Get the Inside Scoop on What's Happening at EA

The Need for Speed World team is pleased to announce we are removing the Level 10 cap starting today and making the game completely Free to Play.

We've listened to the comments from our community and we've decided to make a change. Previously, gamers who didn't buy the Starter Pack were unable to progress past Level 10. Beginning today, anyone will be able to race all the way through to Level 50 and will have full access to the entire World, all Events and Game Modes, both present and future.

In the next weeks and months we have some great new features coming including new cars, deep performance customization, a new world region and a co-op pursuit mode. With such cool content we wanted to make sure everyone has the chance to experience the complete game from Level 1 to Level 50. For more info about these new features click here.

Our VIP gamers who bought the Starter Pack before today (Sept 8th) will soon be receiving a little present from us in the form of three free 7-day car rental vouchers for the BMW M3 GTR, the Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4 and the Audi R8 4.2 FSI Quattro. We wanted a way to say "Thank you" to our most ardent fans and cool, fast cars seemed to be the best way. We'll be emailing codes to all the qualified gamers shortly. Thank you again for all your support and passion.

With all these industry events occurring--like Gamescom, Penny Arcade Expo, and Tokyo Game Show--I thought it would be great to interview someone who helps put these things together. Wendy Spander, Sr. Manager of Events and Media, is such a person.

In addition to putting together such things as EA's E3 press conference, her team also sets up "all the appointments for the 200+ North American press members who come through the booth over the three days."

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Surprisingly (or maybe  unsurprisingly?), a lot of the people I meet at EA started off as either an intern or a tester. And even the people who started off as neither always suggest getting an internship as a start. You can browse the Breaking into the Industry archives for proof.

Getting a job in the gaming industry becomes a lot easier if you have talent in addition to having connections, and interning or testing is an easy way to get your foot in the door to get those connections. So this week, I figured I'd interview an intern, Tracey Cannon. She's a Web Analyst for Tiger Woods PGA TOUR Online. As a Web Analyst, she analyzes data to see "what is most popular in the game and where people are spending money" and using that info, "management decides what the next move should be to improve those stats."

She really makes interning at EA sound fun. They get paid well, for one.

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It would be foolish for us at EA to have every game team need to start from scratch any time they wanted to launch a site for their new game. That's why we have the North American Web Publishing group, a "one-stop shop for developing low-cost websites, all the way to high-end custom sites for EA marketing teams." They manage "all of the technical aspects of building a site so that marketing can focus on what they do best--creative ways to drive traffic to their site."

Those are Lianne Miller's words by the way. She's a Project Manager in the aforementioned web group. She's also Canadian, very girly, and eats peanut butter on her toast. And by the way, am I the only one who didn't realize Canada was considered part of North America? (continue reading…)

I approached Greg about doing this interview thinking that he was a Lead Designer, but instead he told me he was a Producer. Even better, since I haven't interviewed a producer yet. His team leverages the fact that he has a design background though, as his role requires him to "drive the [design] team and help them create features that can then be given to the director of development and scheduled out."

He also gets to travel to Montreal for weeks at a time! Why can't I find a job that cool? (continue reading…)

Jeff and Samantha visit Playfish headquarters in London to interview co-founder Kristian Segerstrale and talk about social games.

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EA is compromised of lots of different game developers--Visceral, Blackbox, and DICE, to name a few. With so many different development teams, it's important to have one centralized place that, for example, people in Marketing can go to find the latest logo any game they want. At EA, that centralized place is called TEAMS, and the person managing TEAMS is Ronda Valenzuela.

If you're wondering if you'd be interested in reading this interview, consider the following about Ronda: She used to be a designer by day, and a waitress at a Reggae club by night; she's been at EA so long she used to have to FedEx game packaging art on floppy disk to other countries; she helped launch a magazine; she raises chickens. (continue reading…)

No doubt if you're a Madden fan you've had a moment where some running back rips right through your defensive line and your secondary for twenty yards, pissing you off. And then the next down he does it again! "He's over-rated," you'll whine, until you think about it and realize that's kind of how Ladainian Tomlinson is in real life.

