Watching Zynga and Facebook “getting along” in the press reminds me of the scene in the 1993 movie Army of Darkness where Ash struggles to separate himself from his evil conjoined twin. I wrote previously that the first generation of “social games” are really just Facebook parasites. They are games that nobody wants to play outside of Facebook.
First-generation social games are designed for one purpose: to hijack the social graph machinery to virally promote themselves, providing just the shallowest amount of entertainment value to get their players to perpetuate them to their friends. The games can’t survive outside their host social graph on their own merits. The point of making this observation is not to denigrate the many talented social game developers out there, but to make an important observation about the future of the phenomena called “social gaming.” See Industry Gamers for more. 