And now for something refreshingly not about games…

Esquire’s fiction contest this year challenged time-challenged writers to pack a story into 78 words. No, I didn’t win that trip to Aspen with Oprah… But I actually liked the timbre of what I finally came up with. Alas, this intro is longer than the story. And so:

Shady Nate, VP of Business That Runs Itself, has a desk photo: Sweet but sassy wife, plump uncrying infant. Finally joining the tyranny of the clueless happy.

Then: A diagnosis.

Meadows become minefields. Every word a restrained scream. Director of Performance Improvement. Bourbon postpones the Bang.

Misrouted email: Niral, in Finance, in thong, smartphone aimed at her hotel mirror. Meant for a luckier Nathaniel, in Sales.

The artifact lets Nate let go. A balloon drifts over the cemetery.

My second instinct is to admit that Dan is 100% right. Like the too-rich landlord falling to his knees before a wild-eyed dustbowl preacher, I feel the urge to testify. To rend my suit and wail as I recount the Satanic thought process that has led me, more often than not, to bake my bread with the wheat of other people’s ideas.

But the reality is somewhat more nuanced.

I believe there are three distinct categories of game plagiarism. And since we’re making an ethical judgement here, it’s important to clarify:

1. Reverse Engineering: If you have an edge on the means of distribution for a new ecosystem but need a “hit product” ASAP to distribute, then looking at another popular Game X and all-out cloning the sensibility, economy, theme, and user interface, has proven to be great business. Often this work can be done by a clever programmer with no background at all in psychology, storytelling, or economics.
2. Synthesizing: If you understand the brilliantly-wired sources and sinks of Hit Game A, savvy viral design of Hit Game B, and beloved theme of Hit Game C and blend them together, then this is way to create something low-risk but still fresh. The world all-out canonizes people that successfully “steal but not borrow” this way, such as Picasso or Steve Jobs. This type of work takes the most discerning of design minds, a mind of pure and perfect taste that keenly understands exactly how to surgically combine the essential parts of each animal.
3. Expanding: This happens when you love Game X so much you just want to build it yourself. As you build, you find yourself seeing flaws, prodding, tweaking, adding, excising, retrenching, and eventually stumbling out with something you genuinely like better than Game X. The outcome is familiar but has never quite been played before.

So the purist’s argument — Danc’s argument — is that the intention behind all three of these categories are fully guilty of Plagiarism. Yes, riches may flow to Savvy Reverse Engineers such as the makers of Farmville or Kingdoms of Camelot, epic audiences may flock to Master Synthesizers such as Millionaire City, and lasting cultural relevance may bless Expanders such as Bejewelled… but all of these companies and the people that toil within are Guilty, Guileless, and Unoriginal.

Speaking for myself, my career is actually more a dialectic between innovation and willful borrowing.

• Feeling boundless and young, I tried to innovate. I found that it was hella difficult to finish something that was any good. So I picked a game and Expanded.
• Feeling unfulfilled, I tried to innovate. I walked over coals. I fought armies of nay-sayers. Bloodied and weary, I delivered. The market crapped on me. I needed a quick, guaranteed recovery. I Reverse Engineered.
• Feeling dirty, I tried to innovate. But being responsible for the livelihood of many others beside myself, I playtested and coldly, analytically began to understand what audiences who actually pay actually want. I Synthesized.

I’m hopeful, indeed — I am counting on the fact that some of the very out-there prototypes and half-formed ideas in my skull will one day be both purely innovative and widely enjoyed. But until then, I’m okay with delivering fun experiences based primarily on the hard work of those who have come before me as long as I’m changing things up enough to advance the genre and learn something from the process.

And so: I proudly defend Synthesizers and Expanders. It’s harder to argue for the ethics behind Reverse Engineers… but even there I have faith that, long term, those with a Reverse Engineering culture will find themselves unable to even slightly innovate. Those companies and individuals will stall out once they’ve ripped off all there is to obviously steal.