Well, the person tasked with rating every NFL player in Madden is Donny Moore, but he does a lot more than that. "Player ratings like speed, awareness, agility, and throw power; player equipment like what face mask does a player wear, what wristbands, skin color, hair style; player contracts, player bios, blend shapes, how big they are, player historical statistics... Anything and everything related to the players and coaches go through me."

And that's just half his job. His full title is Designer/Madden Ratings Czar, but more on that designer bit later. (continue reading…)

Need for Speed World is now live! The Head Start period for Starter Pack racers began slightly more than one hour ago and already World is filling up quickly. Races have been highly-competitive so far, and many an epic pursuit has been had, and we're just an hour in.

The floodgates open up for everyone starting next Tuesday, July 27, but if you want in to the Head Start, you can still buy the Starter Pack to get in today, which includes a limited edition car, a lot of SpeedBoost and the opportunity to reserve your driver name.

My day to day job requires mostly that I design, code, and manage the content on EA.com, but I also love to write. That's one of the main reasons why I do this column, and why I am extremely envious of Andrew Shvarts, co-lead Writer for the iPhone game Surviving High School.

You know how on television and movies they sometimes show a bunch of writers in a room just throwing out crazy ideas to try to figure out how the plot of some piece will go? Well Andrew gets to do that, but for games! And choose-your-own-adventure type game like Surviving High School are by nature very story driven, which means that the Writers on the team essentially become game designers. As Andrew puts it, "because the game is so story-driven, the writers also produce all the logic, scoring, and balance, etc. A writer starts from scratch and produces, by the end, a fully-playable episode." (continue reading…)

NOTE:  Today the state of California filed a written brief with the United States Supreme Court arguing to reinstate a previously overturned law that made it illegal to sell or rent videogames deemed "excessively" violent to minors in the state of California. If you're interested in following this story, and voicing your concern about it yourselves, you can check out the Entertainment Consumer Association's page on the issue, and sign a petition against this piece of legislation.  Be sure, too, to check out the Video Game Voters Network, sponsored by the Entertainment Software Association, for more on this as well.   Here is columnist Jeff Green's personal take on the matter.

Next month, on August 18, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is co-starring in a new movie called The Expendables, a movie rated R by the MPAA "for strong action and bloody violence throughout."  (How violent is this movie? You can watch the trailer here. )

Here's the thing, though. As bloody as this movie may be, it's not actually illegal for a theater to sell a minor a ticket to this movie, nor is it illegal for a parent to let his or her kid in with them. The MPAA movie ratings is a voluntary system not enforced by law. For the past 48 years, people have used the MPAA ratings to decide for themselves whether a movie was appropriate for themselves or their children. So when you see young teenagers or little kids sitting with their parents at The Expendables next month for two hours of bloody carnage, this is why. It's not illegal. And it's not news.

Videogames, on the other hand, well--that's always news, isn't it? Or at least there's some people that keep trying to make it news. Which is why the very same Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the one blasting bad guys to smithereens in a movie theater near you soon, has his name associated with a piece of legislation now about to be in front of the Supreme Court of the United States that would make it illegal to sell or rent videogames deemed by the state of California to be  "excessively" violent to minors.  So had there actually been an Expendables videogame, chances are that while it would have been perfectly legal to sell your kid a ticket to the movie, it would have been illegal to sell him the game.

This man would like to keep violent games away from the children.

In case you don't know much about this, here is a brief history lesson: The bill in question, banning the sale of violent videogames to minors,  was actually signed into law in California in October 2005 and was scheduled to go into effect on January 1, 2006.   But following its signing, the EMA (Entertainment Merchants Association) filed a lawsuit -- EMA v Schwarzenegger --  asserting that the law was unconstitutional because it violated plaintiffs' rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution to freedom of expression and equal protection of the laws.  In 2007, a district court agreed with the EMA and barred enforcement of the law, and then in 2009, after an appeal by the State of California, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit agreed once again that the law was unconstitutional. That brings us to today, in which California is presenting its written argument in favor of this law to the United States Supreme Court, who will have the power to reinstate it as a law in California  if they so choose.

