The Art of Play - Part Two

I think what the Wii did more than any other platform is just open up the mature audience - the audience beyond the people that we normally sell games to. What I like about the Wii is that on my nursery school run each week my kids, who know I work in videogames, are always asking about the Wii and its games.

The reason is that it's become a family console, a thing that unites people around a gaming experience. If you think about games that you and I remember from seven plus years ago, it was being alone in a darkened room with the sound turned up and no one around.

Now we've grown up a bit, people have had kids, and they're something that's in people's minds when making games - the Wii's just opened up a bit of socialness around the machine and gaming as a whole. It's now more acceptable and it just feels like it's changed some of the stereotypes that people have associated with gaming. It's like Star Trek - people are talking about having watched the new film, and it's a great film, but if you'd talked to people about watching old Star Trek movies a few years ago, they wouldn't back you... unless they were the ones with the ears...

That's the way gaming has felt, and the Wii has just helped to open up our audience and our potential, and we're now talking to a much broader consumer base of people who will love our experiences, but just need the access point in.

From a product standpoint I've long given up on the idea that you just port what you've got to that platform. I think a lot of platforms have come in with a lot of things which just naturally fit our customers - they're either people that are buying that platform for a reason, or they've got technology that works in a certain way (such as the Wii with motion controls).

There are things that those platforms allow us to do, and for me it's about building an experience that's tailored to that platform. There's nothing worse than having a third-grade port from a franchise when you can have something that's custom-built for that platform. You have to build great games for that platform, rather than taking a game and porting.

Very soon the consumer isn't going to care which device they're on. More and more it's going to be about taking a character because they want to play with it on the iPhone, then wanting to take it home and play online because they want to play with a buddy... and then onto console.

We haven't cracked that nut yet, in terms of characters moving from platform to platform, but it's one of the highest priorities.

If you think about how many devices you play games on, and I don't just mean console, but PC, laptop, phone, Blackberry, iPhone... but you play games on everything - you might not even recognise some of them as games. That little Solitaire thing you may play when you have nothing else with you.

I think people are already gaming on these platforms, and it's just a case of linking them so that the gaming experience is additive.

Where EA has done the most impressive job is Hasbro - we've taken games like Monopoly and put them out onto every platform. It's on POGO, mobile, the Wii and multi-platform, differently presented, but nonetheless - if you want to play Monopoly you have that option.

Yes - you're iPhone Scrabble can play games against Facebook Scrabble - that's the first touch for those connected plays, especially for something that's turn-based like Scrabble.

I think it's a point of advantage that only EA has, because we have world class game development studios, EA Mobile, POGO - you can harness the power of the bigger, integrated organisation and keep doing that for our best franchises.