"I don't think the investors give a sh*t about our quality," says John Riccitiello, Electronic Arts’ CEO.

He’s right.

Oh, I know this is one of those quotes that will be dragged through the mud, locked in the stockades and have lettuce thrown at it from torch wielding villagers, but as is often the case we least want to hear that which is most true. Despite the tone and the brazenness of the quote, he’s dead freaking right.

So, let’s parse a bit here, because taken out of context from the absolutely fascinating interview at VentureBeat, the quote is pretty easy to read in a completely inaccurate way. But, lest one think EA's CEO is setting the stage for equivocating on the uncertain quality of EA’s games, this is in many ways the opposite: an affirmation of the effort tempered by the realism that EA is a business, and investors only care so much about quality in the company’s games as far as that quality makes them money.

Beyond that, they don’t give a sh*t.

Like most people, I fear change.

I recently heard an adorable and completely true tale from some forgotten corner of the world of a village that elected their long-time mayor back for another term despite his all-too-common condition of being dead. Soft pitch jokes about politicians aside, I was particularly amused by one of the interviewed voters who defended his necrotic choice for elected official by stating that he didn’t like change.

How powerful our basic nature to resist change despite its immutable certainty. We hold fast to the familiar, indulge in our own personal traditions long after their usefulness and relevance has passed. And so, I am reminded of this as I invest myself in the middling irrelevance of another E3.

If you had wondered if E3 was now truly a relic of bygone days, hobbled permanently by the slapstick bunglings of the ESA, then this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo ought to just about wrap things up for you, which will make it easy to tie on a block of cement and toss the whole mess into the East River.

Denis Dyack talks too damn much.

I love him for it.

I applaud Dyack and his ilk partly because I operate in a medium that demands constant content, and having people like him around to spout some off-putting remark that can be blown dramatically out of proportion polarizing entire nations of the internet makes me feel about him the way that I suspect a lot of late-night talk show hosts feel about Britney Spears. But, mostly I like it because in an age where everyone else seems to be operating off talking points provided directly by PR firms staffed by self-aware marketing AIs, it’s nice to see people working from the seat of their pants.

I like blowhards. I honestly do, because even when they are being combative, dismissive, argumentative and offensive they are moving discussions about gaming forward in a way that a focus-group friendly marketing message never can.

That’s it. I’m buying Madden ’09, and I’m not going to feel bad about looking forward to it anymore.

I could posit endless theories, filled with the worst kind of amateur psychobabble, on the topic of why the hardcore wing of the videogame cabal trends toward overbearing snobbishness. The propensity for clique making in the gaming community rivals that of any Southern California suburban high-school lunchroom. Every day I expect the Nintendo table to leap to their feet and start a West Side Story rumble, finger-snapping dance and all, against the defiant PS3 crowd, their slicked back hair and pompadours quivering as they snap out combs that look like switch-blades. Someone sings, "I Just Met a Girl Name Mario."

Most days I’m not disappointed.

But, if any group is universally maligned in this thinly realized analogy, then it is that of the Mainstream Gamer. These enablers of regurgitated ideas and creatively bankrupt gameplay huddle at the ass-end of the cafeteria, apparently forgetting that there is strength in numbers. They are viewed with scorn from all corners, but despite the stigma, the taboo and even the occasionally hurled fruit, I will take my pizza by the slice along with my cardboard container of 2% milk and sit at this unfairly maligned table.

This past weekend I fired up World of WarCraft for a brief and familiar respite from this all too real reality, and was met by digital malfeasance most foul, though I didn’t realize it immediately. I am impressive enough in the speed of my keyboarding, but my lack of equally impressive accuracy leaves me no stranger to the incorrect password dialog box. Normally it just means that I have bungled along the keyboard with the grace of a drunken elephant on a frozen pond, and with some concentrated effort the problem is soon enough alleviated. Not this time. I was about to encounter villainy most foul!

So, allow me to save you the artificial and flowery suspense that I so ham-fistedly offered and jump right to the point. I was hacked. Haxzored! Owned!

On resetting my password, and with a palpable sense of dread, I logged into the tattered remains of my account. My once vastly populated character select screen had been mercilessly trimmed to one lonely, naked and embarrassed looking Dranei. Gone were my level 70 Warlock, my fifty-something warrior, my sundry collection of alts with their pseudo-twinked gear and healthy bank accounts. These trappings and avatars which now represent hurumph-mmphg hours of my life had been stripped down for parts and discarded without apparent thought or care.

I was the victim of a good old fashioned virtual mugging.

You might imagine that during my time as a manager of a video game retailer I was, if not encouraged to play games on the job, at least free to take the occasional liberty with the Xbox 360 machine on down times. After all, these are the products I was expected to market and support, so being seen enjoying the stock from my shelves, the bounty of my reasonably priced harvest, the fruit of my retail loins might be seen by potential customers as a positive endorsement. Besides, how shocked can you be to walk into a video game store and discover that the guy behind the counter actually plays video games. And yet, not only was this practice sharply frowned upon, but was a fast-track toward dismissal.