So, okay. You may be asking, at this point, what is Jeff blathering on about here?  And what happened to all the fart jokes? The fact is,  if you care about gaming, and your ability to buy the games you want to buy, then you should get familiar with this issue, no matter how much you may not like politics or the real world in general. (And believe me, I'm happiest amongst the elves and goblins, too.) Because this is serious. And the reason it's serious is that, on the surface of it, it actually doesn't seem like that bad of an idea, does it?

I mean, no one (well, no one with half a brain and any standard of decency or responsibility) wants to actually sell excessively violent videogames to children. But by making it illegal to do so--especially given the vagaries of what constitutes "excessive",  it could have a chilling effect on the gaming industry as a whole--both the makers and sellers of the games, who will have to seriously think twice about the kind of product they can and want to sell, out of fear of ending up in jail. And therein lies the bigger question at hand. Because if you substitute books or movies or music in the previous couple sentences, you can see just how wrong this is.

What's most depressing about all this is how often we've been here before.  And I'm not just talking about videogames. The history of the 20th century---well, before that, of course---is littered with one case after another of a work of art or creative property coming under attack by those who would purport to know what is best for us:  Jazz, comic books, rock-and-roll--all former agents of evil and sin that were going to drag our women and children down into a cultural morass and possibly lead to communism, vegetarianism, or worse. Hell, even James Joyce's Ulysses, one of the great literary masterpieces of our time, had to fight these charges off in a courtroom. But time marches on, and what's edgy and dangerous becomes quaint and nostalgic. The Beatles' "Revolution" becomes the background music to a Nike commercial. The Sex Pistols get played on "oldies" stations. And this is what I believe is going to happen with videogames, no matter how many times this old guard of bewildered, scared dinosaurs tries to fight what it doesn't understand. After a certain number of years, all those fussing about all this will be gone, and the only people left will be those who grew up with games their entire lives,  and know how harmless and not scary and not worthy of reactive legislation they really are.

The movies have the MPAA ratings to help guide parents towards what movies they feel are appropriate for their kids. Videogames have the ESRB ratings. This is all we need. If your 12-year-old comes home with a copy of Extreme NaziKiller 12 and is playing it in your living room, this is not the publisher's fault. Nor is it GameStop's fault. This is your fault, as a parent. That's all it's ever been. We don't put people in jail for selling junk food to your kids, or putting borderline-obscene reality TV shows on primetime TV when your kids are awake.  That's your call to make.

If Schwarzenegger really believed in the underlying message of the law with his name on it---that it should be illegal to sell or rent material deemed excessively violent for kids---then he should take the first step and make it illegal for kids to see "The Expendables." Until then, this is all nothing but hypocrisy of the highest order.

As usual.

--Jeff Green

Sha Sha Chu! No, I'm not sneezing on your computer or mobile phone screen (which is probably an iPhone). Sha Sha Chu is the name of a Gameplay Engineering Development Directer for The Sims label. Really that translates into her being Project Manager, but Development Directer sounds much cooler.

Sha Sha's duties include making sure the engineers know what needs to be done and are meeting there deadlines. She's also responsible for there "caring and feeding." Interested? I know you are... (continue reading…)

Being a part of the EA.com team, I interact with all kinds of people at EA. Half the time, I have no idea what they do aside from the single way they interact with me. One such person is IP Associate Mimi Parayno. You don't know what that is right? Well, let me enlighten you.

Mimi is part of what she calls the "Legal Triage," where her and the rest of the legal team "reviews consumer-facing materials such as packaging, press releases, websites, videos/trailers, etc. to ensure legal compliance." You'd think being a legal team, they're just a bunch of lawyers with boring personalities who wear suits everyday, but Mimi says that's not the case with her group. "No one dresses up in suits," she said. "Well, except maybe one." (continue reading…)

All right folks, you've waited long enough so here it is, the car list for Need for Speed World. (continue reading…)

We are pleased to announce the next Need for Speed World beta will begin Monday, June 28 and run until Wednesday, June 30. (continue reading…)