To flip things a little bit, Danc, I leave you with this challenge:

You have Truly Innovated (I friggin’ love Triple Town). Amazing, wonderful, unique, delicious work.

But is that enough? Whose fault is it if Triple Town doesn’t become a mega-hit and turn Spry Fox into a Billion Dollar company? What will it take for you to not only craft the New, but out-distribute the Reverse Engineers, pre-figure the Synthesizers, and beat the Expanders at their own game?

Go get ‘em, Danc!

I am one of those pathetic souls guilty of agonizing over the issue of whether computer games can ever become real art. Yes, I dared give voice and ask questions like:

>> Can Mafia Wars ever come close to leveling up to the emotional tension and soul of the Godfather Trilogy (well, okay, let’s limit it to I and II)?

or

>> Will the Grapes of Wrath ever be harvested on Farmville?

And so, rather than lock myself in my basement with a flask of cheap bourbon and write yet another one of those why can’t games be more art-like whines,  I sneaked away from the kids for a few weekends and made an actual game — something that says something about something.

Behold: MelVille.

I won’t ruin it all by making a “statement of artistic intent” or somesuch. I won’t cow-tow about the meta-meaningfulness of satire. But let’s just say that games mean a whole lot to me… and that I’m less than thrilled with the direction the medium is taking  since the undeniable triumph of social network games. Also, Moby Dick means a lot to me. As a literary agent I once conned into a meeting once scolded, “You think your novel is experimental? All experimental fiction written since 1850 is just Moby Dick in drag.” That comment got me to carefully re-read the boring brick I had been assigned in High School… and I realized he was right.

If this game exposes a glimmer of what a Great Book can Do to even one person, I will be Happy.

If it hits an ARPU of $0.10 I’ll be even happier.

A better phrase for “social games” might just be “popfast games”.

Start by thinking about pop music. Is the music that sells the most widely the “best” music? The most “inventive” or “innovative”? The melodic phrasings that took serious artistic risks or lyrics that tried to actually say something? Or is pop music, more than anything, the music that you happen to listen to? The music that plays in the background while you and your buds hang out, battling against crushing boredom?

Pop is everywhere, always, at once. On the radio/Pandora, on TV/YouTube, topping the Billboard/iTunes charts. Pop gets inside you, forcing your foot to tap before it remembers to be cynical, forcing the teenage-fangirl inside us all to shriek, “Gawd I luv this band!”

Sure, every once in a while an obscure, innovative song miraculously rises to the top of the charts and becomes naturally, organically pop. But more often pop is painstakingly manufactured by a very big industry. Few record companies understand the current gestalt well enough to produce a tune and develop a pop star both new-feeling and familiar-feeling enough to work across the broadest of audiences. But even fewer companies can take a nascent sensation and understand and manipulate the media machine and marketing ecosystem well enough to engineer the fact that everyone is listening to the same song at the same time.

Pop is also unique to the medium of music. Modern music is purely portable, able to be layered onto the rest of life – at work or study, driving or dining. There have been “pop art” and “pop film” and “pop fashion” and “pop fiction” movements, and other media certainly succeeds in manufacturing hits and using expensive marketing to make products feel ubiquitous. But only music can truly be pervasively pop.

Until now. With the mass adoption of the Web and smartphones, games too have become purely portable and able to be layered onto life. And with the dominance of Facebook games now have a context to live in involving chums and colleagues whose consumption habits you can continually follow like a wave carrying the same piece of flotsam in to shore, back out, and sometimes in again where it will, for a time, litter the beach of your consciousness.

With apologies to Wikipedia, check out this chart that clinically lists the characteristics of pop music versus those of social games:

Of course the even greater potential and power of social games is that they are not media like a canned pop song – they are an ongoing service. So really the pop music metaphor breaks down once the player actually arrives at the game. A better metaphor at that point becomes a convenient place that people drop into out of habit, a place that nearly everyone passes by during their daily journey, a place with cheap, quick, addictive treats.

