If you gave me five, seven or even 10 guesses about who outgoing EA CEO John Riccitiello's favorite character on HBO's acclaimed show The Wire was, I'd have gotten it wrong.

EA's CEO John Riccitiello has stepped down. And so of course, the fact that he's got a difficult-to-spell name, combined with the general level of dislike EA has earned in the wake of SimCity's disastrous launch, means that jokers the world over have been quick to hop on the joke train and joke it up with their jokes.

John Riccitiello, CEO of game publisher Electronic Arts, is stepping down from his position.

The company's share price dropped by a third in the past year, and expensive incursions into mobile and social games development haven't yet panned out. Adding insult to injury, Electronic Arts was booted out of the NASDAQ-100 Index for poor performance. Figure in the continuing decline of video game sales on…

With player numbers dropping and the recent revelation that 85 percent stop playing after the first day, a shadow hangs over the once ridiculously profitable social gaming scene. Speaking today at App Conference in San Jose, Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello said that the decline of social gaming is overplayed; it's …

Somewhere inside the Beltway today, copies of Just Dance 3 for the Wii and The Sims Plus Pets rode in a presidential caravan with the nuclear football. That, gang, is core game cred.

EA CEO John Riccitiello, head of the company making this fall's premiere Call of Duty competitor, Battlefield 3, recently said he hopes that Call of Duty would "rot from the core."

One day before Electronic Arts' reorganization, Patrick Bach, the DICE executive producer of Battlefield 3 said an annual publishing schedule "will eventually kill the franchise." A day later, EA's top general had a somewhat different tone.

In a recent interview with Develop, Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson discusses EA CEO John Riccitiello's visit to the Stockholm headquarters of Mojang, saying that any acquisition hopes Riccitiello might have had were quashed by the independent studio's vibe.

Peter Moore, president of EA Sports for the past four years, has been promoted to Electronic Arts' chief operating officer in a company-wide reorganization, John Riccitiello, the EA chief executive, said today.