Editor’s note: Mayshod is a new contributor and long time reader of Sarcasticgamer.com.

With all the attention we’ve been focusing on EA lately I decided to do a little research to find their roots. I refuse to believe they’re all bad. In the process, I discovered William M. “Trip” Hawkins III. He is the Silicon Valley pioneer that founded Electronic Arts. Although he no longer leads the publishing juggernaut, he’s nothing shy of a genius in the field and a forefather of modern gaming. (he designed his own major at Harvard in Strategy and Applied Game Theory).

I contacted Trip through his new company, Digital Chocolate (they produce mobile games for cell phones) to see what he thought about the Bad Company boycott and to find out what he’s currently working on. He was generous with his time and I’d personally like to thank him once again for granting me the interview.

1) What’s your reaction to EA’s (as well as other publishers) attempts at releasing an incomplete product for the purpose of padding micro-transaction sales with downloadable content that could have been in the game to begin with?

There’s a big industry debate about buying game items versus earning them through play. Personally, I think both approaches are reasonable because some people have more time to play and some people have more money and less time, and it provides more paths to enjoyment, ways for people to be successful, and makes for more interesting competition and play. I think it is pretty lame for a gamer to think he is entitled to clobber an opponent simply because he has more time to mine WOW gold, and resents the opponent for having a demanding job where he mines real gold that he uses to buy WOW gold. If Tiger Woods gave me a 30 handicap it would make a round with him more interesting. And if I managed to beat him, do you think he would feel inferior, or that I would feel superior? Of course not. And if someone can use skill, practice, and cunning to compete vigorously with inferior weapons, and sometimes defeat players who have spent more money, isn’t that honorable enough? And would it not earn the respect of the rich opponent to see such a capable adversary?

2) Do you believe that the reputation that EA has today would have been earned if you had stayed with EA?

When I founded EA, I had a big commitment to values and building an organizational culture. The culture of the company definitely changed after I left. Also, when companies get big, they have thousands of people and you get a bell curve that includes a wider variety of both good and bad. It is harder for good organizations to remain exceptional as they get bigger. I have tremendous respect for how Apple and Nintendo have reinvented themselves in recent years because it is such a difficult thing for large companies to do.

3) How did you feel about EA’s efforts to edit you from their Wikipedia entry?

I was not surprised. There have been misguided and unethical public relations people there for some time now. They really need to clean house. It would have been classy of them to apologize to me but nobody has done so.

4) As a game maker, how important to you is the trust of your end user, or is trust not relevant, as long as you are producing a quality product?

They go hand in hand. Digital Chocolate wins the most awards and has the highest ratings for casual and mobile games. But we aren’t going to keep making the same game, we’re going to keep innovating. A music fan may love a certain band, and be so attached to particular songs that they have a hard time caring about the new creative directions that the artists in the band may want to take. I think it is harsh when music fans boo a famous group for playing their new songs that aren’t just like their golden oldies. If there is trust, hopefully it goes both ways. Quality can mean different things. To me it is about professional production values and accomplishing what you set out to do, even if it may not please everyone. Sometimes as an artist you are trying to prove something and please yourself. Madden Football was that kind of “labor of love” for me, and I took so long to make it that it became known within EA as, “Trip’s Folly.” Beethoven should have the freedom to make a rap song, but it should be recorded in a professional studio with good equipment, properly tuned instruments, and no background static. For all of these reasons, some of my all-time favorite games, like M.U.L.E., Twisted!, Army Men, and Portal Runner, were either panned by the critics or commercial failures, simply because they did not match up with the expectations of the time. For the most part I think I have struggled when my ideas have been ahead of the times. I was doing social games and casual games decades before customers were ready for them.

5) How involved are you personally with the development of Digital Chocolate?

Extremely. Several of them were my ideas originally, and in every case I am a key checkpoint on anything that goes into production and goes into the market. One thing about me as a creative person is that I’m not purely an artist; I like commercial success. So I analyze every idea to death to either polish or reject it. I get especially involved in design details for our larger and most innovative projects. At the same time I am grateful to have so many outstanding colleagues who do great work regardless of what I may or may not contribute. We have a strong and deep creative roster and they care as much as I do about process discipline and analysis, not just the idea.

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