We’re talking ‘bout fast food.

So let’s review. For a company to succeed consistently at social games it needs to be masterful at:

• The market research or raw skill capable of capturing or cloning a gestalt.
• The technical and artistic prowess to achieve scalable, fast-loading productions.
• Engineering the social network to make it seem like everyone is grooving to the same frequency.
• Merchandising, branding, and the systematic measurement and control mechanisms involved with running and scaling a successful franchise.

Social game companies (and wannabes) are just now grappling with the magnitude of capital and breadth of expertise required to release and run a continual flow of hits. They are painfully realizing the need to weave discrete disciplines together and get it all running in lockstep.

We all – as human beings or companies – have things in our repertoire we truly know because of sheer experience; the knowledge is inherent and core to our way of thinking. And we all also have things we copy baldly from leaders and fake our way through. Most social game companies are deeply in the latter category – either stuck in boxed-game mentality or so focused on metrics and feedback loops that they are unable to branch out and experiment with even the simplest of innovations.

Few companies will make the leap to popfast.

And even fewer will really harness the full potential of popfast anytime soon. After all, pop music brings people together because it truly heightens emotion and becomes the soundtrack of precious memories. Fast food restaurants, meanwhile, feed a very essential human hunger (arguably unhealthily, but certainly cost-effectively). Popfast games have the ability to achieve true togetherness and give humans a platform through which to express and understand themselves in entirely new ways. The company that figures that out will dominate this new art form.

• Involved play
• Told meaningful stories
• Connected people

I believed that if I could hit on those three key notes in innovative ways then the things I helped build could usher in an entirely new form of mass market entertainment. I honestly believed in the power of play and that iWin’s games could significantly ratchet up people’s overall sense of happiness and fulfillment by stimulating their imaginations while forming real relationships.

Over the years iWin pivoted from skill-based online games to a downloadable games to social games,  from tournament-fee to in-game-ads to subscriptions. From Java to C++ to Flash. Working in conjunction with CJ Wolf, an imaginative, risk-taking, and market-savvy CEO, I spent most of my work days designing out “Version 1.0″ products –  coordinating talented teams of  artists and engineers to take crazy ideas and, through a Frankenstein-like process of digital alchemy, make them live.

Some of the products I worked on failed miserably but most were viable little audience-builders and revenue-generators. A rare handful became big enough successes to spawn entirely new lines of business.  But looking back, almost none of the products hit simultaneously on those three idealistic notes of Play, Story, and Connectivity.

When Facebook’s platform opened up and “social games” began to gain momentum two or so years ago I saw a glimmer of hope in bringing those three forces together. I felt excited and charged-up in a way I hadn’t been since those early iWin years. And the eventual revelation that the virtual goods model was actually pumping out some serious cash was icing on the cake.

One of the new social games I helped tickle into existence using duct tape, spit, and static electricity was a little nugget called Family Feud. It combined a fantastic, classic game show format (one that makes unread people feel like champions of trivia), a truly together-with-family-and-friends social brand,  along with an original and meaningful viral hook. Tens of millions of players later, the game has done more than addicted a good chunk of Facebookies — it has become the focal point of iWin’s new strategy and I believe it will transform the company from a shrink-wrapped casual game publisher into a true contender in the social game — indeed, mass media — industry.

But an odd thing happened as a result of this success. My little “I-think-I-can” and “try a bit of this and a bit of that” company now needed discipline, focus… coordination. There was no longer a strong need for the mad scientist. The disruptor in me had to constantly bite his tongue and let the talented game-devs around me dig foundations deep and skyscrapers high.

Now… to digress a bit… an inspirational American businessman I hold in great esteem is George Washington Carver. Before Carver came on the scene, Southern agriculture  was basically monoculture — that is, focusing only on one crop: Cotton. Other crops were considered bad business.

