We don’t tend to have a lot of cutthroat competition around here, and the idea of having to defeat an opponent in order to get ahead doesn’t really appeal to much of our audience.

It certainly seems like, from a customer perspective, being able to play games for free and possibly win prizes is a pretty appealing model. I don’t know if there’s a lot we could do to improve upon that…

What does the typical Pogo game-making team look like today? I.e. X dedicated engineers, Y dedicated artists, Z producers, working for ABC amount of time. What do you think it will look like in four years?

It’s pretty small. For our online games, we have 1 engineer, 1 artist, 1 producer/designer, and a contract sound person. Generally, we’re in production for 4 to 6 months — more for multiplayer games, less for single-player games. The teams that make the downloadable games are a little larger just because those games tend to have higher production values.

I’m guessing that in four years, when most of our audience has migrated to broadband and 12 meg games are commonplace, we’re going to see slightly larger teams (probably an extra artist and engineer). Personally, though, I hope they don’t get too much larger than that — one of the enjoyable aspects of working casual games is the fact that you’re on a small team and have so much control over the entire product. I’d hate to lose that.

What has surprised you most about the current state of the casual game market?

I’m pretty surprised at the speed in which it’s gone from being the “crazy aunt of the gaming family that nobody talked about” to the, uhh… hot aunt. (Like Portia de Rossi in Arrested Development, I guess.) When I started at Pogo back in 2001, the site had huge numbers of subscribers, but getting anybody outside of our world to acknowledge that large numbers of people were playing these casual games was impossible. These days, it seems like a lot more people are talking about making or playing casual games. I don’t know why that is. I’m sure that having Microsoft and Nintendo hype casual games with their latest offerings certainly hasn’t hurt.

What has surprised you most about the process of making casual games, in general?

I think when I first started here, I was probably surprised at the amount of work that’s still involved in making these “simple” games. To outsiders, they probably look like they could be whipped up in a week. But once you see all the little details that go into these games — I think we had over 20 prototypes of the Bowling interface until we came up with a version we liked, for instance, and I remember making several prototypes of the “condensing everybody’s poker chips into the center pot” presentation for Hold’em, trying to find a version that was the most fun — you realize that even these simple games can be pretty complex.

Our audience can still surprise me me in terms of what games they like and what they don’t. There are some games out there that I thought were brilliant that never really found an audience (maybe because I’m still confusing “brilliant” with “fun” — see question #2). Similarly, there are games that I didn’t think were going to take off that became huge hits. I remember we all tried playing a few Sudoku puzzles when they were first coming to America, and our initial reaction was, “Jeez — this seems kinda dull and nerdy. I can’t imagine this catching on.”

Needless to say, we got that one wrong.

Bing Gordon is the Chief Creative Officer of Electronic Arts, as well as a member of the faculty for USC’s Interactive Media Division. He’s also one of the smartest guys around (not to mention famously outspoken), which is why I wanted to email-interview him for my blog. Here’s what came of it:

Controversy over the rising number of game design programs in the US has heated up. Some people claim that academics can’t (or won’t) teach useful skills to aspiring designers. Some claim that, beyond technical training, only commercial project experience is truly useful. How do you feel about this, and what do you think academic institutions should be focusing on?

From first-hand experience, I can say that the best university programs are graduating the best entry-level game-makers. Period. The advantage students have is that they can work on many smaller projects, with teachers as advisers, and they can polish their team and cross-functional skills.

I recommend to game-making students that before they graduate they should: complete 4 team-based interactive projects; complete 4-6 fast prototypes, in many different media, including paper, cards and dice, and lo-res animation; complete basic feature design projects for key game categories that have user tools, such as designing a “smart object” for an object-oriented “living” environment (e.g.the Sims), level design mods (e.g. Unreal Tournament), and mission design mods (e.g. Neverwinter Nights); learn software “architecture” and data structures, if not c++ and java and html; learn basic maya skills; and play as many of the “Best Games of All Time” as possible, just as film students are literate in the most important movies.

