Q&A: Electronic Arts' creative guy knows how to play

But that's William "Bing" Gordon, 56, chief creative officer of Redwood City, Calif.-based Electronic Arts Inc. Best known for sports and action titles, the industry giant has been expanding into other areas, such as its Pogo.com casual gaming site -- for which Gordon created the Lottso! card game.

In Seattle for the Casuality casual games conference, Gordon answered questions on that area of the industry and other issues, including EA's new deal to acquire online role-playing game Mythic Entertainment. Edited excerpts from the interview:

Q: You're obviously a gamer.

Gordon: In my position, I wouldn't be here if I weren't. There's executives in the game business who aren't, but I think that's a fleeting trend, because there aren't any executives in other entertainment businesses who aren't consumers. You can't be in the movie business if you don't go to movies every week. You can't be in the music business if you don't have a wall full of CDs and multiple iPods.

Q: You had World of Warcraft going when we came in.

Gordon: World of Warcraft is my all-time favorite game.

Q: You're here in Seattle to talk about casual games. What do you like about them?

Gordon: As a consumer, I play them. I went to college doing The New York Times crossword puzzle every day and kind of liked those five-minute mental hits. I think I'm probably addicted to five-minute mental hits.

Creatively, what I like about them is that they are of manageable scope for designers at all levels. I also teach and create curriculum at the USC Film School (in interactive media studies) and these kind of projects that are three to eight people and take three or four months from conception through iteration to final are also perfect training experiences. So I like them a lot as creative endeavors.

Q: For EA as a whole, what type of mix do you envision between casual games and other video games in the long run?

Gordon: I actually think that casual games are likely to be embedded in all kinds of interactive entertainment. Seven or eight years ago, we put a trading card collectible game inside Madden Football. We put what we call mini-games -- three- to five-minute activities -- in The Sims on Game Boy Advance.

The inspiration for me was a 1980s role-playing game called Wasteland that EA published. It had a skill system separate from an experience system. That was a game where, when I had five minutes free, I would go in and say, "I'm going to get my lock-picking skill up a couple points."

It was kind of a surprise for me that you could do something useful in five minutes in a game, because up until that time a five-minute game was basically succeed or fail at a particular level and try to find a continue point or a save-game point.

Q: Where are casual games in their evolution, when you look at the overall market?

Gordon: I think it's pretty early. I think we're no more than one year into it obviously being a category in its own right. Pogo has had huge success. Nintendo with Brain Age, which is clearly a casual game, is a wild success. ... That's a stunning turn of events, just over the last six months, so I think we're in a takeoff stage.

There's another thing going on: Casual games are the last of the popular interactive entertainment categories to get monetized effectively. They're way undermonetized.

Q: Do you expect one business model -- subscription, purchase or advertising -- to become predominant for casual games?

Gordon: I would bet that advertising is the great unlocker, only because it's kind of a perception of free entry. ...

It's shocking on Pogo to us that people play so much. The so-called casual gamers are playing as much every week as World of Warcraft. They're deeply involved. So the original thinking that a casual game was for people who didn't want to do interactive stuff was wildly wrong.

I think the answer is that, on average, casual games right now are about 10 times too cheap (based on how much people get for the money they pay). The amount of money created per hour of play is about a tenth of what people are going to be willing to pay in a few years.

Q: Off the subject of casual games, how do you see Mythic's portfolio of games meshing creatively with what EA does?

Gordon: Well, before World of Warcraft (from Blizzard Entertainment), Dark Age of Camelot (from Mythic) was a revelation for me. I was kind of blown away with DAOC.

We are filled with respect for what they have accomplished, kind of with baling wire and chewing gum. They assembled a team. They did a Hall of Fame game. They created great technology. I think that's the start.

Organizationally, we've acquired a lot of studios, and it turns out that almost all of our leading executives on our studio side have been involved in a startup studio before. I think the more interesting question is, can the entrepreneurs who created Mythic become part of the former entrepreneurial team that leads EA? And for that to work, we've really got a lot of peer-to-peer sharing.

Q: Does this acquisition mean more of a focus on MMOs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) within EA?

Gordon: Well, it couldn't be less.

I hope that Mythic does for EA in the online world space what Pogo did in, I'd say, the online solitaire game space. When we acquired Pogo, it was just part of an overall online initiative, and when they got in the company, we realized, "Oh my, God, they know so much more than anybody who used to be at EA did." ... So we did our best not to screw it up.

Already, with the people at Mythic, they know stuff that even with Ultimate Online and Earth and Beyond and Sims Online and Motor City Online we didn't learn. So they have deep insight. So I hope that we can add a little value for them without undermining what's gotten them this far, and that they can add some value back.

P-I reporter Todd Bishop can be reached at 206-448-8221 or toddbishop@seattlepi.com.

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