Against all odds for a man of his skin color, this “Black Leonardo” combined his skills in scientific invention, hucksterism, agricultural engineering, and art to develop, teach, and build upon practical uses for peanuts, soybeans, pecans, and sweet potatoes. By understanding every aspect of numerous industrial processes he was able to combine wasteful by-products into hot new commodities. His vision ultimately expanded the overall economy and helped impoverished farmers grow more varieties. This meant families could rotate their fields to keep soil fertile, avoid catastrophe by relying on just one source of income, and overall break the downward cycle of cotton dependency. More to the point, Carver helped jolt the world awake with instant coffee and he spread mainstream the perfect, chunky deliciousness of peanut butter.

I don’t claim to be even a tiny peanut-shell-scrap of the man that George Washington Carver was, but I have had some success at shaking up monocultures and turning crap crop to peanut butter.

Enter into the story another American businessman I have long admired: One Trip Hawkins, the CEO of Digital Chocolate, founder of EA, and about as close as you can get to a real-life Video Game Titan. Trip and I occasionally bumped into each other throughout the years and had brief but deep chats about the directions of our respective companies, where the markets were going, and the pros and cons of various emerging platforms. Talk with him long enough and you’ll see that Trip is indeed an apt nickname. He’s got some Ideas with the capital-I.

The last time Trip and I met we were both in good moods. Much like iWin, Digital Chocolate has had an amazingly successful year due in large part to their own Facebook games such as Millionaire City. But Trip then spun a compelling tale about Digital Chocolate’s direction: A story that involved not just entrenching and building off their social game momentum but pulling back a bit, looking future-ward, and thinking through  bigger, badder, gapless ways that social networks, smartphones, TV, and the wider web itself can work in concert to give the world broader connected gameplay and deeper story.

And so… Peanut Butter… meet Chocolate.

As of November 1st, I will jump aboard as Digital Chocolate’s VP of New Platform Development. I’ll work with Trip and his world-class and world-strewn team, researching, interconnecting, and building upon cutting-edge game mechanics, business models, and technologies.

I’m certain it will be an unrivaled, and utterly delicious, education.

Now I know that’s some downright geeky “we’re all in the matrix” shizzle right there. Maybe I can clarify with some examples:

• The Endless Tutorial: Most modern games have a tutorial where you are put on a track, learn the rules of how to interact, and plod along unable to really get hurt. You can’t fail most tutorials, just take longer or shorter times to pass them. But many best-selling games continue to automatically scale their difficulty based on my (usually crappy) performance. This is smart: It lets a hard-core player feel challenged while letting a casual player “skip” the hard parts and “play through” the story. You and I each take 2 or 3 wacks at killing the boss, even though you crafted a highly tactical, brilliant, trigger-finger-numbing approach and I just stupidly mashed buttons. Your game’s variables are not at all like mine but your experience is roughly my experience. The line between where the tutorial ends and “real” play begins has blurred.
• Graph Games: Social games, as many have argued and ranted, are not games. Indeed, many of the top games can fairly be called a complicated series of pretty progress bars that simply give “players” an excuse to use (abuse?) the Facebook social graph.
• Tuning for Everyman: The art of “playtesting” is to watch people play your game and tune it to achieve the best effect — so that the experience is frustrating in proper proportion to being rewarding. As audiences become mass market and our games try to capture them all, playtesting for every demographic becomes unfeasible. Tweaking a live game based on analytics certainly helps standardize it to the average clump of players. But ultimately, to appeal to the entire curve, our games itself must become smart enough to know when they are becoming unfun and react accordingly.

Think of it as a pure game of Pong versus handball in the holodeck where your robotic opponent — and even the very laws of physics — are fluid and will shift so that you are calculated to always sawtooth a bit ahead or a bit behind your opponent, except for the very endgame when your opponent bursts far ahead but then you amazingly catch up via series of spectacular moves in the utter nick of time. It’s a false victory, a totally stuffed ballot… But if it feels great, does it matter?