The crime of playing games on the job was so severe that we were frequently brow-beaten with strongly worded directives reminding us that any employee found playing on the demo machines, or worse a portable game machine they had brought in on their own, was at minimum subject to a "write-up". Apparently the job of convincing absentee parents and feckless malcontents to buy video games is such a serious proposition that to lose one's focus, even during breaks, is anathema for the retailer. I must imagine that the management geniuses in their retail ivory tower handing down edicts to the lowly fiefdom slogging in the muck and mire of actual work below, imagined that giving the appearance of being a gamer, despite working at a gaming store, must somehow sully the highly professional atmosphere they had cultivated with big Mario standees and a poorly groomed workforce. Like virtually everywhere else at the time, gaming at work was strictly forbidden.

My poor maligned PC. How it must sulk and suffer at night, ruminating on the unfathomable certainty that its day has come and gone. How inferior it must feel when the Xbox 360 fires up like a Saturn V rocket in the other room, daring to play its games right from the DVD without installing a thing. In the morning I see empty bottles of Paxil strewn around its emo-black case, and poorly written poetry scrawled onto my desktop. Or so I would like to imagine were I to anthropomorphize, which I admit I am given to do.

But, I am increasingly convinced that the negativity rampantly besmirching my PC from all corners is misbegotten. As I have said numerous times before, and which I would defend with signed affidavits, PC gaming is far from dead or even dying. In fact, the more I linger on the topic, the more convinced I am that in fact the PC is, even now, the primary platform for gaming, that it is enjoying a renaissance which will define all gaming to come and that it should be the first choice for businesses looking to create profitable experiences.

Not surprisingly, there is a trick to this position. And, while it may seem like equivocating or justification, I believe it’s just a matter of the industry finally coming to terms with reality and redefining the gaming experience from the ground up.

In the late nineties the video game industry was mired in a starry eyed fascination with a few high-profile game developers who had been elevated into a kind of geek stardom. There was talk of Ferraris and rockets and exorbitant spending at short-lived companies with poor oversight. There was a pantheon of “game gods” populated by people with names like John Carmack, Warren Spector, Tom Hall, Sid Meier, Will Wright, Richard Garriot, American McGee, Chris Roberts and others. And, of course, the poster boy for the late nineties excess of the video game industry: John Romero.

The rise and fall of Ion Storm, which actually released several games of note beyond the calamity that was Daikatana, is the cautionary tale that proves that Design is not, in fact, Law. The farcical comedy of Ion Storm heralded the twilight of the cult of personality, and these once powerful figures in gaming either learned to integrate into the growing corporate structure of development, or pressed on with visions that largely twisted toward dead-ends and obscurity. And so, it seemed for a long time that in the aftermath of the end of the millennium the business of video games became very much more traditional, that the team was elevated above the personality and when the revolution came the John Romeros of the world had been the first against the wall.

Or so I had believed until the pantheon of gaming’s gods was populated anew.

Hard as it may be to swallow, this generation of gaming is entering middle-age. With the Xbox 360 turning three years old later this year, it may be worth remembering that the system was released on only the fifth anniversary of the original Xbox. That probably puts us somewhere close to the dead-center of the 360’s lifespan, and it means that just as the phrase next-gen has stopped describing the 360 or PS3 we should begin to expect the first titillating hints of the next-next-gen in the coming months.

You’ll be forgiven for feeling as though the generational cycle is too short. After all the PS2 remains a semi-viable system, and even now doesn’t feel nearly as dated as the PS1 did at this point in the previous cycle. The laws of diminishing returns seem to be catching up with the videogame console cycle, as it seems increasingly hard to fathom exactly what demands a next-gen round of system could concoct to meet. And yet, I have no doubt that in closed door meetings the question of what do we do next isn’t just being asked, but answered.

Along with all the features we expect from a next-gen system, including technical improvements and our favorite franchises revisited, what else should next-next-gen deliver, and what has it learned from this-next-gen. Here are a few thoughts.

On Tuesday I accepted a position as a copywriter at a NYSE listed corporation, a salaried cubicle job with a cushy benefits package, free Starbucks in the break room and fancy flat-screen monitors in the lobby; ending in a single phone call three-years worth of toil and sweat as a private entrepreneur. In the aftermath of that decision, what I feel above all else is a sense of relief. Having spent 33% of a decade as a self-made man, living and dying, so to speak, on the fruits of my own labor, the prospect of a traditional nine-to-five seems like a breath of HEPA-filtered fresh air.

Ruminating – in the sense of reflecting and not cud chewing – on the past three years, I am both extraordinarily glad to have swum in the deep waters, and equally glad that it is coming to what appears to be a tidy and perhaps surprisingly untragic end. It is the dream of many an office-jockey to suddenly pull up the stakes and work in a bathrobe from the downstairs office, and let’s be honest, any work environment is improved when you enjoy it in the comfort of Terry Cloth. That said, the magnitude of work, funding, planning and support needed to start a home business is simply inconceivable until you’ve attempted it, particularly when you’re stewing under fluorescent lights at the office feeling decidedly underappreciated. Just as parents-to-be are laughably naïve when pondering how easy it’s going to be for them to raise their children, so too the talented but under-informed might later compare entrepreneurship to being hit in the face with a small moon.