El33tonline wasn’t the only crew touring gaming events in South Africa during the week of January 16th, as EA South Africa and a very special guest all the way from Australia were also making the rounds to attend gatherings of gamers in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

EA South Africa’s Ralph Spinks and Bianca McFadyen, along with EA Australia’s Brad Pidgeon, recently visited a number of gaming events in the country to meet with the gamers of Johannesburg and Cape Town as well as to extend EA’s message of community to gamers.

As the community and social media manager for Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Africa, Pidgeon is tasked with listening to EA’s community and communicating with gamers by answering their questions and informing them of the latest announcements and events.

Pidgeon also works closely with EA’s internal studios and game development partners to not only provide fan and community feedback directly to the people making your favourite EA games, but he also goes out of his way to ask burning community-submitted questions of these game developers so we can all get thorough and interesting answers to our queries, however particular they may be.

Starting work at EA in April 2011, Pidgeon’s experience in the game industry can’t be overstated, having worked at Microsoft Australia as head of tech and community for ten years, operating closely with teams creating celebrated titles such as Halo and Mass Effect. After only a very short time, Pidgeon was able to grow his EA community from hundreds of people to over a hundred thousand, and now his focus is squarely on helping the South African and Japanese EA communities flourish.

One of the ways in which Pidgeon hopes to inject newfound vigour and excitement into his communities is by holding regional, country-versus-country tournaments using EA titles such as FIFA and Battlefield to promote national gaming pride and introduce some healthy competition – elements that effortlessly bring nations together in real-world sports like soccer and rugby.

Pidgeon even used the rugby allegory as an example of his vision for tournaments in the future; something like a Super 8 or Asia Games, but allowing nations to strut their stuff in videogames instead.

Pidgeon also showed off a selection of trailers for upcoming games, namely Big Huge Games’ Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and BioWare’s Mass Effect 3, but as awesome as these games are destined to be, he seemed most proud of the video for The Sims 3: Showtime featuring Katy Perry.

According to Pidgeon, EA has been in negotiations with the superstar singer for quite some time, and speaking with him earlier, I could tell that the publisher’s partnership with Ms. Perry is something of a coup for them. Expect big things from The Sims and Katy Perry in the future!

Brad Pidgeon’s visit to South Africa was something of a whirlwind tour before he jetted off to London for an EA event (where he represented the region of Asia Pacific) before returning home recently, but he’s already making plans to visit the country again to attend more events in the near future. April perhaps?

El33tonline is very appreciative of Pidgeon’s time and energy as he travelled thousands of kilometres to talk about subjects he’s so clearly passionate about, namely gaming and community.

And EA, of course.

If you haven’t yet, be sure to follow EA South Africa on Twitter and ‘Like’ the Facebook page, too, and also follow these fellows and fellowettes for all of the most important EA and EA South Africa announcements:

• Brad Pidgeon on Twitter

• Jess Hodgson on Twitter

• Ralph Spinks on Twitter

• Bianca McFadyen on Twitter

And just for good measure, here’s an excellent interview with Brad Pidgeon conducted by Grant Hinds of Gamezone TV:

Gamezone TV - Episode 17 - EA Games