I’m not sure how I feel about this trend. There’s obviously nothing wrong with an engineered arc of emotion — that’s the whole point of narrative forms such as novels, movies, and even some music. In fact, some of the more artsy folk in our industry (weak hand up) have been crowing for years that games don’t provide enough raw emotion. Mastering the discipline of understanding our player’s psychological states and then manipulating it carefully and deliberately can finally make the impossible happen: Players can care so much about a game that they will cry — their webcams plus our whiz-bang facial recognition middleware will let us know the precise moment their eyes mist over.

We game designers need to acknowledge the path we are on, and the slippery slope it presents. I predict that over the next few years game design is going to officially bifurcate into two core disciplines: Interactive Game Design (i.e. creating rules for free play, like sports or board games) and Pseudo-Interactive Game Design (definitely needs a way better name than PIGD).

Take a real hard look at what you are working on with your latest game, what you are trying to achieve, what challenges you are working to overcome. Which type of designer are you slowly becoming?

For those who care about big brands, social games, or the legacy of Richard Dawson, the Social Times has published an interview about my company’s involvement bringing Family Feud to Facebook.

In designing the game, we pretty much had to break every dearly-held rule of social gaming. Family Feud is long-form, text-based, American-only, and losable. And yet it seems to be a hit — we’re nearly at 4 Million monthly users after 6 weeks out. Here are from slides from a talk I gave at the Social Games Summit:

What this means for me personally is that Family Feud has had more social and cultural impact (by most forms of measure) than any other project — game, writing, movie, or otherwise – I’ve ever toiled on. Knowing that so many people are spending so much of their leisure time on something you help pull the levers on is a tremendous feeling. This was (and is) an exhilirating ride.

Life, she is a funny beast.

At some conference-talk I gave two years ago I said social games would never make money. Eh, I was a bit off on that one.

Then I ranted about how the current crop of social games had no staying power. That they sucked. That there was no art-factor, no fulfillment-factor, no learn-something-about-the-world-or-myself factor. That because of this they would fizzle out fast.

A few million Farmvillers later sure taught me.

Truth is, I shouldn’t have been surprised. None of us should have been. The social games that work today play right into the ethos taught by American public schools and mega-corporations: Small rewards for repetitive, mindless effort.

Okay. So my “predictions” weren’t well-thought out visions of the future. They were visceral reactions to the obsolescence of my traditional craft in the industry’s most lucrative field. They were hopeful reactions against the deep cynicism that when given access to a person’s social circle (and after all, what are we other than who we know and how others perceive us?) it’s merely the basest urges that generate the most hype and cash.

I believe the rise of mass-market social games is more than a question of shallow vs. deep or genre vs. literary. I believe there is a true battle over the soul of the game industry going on, with the core difference being the motivation of the creators: Those who are excelling and will excel at making the most money at social games are revenue-minded marketing wizards, not experience-minded interactive artists. As Zhan Ye put it at this year’s Virtual Goods Summit, everything traditional game designers know and value is wrong.

And so here I am, by my own choice, leading up the social games group at my company. I  must struggle with my instinct to make the things I create meaningful and beautiful and joyful and boldly realize that this is antithetical to what I must be focusing on: Urges, compulsions, and funnels to revenue.

Fine, I’m clever enough to adjust, right? As Mad Men‘s Don Draper said, “You’re not an artist. You solve problems.” But is that really what I want to be doing with what little gamecrafting talent I have?

So here’s another prediction (and you already know my prognostication track record):

Very soon there will be an A-bomb of a social game that does something truly crazy – it will make more than money.

And it will usher in an entirely new era of creativity, giving games and their creators an unheard of amount of exposure and power.

Will it be the game that lets people gang up and form an entirely spontaneous but unstoppable cultural movement? The one that highlights how shallow most of your Facebook friendships are and forces you to acknowledge the true timbre of your human connections? The one that overthrows a despotic government? Or the one that gives you a genuine religious experience?

Until then, keep farming.

