“The human imagination is an amazing thing. As children, we spend much of our time in imaginary worlds, substituting toys and make-believe for the real surroundings that we are just beginning to explore and understand. As we play, we learn. And as we grow, our play gets more complicated. We add rules and goals. The result is something we call games.”

– Will Wright, Wired, April 2006

Celebrated game designer Will Wright has a new job: doing whatever he damn well pleases. He’s leaving Electronic Arts (ERTS), the game publisher for which he developed Spore and the wildly successful Sim City and The Sims franchises, to run Stupid Fun Club, an entertainment think tank developing ideas for everything from toys to TV. “The entertainment industry is moving rapidly into an era of revolutionary change,” Wright said in a statement. “Stupid Fun Club will explore new possibilities that are emerging from this sublime chaos and create new forms of entertainment on a variety of platforms.”

Wright and EA each own equal percentages of Stupid Fun Club, and the company has first right of refusal for game concepts that arise from the venture, so this isn’t quite the blow to EA it might at first seem. In fact, it may turn out to be a boon. With the novelty of EA franchises like Madden NFL, Need for Speed and the Sims fading and sales declining, the company desperately needs some big, new, innovative ideas. And who better than Wright to fish them out? Certainly, there must be far better games than Need for Speed XXX waiting to be developed in that “sublime chaos” Wright hopes to explore.

Indeed, just this morning, Heard on the Street’s Martin Peers suggested EA would be a good acquisition, particularly for an entertainment company. “Any entertainment company could be interested in EA, given continued growth in videogame sales, the potential for cross-fertilization with TV and film storylines and advertisers’ interest in buying space in games,” Peers wrote. “Disney makes the most sense. EA’s biggest assets include its sports games, such as ‘Madden NFL,’ which would fit with Disney’s ESPN cable network. Disney could also save at least part of the roughly $200 million it spends annually to develop its own games.”

An interesting theory. Ironic too, since before EA was in the news for its current ill fortune, it was making headlines for its dogged pursuit of Take-Two Interactive. That said, with only $2.6 billion in cash on its books, Disney would have to borrow quite a bit to push such a deal through, which seems unlikely in the current market.

Well, if this rumor proves true, Canada really will have to declare a national day of mourning for the BlackBerry (RIMM). When Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs uncrates the 3G iPhone a few months from now, presumably at the company’s WWDC conference in June, the device’s price may draw more oohs and ahs than its feature set.

Fortune claims AT&T (T) plans to knock $200 off the cost of a new iPhone for customers who sign two-year contracts. If that is indeed AT&T’s intention, the 8-gigabyte version of the device would likely price out at $199, the 16-gigabyte model at $399. Which is a pretty compelling value proposition given that the device will soon support Microsoft (MSFT) Exchange and run Spore, Salesforce (CRM), AIM from AOL (TWX) and a host of other third-party apps.

No wonder Apple execs seemed so comfortable reiterating the company’s goal of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008. At $199, they might be able to hit that number without the Asian markets.