The best grads will have “published” at least one project to public acclaim, such as 10,000+ downloads or competition winner; and they will have invented an improvement to at least one “best game of all time.”

If an aspiring game designer (or producer) could take just one class in college, what class would you recommend? Why?

“Building Virtual Worlds” class at Carnegie Mellon’s ETC program. Students complete 5 games in 3 months, working in cross-functional teams. My second favorite class is “Building Sims Objects” at USC’s School of Cinema, TV and Interactive Entertainment.

You received an MBA from Stanford. How has that been most useful to you in your career? Where within the game industry do you think MBAs are most needed, if anywhere?

I have found that MBA training is great for enhancing students’ “business imagination.” You just see so many business histories and models in 2 hectic years.

Business schools tend to be best at teaching finance and accounting, however, because the basics can be covered in a textbook. But this material that is easiest to cover in curriculum is also easiest to self-learn. Once you find out that the trick to business is making “marginal revenue equal marginal cost”, the rest of financial planning is conceptually easy.

But for me, the most important aspect of attending business school was getting access to projects and internships at real companies, rather than exposure to interesting professors. I would probably have founded an ad agency, rather than joining “Amazin’ Software”, if it weren’t for doing a research project for the Fairchild “Channel F”, the world’s first cartridge video game system.

At EA, an MBA is very useful for people working in finance and business development. We must have 2-3 entry-level job openings per year for MBA-type skills in these areas. But there are many more openings per year for MBA’s who also can lead product development teams through sound business judgment, organizational development and leadership skills, and game-making creativity. We have 200-400 entry-level job openings per year for people like this. In other words, MBA’s who want to be in the game business should try to be Producers, not business specialists.

Despite the maturation of the game industry, many games (across developers and publishers) are still completed over-budget and behind-schedule. Is that an inevitable aspect of the creative process? If not, what can be done to change things?

The trick to finishing any creative project on schedule is to ship whatever is done by a given date. This is what advertising agencies usually do with the commercials they create. Of course, no one remembers that it was on time after it fails miserably.

Once you set minimum creativity standards on your work, predictability flies out the window. The trick here is to make progress through small, user-testable iterations, the way Neil Simon describes in his autobiography, “Rewrites”, and the way David Kelley’s Ideo process is described in “The Art of Innovation.”

The game business has an added wrinkle, that we deliver our creativity in the form of software, which is notoriously hard to schedule.

How do you feel about outsourcing labor to markets such as India, Eastern Europe, and China?

I think innovations happen from small, cross-functional teams of programmers, designers and artists. This kind of team seems impossible to outsource.

Content, some code modules and testing, because they are not cross-functional, and can be scoped in detail, are out-sourceable. For this type of work, cost versus predictable quality and schedule are the primary concern. In some cases, EA is outsourcing, and in some cases we are “in-sourcing” to EA employees in other locations.

Do you think that game developers and publishers should be putting more energy into meeting the needs of consumers in India and China? Or are these markets already being tackled with sufficient dedication?

I hate the word “should.” I have always rebelled against “should.”

Obviously, the capital markets are valuing the current and future potential of consumer markets in India and China. Publishers that cannot meet their long-term goals without success in all markets “should” try to succeed in all markets. It’s not clear whether there are any publishers who must succeed in all markets, however. EA, for example, has chosen not to enter several meaningful videogame markets, such as the gambling games business, and Microsoft has chosen not to enter the Playstation games business.

In many organizations, marketing and development still treat each other as “necessary evils.” What can be done to improve these relationships?

The best solution is to have a cross-functional company leader. David Ogilvy was a researcher before becoming a copywriter and founding Ogilvy & Mather ad agency. The next best approach is to have leadership with great empathy for the other function. In the games business, that means that marketing leaders should be awesome game-players, and game-makers should be awesome tv-commercial makers.