A lot of corridor talk centered around how top social game-crafters seem to basically be slapping spam-like functionality and heartless monetization techniques onto crappy and dated game mechanics and milking it for all it’s worth. Many core game associates were saying things like, “If all these people care about is profit, why aren’t they just working on Wall Street?”

As a knee-jerk reaction, I share a similar inherent repulsion to the whip-smart but cynical techniques that many social game companies use to turn players to engines for more-monthlies and those monthlies into mo’ money.

With young companies like Zynga raking in that mystical (if not mythical) “over $100 million,” these techniques are working and working well.

Christian Nutt wrote a fantastic summary at Gamasutra that captured some of the tension. In the comments to the article, the inimitable Ian Bogost scoffs at how “web assholes ” are:

…simply “leveraging social graphs for maximum microtransactional sellthrough” or whatnot.

Siqi Chen, who was targeted in the article as a cold-hearted metrics-head, responds:

For my part, I don’t agree that’s what our industry is doing. We have hundreds of thousands of people every day who are passionate about the community and games that we have built – we’re not just “web assholes.” … We’re people who have a background in web, communities, and data driven development that want to share a little of what we know in the hopes of getting more people like you who really understand game design involved in our industry.

Truth is, Siqi gave a fantastic talk, the best one of the summit. He covered social game metrics 101 in plain English and dug in deep on real tools, data, and insights instead of banal platitudes about “games that friends that can finally play together.”

Add to that, Siqi is a heck of a nice guy. He has no pretensions. His LinkedIn job description as CEO of Serious Business is, “Making stupid shit on Facebook for fun and profit.”

Siqi was careful before his talk to disclaim that metrics are not the end-all-be-all and he cautioned about spending valuable time and resources chasing “local maxima” — trying to tune, say, word variations on Facebook notifications to get a higher viral coefficient rather than adjusting something else that would have much greater impact.

But make no mistake: Whether intentions are noble or cynical, we’re in a battle for the soul of computer games. And it’s clear to see which side is kicking ass. Ultimately, what will most people in the world be playing? Will they be ramping up on intricate mechanics with specialized controllers, or whittling away their daily boredom doing game-like-activities via ubiquitous platforms?

Just as core game devs were jealous yet dismissive of the impact and reach of “watered down” casual games, casual game devs are frightened as they watch social games drawing away much of the mass-market attention and money.

And it’s the cyclical nature of the beast that today’s casual games market is stuck in the same cul de sac that trapped core games, educational games, and kid games – stuck atop an ever-shrinking local maximum that demands high production values, utter accesibility, and little originality.

For my part, I want to, and need to believe that the core metrics surrounding virality and monetization are always going to be local maxima. Making a more emotional, more impactful, more artful and polished and nuanced game (or game-like activity) will always lead to happier players — if not more players and more money. 

I’ve interviewed non-game-industry friends who have succumbed to buying points in Mafia Wars. They ultimately feel ashamed and a bit dirty about it. That’s not sustainable. There’s no doubt — social games must get richer and more artful to keep people engaged. Companies like PlayFish are already taking a stand, focusing on the gameplay first and metrics later — deliberately not shoving people to invite their friends, just making it easier to do so.

Who will win the battle?

As with all things, depends on what metric you’re measuring.

All of them suck… yet brilliantly suck you in, each in their own special way. The one that sucked the most, sucked like a pornographic nebula, is Zynga’s Mafia Wars.

I dutifully drag myself back to the browser every few hours and do enough Jobs, Fights, Property Buys, and occasional Blacklists to up my points. In case you haven’t played the game, doing these actions doesn’t involve negotiating a rich 3D world, outstrategizing opponents, or carefully balancing a recipe of spells – but just hitting buttons.

Bap, bang, ka-pow. Energy down, experience up. No more energy? Wait.

Easier’n than a 2006 mortgage.

Why? Why bother playing this thing?

There’s the joy of earning more “money” each hour as I buy more rental properties, though most of the cash is stolen from me through an endless news-stream of fights and heists.

