But it was totally an accident, he swears. Riccitiello played BioShock in two sections, first on a long plane trip to London and then finished it on his way to Singapore — "which will prove I'm a slow gamer," he said. Having just gotten a new computer from Apple, he found himself switching back and forth between it and Windows.

"The problem was... the key for saving the little girls didn't work," said Riccitiello. "My keys were wrong, and I needed to go online to figure out how to re-map the keys on my own while I was in the game. I'd already harvested six by the time I landed in Heathrow."

"When they turn into slugs, I was a little horrified. I flew to Singapore, finished harvesting and then re-played it."

So first EA's boss ate the souls of innocents due to some major mistakes, and then he went back over it to do things the kinder, gentler way? Art imitates life, perhaps?

Incidentally, Riccitiello has also played Portal 2, and said we're in for major awesome: "It took my breath away."

So does EA worry about the new competition for top dog? "No," said CEO John Riccitiello. "I think it's a cool company; they make products I like. I like Call of Duty... I don't play much WoW anymore, but I was hooked for a while. And there's no question that I thought Guitar Hero, when it first came out, was an innovative product and one I'd like to play."

"They make some cool products. The fact that the two of them are together, though, doesn't change much for our industry. Comparing stock ticker to stock ticker isn't really what happens."

But that is what happens, to some extent, in our industry driven so strongly by numbers and sales figures. When we asked Riccitiello about this, though, he stressed that can't be the whole story.

"You don't make games profitable on purpose," he said. "You make great games first, and then they are profitable."

"I think that trips up a lot of companies... even EA, at different times, when a company is seeking to make purely a profitable game. Frankly, even when EA was at its peak at the last cycle, we didn't talk a lot about profitability as a goal," Riccitiello said.

"I think it's the beginning of the end when you talk about profitability as your goal. We manage the business intelligently to try and be more profitable, but that's never the primary goal. Bands don't set out to make profitable albums; Pink Floyd didn't say, 'I want to create something that people are going to buy for 20 years so that I can make X amount of money."

Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello bears no resemblance in person to Darth Vader. I was a little bit surprised.

"People have asked me many times how EA is going to be loved by this particular audience," said Riccitiello, when I told him about the popularity of anti-EA sentiment I often see from the readers. I asked him if he's ever read Kotaku comments, and in fact, Riccitiello was ready right away to recall one of his favorites.

"'Hating EA is so last year,'" he quoted immediately.

The company's pride is its label structure, which EA says provides individual autonomy to the studios under its purview. But better to acquire well-functioning and talented external studios and let them self-govern, Riccitiello maintains, than to attempt to meet high production volumes from a centralized locus of control.

"I think we might have learned that the hard way," he said.

EA is still building its way back from a loss of face in the gaming audience, after aggressive studio control led to quality lapses. But Riccitiello says the company's most definitely on its way, as he spoke to me alongside EA's packed E3 booth show where there were quite a few standout titles, like Spore or Mirror's Edge.

"There's a noticeable shift in quality and innovation playing its way through," Riccitiello said. "We had a tough transition, made a lot of falls, but right now, look around this tiny little booth. It's hard to pick a loser off the wall."

Riccitiello said it will take time before the change efforts over which he presided since he rejoined EA a little over a year ago begin to gain appreciation in the audience. "If you were to look at the [comments] on Kotaku a year ago, I think you'd have probably read [a ratio of] 90-10 anti-EA venom. Six months ago, it's 70-30... and right now, what I see on Kotaku is 50-50, if not leaning toward EA."

"At the same time, I read something else they'll say is, 'I don't like EA, but I really like Maxis, DICE, Black Box, Criterion...' at a certain point, they named all of our children, but they don't like the family."

EA will earn its way back in the eyes of the gaming audience, said Riccitiello, "not through PR or advertising, but through better games and doing the right things. There will be a shift... but it won't happen overnight."

"If I were not working at EA, or didn't know EA as well as I do, I'd still have a little bit of a 'wait and see,' or 'prove it to me.' It's hard not to. But it's also hard to square the fact that Will Wright calls us home. John Carmack, Gabe Newell... Lucy Bradshaw on the Spore team... these folks could be at any developer or head of production for most any publisher, and they're here because they're happy to be here."

"I'm not sure they were happy three years ago," said Riccitiello, "But frankly, if you were there [then]... I think you'd be able to see something different about EA [now]."

"For clarity’s sake, I think you’ve got a slight mis-remembering of what we said," Riccitiello told an audience member who asked about capitalizing on GTA IV's release value. "We were extremely explicit that there was no possibility whatsoever that we would be able to acquire the company or close the transaction prior to the release of GTA IV."

"What we said is we wanted to close the transaction in time to affect holiday sales for some of the games like Midnight Club, catalog for GTA and others. And so the reason we’re continuing to extend it, that was our plan all along and that was the way we described it at the time."

The questioner was probably prompted to the question by EA's recurring comments about the time sensitivity of their offer, but Riccitiello said that "the depreciating nature of the asset was not necessarily about GTA."

"It is that one more holiday period where we can sell more puts money onto the bottom line."

It's Riccitiello's second time ever buying EA stock, and this time he purchased 20,000 shares, at about $48.37 each. The move comes one day after EA extended its deadline to acquire Take-Two.