What are your thoughts on the MMOG market? Do you agree with Brian Farrell’s recent assertion that there’s only room for one big MMOG at any given time? (I.e. World of Warcraft as of now.) **Note to reader: interview took place prior to the announcement of the Mythic acquisition.

Nope. I think that “virtual worlding” will soon be a rite of passage for all teenagers with access to the internet.

What’s the biggest risk EA ever took? And now that EA is a huge, public entity, can you take those kinds of risks anymore? Would you even want to?

EA’s biggest risk was preparing to launch a lineup of games for the Sega Genesis without a license. We reverse-engineered the electronics in a “clean room” environment, because Sega wouldn’t give us licensee terms that we could live with. If this had not worked, and the games hadn’t sold, (Sega agreed to license terms the evening before our public introduction of games), EA would probably have gone the way of early computer game leaders like Broderbund and Sierra. It was truly a “bet the company” decision.

I don’t think that company size or shareholder status affects the kind of risks that a company can “take.” Look at Apple with iPod, for example.

What is the biggest business challenge facing game developers and publishers today? How can they address it?

Sheez, good question.

I think our industry’s greatest challenge is to transition from technology-based to creativity-based experiences. In other words, we should all become like Miyamoto! Easier said than done.

Our industry’s biggest business challenge is to figure out how to convince consumers to pay “fair value” for the increased quality we are delivering. We need to monetize our “excess hours” of satisfied play. Our best games are unbelievably cheap on a per hour basis, compared to, say $1.00 per hour for paperback books, and $5-10 an hour for movies and DVD’s.

Phil Gee, University Relations Manager for EA, was good enough to answer a few of my questions about the EA internship program — by far the largest (and probably oldest) program in the industry, excepting perhaps the console manufacturers. On to the interview:

How long has EA’s college internship program been active?

If my memory serves, almost 10 years to this day.

When the program first started, how many interns did you accept (and in roughly what proportion: engineers, artists, production, business, etc?) How many interns do you accept now?

I’ve only been here for 3.5 years, but from conversations with early alumni of the internship program, I can tell you it was rather small. We had roughly 20-30 interns during the summer, working predominantly at EA Redwood Shores. A little over half (let’s say 60%) worked in game development (art, engineering, production) and the other half were on the corporate side (marketing, finance, IT). Today, our program is a global one; we host approximately 274 interns (fiscal year 2006) with close to 70% of them being in game development.

What were some of the problems that you had to overcome in the beginning?

There were a number of hurdles to overcome in the beginning:

Lack of defined strategy: Our internship program was very ad hoc. Intern requests were submitted without any forethought into what areas of EA would have the greatest need for future hires/talent. There was no formal approval process to ensure that each internship was a “value add” for EA as well as the candidate.

Lack of structure: For quite some time, the university relations program was run by only one person (yours truly). It was extremely difficult to juggle and prioritize all the facets of a well run college program. There was no real commitment from our executive team in regards to college recruiting (developing hiring formulas, dedicated college reqs, committing to a college headcount plan, etc.)

Sink or Swim Culture: Hiring managers were not trained in how to integrate a new intern. Development plans were not created, 360 degree evaluations were not given, mentors were not assigned, etc. The intern was expected to come in and contribute immediately. A very tall order for even the most talented of students, and certainly not the best experience with a top-ranked game development company.

No global buy-in: There were only a handful of studios open to hiring interns when I first came on board. The other locations were reluctant to host any interns for the summer as they were “unproven talent” and the risk of bringing them on board was “too high.”

What were some of your early success stories?

Our intern-to-full-time conversion rate increased more than 38% in FY’03 vs. FY’02. It was a great win — our managers were beginning to realize the capabilities of college interns, and how effective they could be with a little bit of direction and guidance.

EA Academy was ranked one of the Top 10 internships by Random House. We never applied for this honor; they selected us from thousands of companies based solely on notoriety, student questionnaires, and interviews.

