Electronic Arts President Levels Up In The Video Game Space

Video gaming has grown exponentially in the recent past, with nearly 191 million Americans reporting playing games, and 61% of the U.S. population playing games for at least an hour every week, according to the Entertainment Software Association. Laura Miele, Electronic Arts president of entertainment, technology and central development, has worked in the industry since the 1990s. I talked to her about her career—especially as a woman in a traditionally male-dominated space—and what’s next for gaming—some of which Electronic Arts will talk about at its Investor Day on Tuesday.

This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity. It was excerpted in the Forbes CEO newsletter.

What made you interested in being in the gaming industry and how have you pursued your career?

Miele: It was a bit of a happy accident. I was working in architecture and design in Las Vegas, and a friend of a friend told me about a game company. I was somewhat curious, but not super interested. I said, ‘I’ll go talk to them.’ This is back in 1996.

I’ve always loved games. I organized game nights for my family, and organized card games at the architectural firm. I was always organizing people to come together to play games. So I go into this game studio and they said, ‘Well, let’s just give you a demo first, then we’ll talk.’

I played Monopoly in English from their conference room against somebody in Germany, and they were playing in German. And it blew my mind. I just couldn’t believe that you could go somewhere and play a game with someone on demand, without planning anything and without thinking about a big schedule. I came out of the conference room and just begged them to hire me. I thought, this is going to change the world. I was very excited about the idea of having shared experiences and meeting people.

I started at a studio called Westwood Studios. They were very well known for online gaming and network gaming at the time. It was a really fun way to start.

What made you interested in keeping with gaming?

Those motivations about bringing people together and having shared experiences and entertaining millions of people [were] such big ideas and concepts to me, and it has only grown and gotten larger. I started out managing an effort called Westwood Online. We had 1 million players, which was huge at the time. Now, we have hundreds of millions. Electronic Arts is going to get to 1 billion players soon. The impact and the reach that we have is very interesting, highly motivating and inspiring to me.

The evolution of games [from] 28 years ago to where we are today—photorealistic and beautiful immersive worlds, characters and storytelling—has been a fast ride. Even though I have been in the industry for quite some time, it’s gone by fast because it just feels like every day has been different, and there’s so many new things happening. I’m a moth to the light and chaos and change. That has been an incredibly exciting ride and path.

There’s over 3 billion game players in the world now. It’s at all corners of the world that we can have an impact and bring our stories and characters and social connection and creation to people.

What has it been like climbing the corporate ladder as a woman in an industry traditionally dominated by men?

I think gaming is not that dissimilar to society, and all industries, really. I think that there’s bias that exists. There’s opportunities that exist. I have always been a fairly optimistic, glass-is-half-full person. I see opportunities where an alternative point of view helps the dynamics of a situation or creative process to build strong bridges. I always have looked to use my advantages, and I don’t know if it’s because I’m a woman, or just because of who I am and my personality. I always have celebrated when I can help connect hard challenges and be a good problem solver. I’ve really leaned into that strength that I have.

I love the idea that gaming is an incredible place—in industry and career—for women. From technology to creative process to really strong business acumen, I think it is an unbelievably fertile, strong area for women to gravitate toward. I couldn’t be more encouraging for women to be excited about it. When you [consider] mobile games and high def games, 50-50 women and men play games around the world. I really love the idea that our workforce represents and will resonate with the players that we create games for.

I couldn’t encourage women more to get involved and give the games industry a chance as a career path, because it has been unbelievably rich and rewarding for me.

Gaming was incredibly different when you first got involved. How have the gaming industry and the people playing games evolved?

We started 28 years ago with cartoony, pixel-like worlds and characters to a level of immersion and crossing an uncanny valley around the graphics and the experiences and the storytelling. How extensive and expansive these experiences are is radically different today than it was then. Oftentimes, most of our players will buy a few games a year because they can play them all year long. It’s immersion in life services and engagement with friends to the content that we show up daily, weekly, monthly, to inspire people to stay in the game. They’ve become platforms and services and these big communities. I think the idea that we redefine what gaming and play means today is quite different than it was a long time ago.

On the other side of the spectrum, there’s also great accessibility to games and content. The mobile device has been tremendous and extraordinary to open up markets and to reach players in all corners of the globe that we couldn’t get to before. Mobile’s the largest gaming platform in the world, and the idea that we can reach people in all corners and bring experiences to them is a really big game changer for the industry, and a really big shift for us about who we can entertain and engage with on a day-to-day basis.

What have you done to make Electronic Arts more inclusive as a company?

It’s an important area for Electronic Arts as a company. Our deep value system and our culture is inclusive. It is a huge priority for our leadership team, and has been for quite some time.

About eight years ago, I started a Women’s Ultimate Team employee resource group. I did it because I was so motivated to create a sense of belonging and a community for women. As much as I admire and respect our culture and our values, I still felt like this is a great step for us to bring women together, and feel like they could have mentors and sponsors and sounding boards and people to share experiences with. We are close to 3,000 people strong. Through that structure and organization, they’ve created some incredible programs to impact not just women within Electronic Arts, but content that we put out in the world, and how we think about and [are] intentional about the inclusion of our content.

We created this inclusion framework that was inspired by the Geena Davis Foundation and what she did for film and TV, where you take a strong inventory of lines of dialogue, of the roles that characters play, how inclusive you’re being with underrepresented talent across the board in your stories and in your games. It started as a small project, an experiment. It was really important to me that it was not something that we were going to finger wag or shame our teams with. It was really meant to be like: This is a framework and we want you to be intentional about how you think about this.