There’s the joy of becoming ever-stronger and upping my attack and defense stats, but that doesn’t matter since there are always dozens of people literally thousands of levels ahead of me who can pound me into the dirt at Internet speed. And the way the game is designed, those with the largest “family” of 501 pretty much always win.

But I return again and again, uppin’ those friggin’ numbers.

It’s the same thing that drives World of Warcraft addiction. Same thing that drives the stock market.

The same single-minded worship of numbers empowers corporate crime… or organized crime, for that matter.

Maybe it’s a guy thing, an analytical thing, a geek thing, perhaps even a core human thing. But in this game, all the numbers you need are laid out right there in the top interface. Upping those numbers is essential. It fills a deep, pathetic, very real need.

And so I play. I almost helplessly watch myself inviting the dregs of my Facebook friends list, kids from elementary school that I haven’t spoken to in thirty years. I hitlist. I read forums for tricks on maximizing the battle algorithm.

I play. I invite. The numbers go up. I play.

I find the game overtaking my very dreamlessness. I wake up fully alert and replay “strategies” in my head to up numbers faster, harder, stronger. I sneak to my laptop… why waste a late nite opportunity to level up?

Everything  about the game is shameful. It was birthed as crappy cloned product of a cloned Apple II game, unembarrassed about copying the very interface, nomenclature, point balancing, and algorithms from the game it ripped off. It inspired a culture of mockingbird copycatters: Mob Wars, Mobsters, Facebook Mafia, The Ultimate Mafia, Mafia, Mafia Cities, All in Da Family– which came first? who can tell them apart? who cares? Carbon-copying a winning game quickly and usurping more daily actives has seemingly become a badge of pride in Facebook development culture. It makes people feel so badass.

Zynga then went on to clone themselves, applying the same back-end code to ever-so-slightly skinned versions for fashion, car racing, pirates, vampires, special forces, knights and dragons, superheroes. There are various “innovations” in the design in some of these games, but they’re all the same story.

Play. Invite. Spend a bit. Up your numbers. Repeat.

Yeah, these social games do work. And I respect aspects of them. The back-end database stat-crunching is bulletproof, considering the tens of millions of active players per day. I know what it takes to architect and maintain that sort of system, and that’s impressive.

Some of the designs also do a nearly perfect job of balancing numbers and time requirements, making it ludicrous to not invite everyone you can to join in. And so, people recruit each other like gangbusters. Forumfulls of otherwise intelligent players post their e-mail addresses in the open, hoping that you will “friend” them on Facebook for the sole purpose of adding yourself to their mobs.

Zynga’s doing great, milking folks on microtransactions and spam-filled offers. I myself often battle the urge to visit the Godfather and plunk down a few Visa digits so that I don’t have to wait for that next essential number-upping.

Facebook must love the growth these games drive. But looking more closely at the game’s top players and it clearly seems to be strangers and fake accounts, all adding each other via botnets in hopes of maxing out mobs. That’s utterly artificial. That’s noise… It may make metrics sing, but it’s not real.

And it’s the same with most (not all) of these social games. Even if you do limit yourself to playing them with your real-life acquaintances and friends. You may be gunning to beat your friends’ stats. You may be “engaging” with your friends as you one-up their mobs or “help” them out on missions by clicking on that big “Help Friend” button. You may even toss your friends virtual gifts if you’re really feelin’ generous.

But is that social?

Social is Risk or chess or Go Fish or touch football.

These social games succeed at spreading.  They deeply compel you to suck more people in and perpetuate the artless addiction. But is viral the best we can do? Viral is Swine Flu. Chain letters. Zombie infestation.

Much of this “social gaming” phenomenon is anything but. It’s about treating the human beings in your life as multipliers in your spreadsheet. It reduces the social graph to one dimension — turning your connections into a list of slightly less predictable non-player-characters with irrelevant backstories and only marginally interesting faces.

These social games? They’re petty, they’re deadening, they’re devoid of meaning, they’re…

Dehumanizing.

Just numbers.

They’re interesting for now. But they won’t last.