We also tripled the amount of interns in FY’03 vs. FY’02, and secured additional university relations resources at EA Maxis and EA UK to help continue the accelerated growth of the program.

How has the program had to change as it has grown in size? Has the growth made it difficult to manage, and how have you dealt with that?

Our program has certainly changed with growth. In my opinion, most if not all of changes have been positive. We now have a formal process and strategy in place, with hiring and conversion targets. Our ability to track, measure and report on our results has given us the ability to quantify the benefits of having an internship program. Last but not least, we have implemented an intern manager training program to educate and promote that fact that all of our interns are hired with an emphasis on education first rather than merely employment.

There are challenges to keeping our program fairly universal across all locations. We want to ensure that each and every intern has the same high-quality experience regardless of the team they work for and location. When you globalize the internship program, this becomes even more difficult.

What would you say is the single most important thing to running a successful internship program?

Without a doubt, the most important thing is that you develop the program around the common goal of ensuring that it benefits the intern more than the employer. It is vital to the success of the program that interns are assigned challenging work that will allow them to continue to learn, develop, and hone their skills. Ensuring that our interns are allowed the opportunity to get hands on experience with the latest tools or development methods allows them to prepare for careers in the interactive entertainment industry. Our internship program is our core pipeline for future hires. We hope that if given a great experience over the summer, they will want to return to work with EA in a full time capacity post graduation.

EA is presumably flooded by intern candidates. What do you do to weed through them as efficiently as possible?

We always consult the almighty Magic 8 Ball! Just kidding….

We have a number of tools that we use to screen candidates. First and foremost is our applicant tracking system. When students apply through our online jobs page, their resumes are filtered by the system based upon skills sets and defined parameters we set for the particular position. From there, The UR team acts as a secondary filter to further refine our candidate pool. We present only the best candidates to our hiring managers to review. It is a lot of work on our end but well worth it based on the results we have seen so far.

What do you do to make sure that interns get as much out of their experience as you get out of them?

There are a number of things we do to ensure that our interns get the full benefit from their time with us. For example:

• Ensuring that the assignments given to interns promote a learning experience.
• Having interns partner with their respective managers to finalize/approve their development plans.
• Assigning a mentor to assist in ensuring that the intern succeeds in achieving all the goals in their development plan.
• Soliciting and reviewing evaluations from both their managers and mentors.
• Conducitng weekly one-on-one meetings with manager/mentor.
• Hosting a weekly speaker series, in which interns meet and interact with some of the most influential people at EA.

Some companies believe that it just isn’t worth taking a college student for a summer; that the ramp-up period is too long to justify the effort. You clearly disagree with this. Why?

We have realized that the talent pool for individuals with game development experience is finite and as such, growing them from within is the only choice. Our internship program has provided a number of benefits over these past few years. Most notably:

• The fresh perspective and innovation they bring to the development process.
• The investment made in our interns is advanced training for future employment. Their ramp up time is reduced significantly, once they join us in a full-time employment capacity.
• Our talent pipeline gets built up.
• We generate great PR on campus when students return to school and share their experiences with classmates and professors.

For those of you who don’t know, Xfire is an IM and file-sharing client for gamers, as well as a community portal. You may have seen a recent article on CNN: Is Xfire the next MySpace? It inspired me to run a few questions past Frederic Descamps, Xfire’s Sr. Director of Marketing and Biz Dev. Enjoy!

Has Xfire performed any studies that quantify the effectiveness of advertising via the client? What sort of return on investment can an advertiser expect from a standard banner placement?

The banner ad located at the top of the Xfire client application is indeed one of the most popular locations for advertisers. One of the reasons is that Xfire users spend on average 90 hours a month using the Xfire client, as opposed to just a few minutes a month on average on any given leading gaming news site. Our client application ad is also static, non intrusive, and is the only ad displayed in the Xfire client application — giving it great impact.