It was a way for us to take a good inventory and look at what we put out in the world. I really believe that when you do that for creative people and in a culture that is as inspired and has the deep values that EA does, the teams will surprise and think more expansively, and you possibly could put a rule set against it. It has become a really important part of our game development process and approach across the board.

What have you done through your leadership position at Electronic Arts and in gaming to have a bigger inclusivity impact on the industry as a whole?

The greatest impact we can possibly have is to have responsible, inclusive content that can impact the way that people see themselves, and the way they see each other. Putting things out in the world, such as having strong anti-toxicity and player safety measures in the industry is a way that we have an impact on the world.

As far as the industry goes, we have several patents that help us in the competitive landscape. Some of those patents that would have a positive impact on accessibility and inclusion, we have made them available to all developers. I’m really proud that Electronic Arts has made that available—something really large and can impact hundreds of millions of players.

In the spirit of the Women’s Ultimate Team at Electronic Arts, I’m very intentional about reaching out and supporting female leaders in the industry. Whether it be something that we do once a year, have a dinner to support organizations that support early-career women in the industry, to having an open hotline to other female leaders in the industry, we share experiences and have a hand in influence.

Earlier this year, Electronic Arts had some pretty sizable layoffs as part of a change in its strategy and how games are put together. How are things going with that strategy and moving forward as a company?

We established and created a new strategy about a year and a half ago, which is highly focused on massive online communities, blockbuster storytelling, and functionality and services for players that sit a little bit beyond the bounds of a game. One of the more articulated intentional focuses that we’ve had as a company is this is where we’re really going to be investing time to enrich the experiences for our players. We have been off to the races on that for the last few years, developing the operating plans and developing great experiences for players against that framework. Clearly, we are in an unbelievable position of timing when it comes to technology and innovation in the industry, where we can leverage things like generative AI to bring players the best experiences and enable our developers at the same time in their development process.

It’s been a really fascinating period for us to make sure that we can skill up talent, and we’re thinking about the construct and structure of the company, and what we prioritize in technology, innovations and skill sets that we have.

We have some really interesting announcements and an unveiling of the depth of the projects that we’re working on, innovations that we’re bringing to market in the coming months. We have an Investor Day, and we’ll be talking about more of this then.

I think that we are in an incredibly strong position to see some strong growth in our company in the year ahead, thanks to the prioritization around communities, redefining what play means, and having creation in our games and social connection. Prioritizing even the notion that people watch each other play games so much and in such great depth—something like 25% of game consumption is through watching people play games.

There’s four pillars that we look at. It’s play, create, watch and connect. [That] is really what these massive online communities are about now. Play is certainly important; we’re not getting away from that. But the idea that people come in and create content, and have creative self-expression, and have tools that we provide them to have agency over their experience. Then, they get to have these experiences, and they get to broadcast what they’ve created and people watch that.

The beautiful wrap around all that is the social connection, which comes full circle [in] our conversation. What got me into gaming is the idea that you could get online, that you and I could go on an adventure together. You form a bond and have this shared experience. I think that is pretty unique to gaming.

Looking ahead at some of these announcements, how much of a shift does it represent from what people think of as gaming right now?

We’re moving towards communities and platforms more than a linear end-to-end play a game and then finish a game. I think that games will potentially be the future of how we think about social platforms today. The notion that you can have human connection experiences come to a place and create things, and have this self-expression, and then maybe there’s a concert in the game, and maybe you go create your own mode and create a competition and an event with your friends. The depth of personalization that’s going to come from these tools, and from what I think generative AI will bring to our industry is fascinating. The depth of social connection and human connection that happens around all of this, it’s a flywheel. It connects and feeds itself, which I think is a fascinating place for us to be.

It has an engagement model. Clearly, streaming platforms have radically changed movie and TV consumption, and they’re amazing, but they don’t have the level of engagement and social connection that games do. Players come every day to our platform, to our games. You watch a movie or a TV series, and you’re done. You move on. It’s very consumable, and it’s a very passive experience. Interactive entertainment is incredibly immersive. If you’re playing a game and you’re in our world, you think about the characters, you think about the story. The world is in your brain, even when you’re not playing. The immersion of what we do is so different than any other form of media. And the engagement model, the time spent, is just exponentially larger than any other form of entertainment that we see today.

It seems like many companies are trying to get into the gaming space nowadays through new ventures and acquisitions. Where do you see the gaming industry in the next five to 10 years?

Established gaming companies like Electronic Arts are incredibly well-positioned and well-poised to drive the future of entertainment in general because of the engagement model, because of the technology innovation that we have created as the foundation of our company. We’ve been doing this for decades, and, as you know, technology builds on itself and iterates. Creating games is, I think, by far the highest form of media, and by far the most complicated form of media to develop. We are at the bleeding edge of innovation. And so the idea that the world is looking for a 3D spatial representation of the internet or of their lives or to replicate that, gaming sits at the foundation of that.

For as large as we are today, our growth potential is significant. I think the impact that we will have on entertainment and social connection in the world is significant, based on where we are and based on the foundations that we have around game engines, technology, 3D representation of worlds, characters, the idea that people can socially connect and have relationships in our experiences and our platforms. I think it is the foundation for the future of entertainment, social platforms and social connection.