Last week I asked the community to send through some suggestions for today's Raczilla Report.  MPDamon sent me the following suggestion via EA SPORTS World:

 I think I would like to hear about "lunchtime conversations" at EA Tiburon.  Who do you head to lunch with? Where do you go? What do you talk about?  Work, games you are working on, other games you are playing?.  Just a thought.

Thanks for the questions Damon.  Lunchtime here isn't probably too much different than at a lot of other places, at least in terms of where we go.  I usually go to a restaurant close by.  Sometimes the mall.  On most days I go with a couple of other people from the marketing group (the same people who keep beating me in our Madden league).  Where we go isn't probably as interesting as what we talk about.  I think your question is more about what it's like to be in this environment in general, so I'll talk about that a little bit.

In my group here at Tiburon, everyone is a sports fan.  This makes for a lot of spirited discussion of any variety of sports related topics.  Since our group is made up of people from all over the country, it also means there is a lot of variety in terms of the teams people support.  We've got fans of the Patriots, Bears, Redskins, Packers, and Seahawks, and that's just in the handful of cubes right near mine.  Depending on who is playing in a particular week, you might hear some trash talk or maybe even see a friendly lunch wager on the results of certain games.  I won a can of a certain brand of soup from an Eagles fan earlier this year. 

We're also all gamers.  I've previously mentioned our 16 person marketing Madden league where I can't seem to win a game against a human opponent.  It's going to have to wait until the playoffs now since the rest of my games are against the CPU.  Recently we like to play builds of NFL Tour when there's 10 free minutes to get in a quick game.  At times we've also hopped online as a group to play Gears of War or Halo 3.  Some 13 year old kid from Wisconsin has probably unknowingly wiped out half the EA Tiburon marketing staff with a well timed grenade toss. 

This is a great place to be for someone who is a fan or sports, video games, or both.  It's hard to get a true feel for what it's like to be here unless you're in the building every day, but I hope this gives you a better idea.  I'd like to share more about the culture here at EA Tiburon, so you may see more about it in future edititions of the report.  Stay tuned.   

 -Raczilla