Xfire is the only marketing platform in the world to offer targeted and behavioral advertising by demographic information, geographical location, actual games played, files downloaded, and more. Our targeted advertising allows for very precise and therefore efficient marketing, which in turn means higher ROI: if you want to run different ads respectively for WoW, CS: Source or RTS gamers, you can; if you want to run different ads whether people have downloaded a trailer or played the demo of a game, you can!

Read the full interview here!…

I had the unexpected opportunity to chat with Dorian Richard, Atari’s external producer for Neverwinter Nights 2, the anticipated RPG from Obsidian Entertainment. We ended up having a long conversation about publisher/developer relations and the pitfalls of production, which I transcribed:

What do you feel distinguishes publisher (external) producers from developer (internal) producers?

As a publisher, you have a broader perspective; you work on a lot more titles than any given developer over a five year time span. The average developer has two teams, and it takes two years to make a game, so you’re looking at approximately five titles over five years. I’ve worked on nine titles over the past five years.

What are the most common challenges you face when interacting with developers?

There’s inexperienced developers, and there’s experienced developers. Inexperienced developers tend to lack staff with sufficient scheduling and managing experience. They might be good at certain development tasks, but they don’t know how to read warning signs and manage people, so they frequently fail to recognize when a big slip is looming. They don’t plan for likely emergencies, like a key team member getting sick or having a family emergency.

Read the rest of the interview…

Michael McHale, Senior Producer at Konami, kindly answered some of my questions about his experience working with in-game advertisements.

Please describe how you made use of in-game advertising in Karaoke Revolution Party.

KRP for the Xbox includes technology from Massive, Inc. If the player is logged into Xbox Live, new ad-containing textures will stream into the game.

We made sure that the advertising spots appear in logical places in the game environment. We were very careful, so the ads are not constantly “in your face” and they integrate nicely with the background environment. We believe that it adds to the gameplay experience when the environment changes dynamically.

Did you reach out to advertisers who you thought would “fit” the game’s theme, or did you work with advertisers who reached out to you, or both? How did that affect the design and development process?

Massive’s sales team sold the ads. We retain approval over all ads before they appear in the game. The content must be appropriate for the audience (the game is rated E10+), and we expect the ad art assets to be high quality, and to fit the general art style of the game.

Did you experience any conflicts with your advertisers? How did you negotiate the process of integrating their ads into the game in a highly visible but tasteful way?

We created a guide that shows where the ads would be placed, with screenshots of the game environment. This hopefully helped the ad agencies. There was a set of ads that we felt did not meet our quality standards and did not fit the art style of the game, so we rejected them.

What surprised you most about the process of embedding advertisements into the game? Would you do anything differently?

There are currently two different types of advertisements you can run, and they each have limitations. Static ads are placed on the game disc and are visible whether you are online or offline. The issue with static ads is that you can’t track how many times they are viewed, and you can’t refresh the content, so the user sees the same ads for the life of the product. The ads have to be placed in the game months ahead of time before the game is released, so agencies can’t run ad campaigns that hit at a specific time, such as an ad for a movie release. The PlayStation 2 does not have a hard drive to store data, so static ads are your only option there.

Dynamic ads can be tracked and scheduled, but the player must be online while playing the game in order to see the ads. This works well for online multiplayer games, but not as well for single player games. I expect this issue to be worked out in the future, when dynamic ads will be stored and visible even when you are offline.

From the development side, the process of planning where the ads will go and integrating the ad-serving technology into the game takes time. Although the impact to our development schedule was minimal, we were still taking time that could have been spent elsewhere.

Looking back at the project, I don’t think we would have done anything differently, but it would have been nice to store the streaming ads locally on the Xbox. We hope we did a good job of integrating the ad content without being too intrusive. Advertisers and their agencies understand all too well that the end user can have a negative reaction to ads if they are not integrated into any form of media in the right way.