Zynga: A Plague Upon Our [Game] Houses

This year, Facebook social game "developer" Zynga was included in The Escapist's March Madness rounds of voting. Zynga made it all the way to the Final Four, beating out more established and influential game houses such as Infinity Ward and Rockstar North. And even in the Final Four, gave Valve a run for their money.

This sparked outrage of epic proportions across the Escapist forums. While I tried to avoid the mindless flaming, even I was floored by the "validation" Zynga has managed to accrue for itself. Many people commented wondering where the hate was coming from, and for myself, it stemmed from many places.

First, Zynga is a plagiarist. They settled with the makers of Mob Wars when they copied it for Mafia Wars. Farmville (especially the original release) was a flat out copy-paste of the game FarmTown with their own sprites. Many of their other games, particularly games like Vampire Wars, Fashion Wars etc are simply copy-pastes of Mafia Wars, but with different themes. I can accept copies of classics such as Bouncing Balls, Tetris, etc.

If the so-called "social gaming" (though personally I don't see what's "social" about spamming your feed with linksfor random people you only friend-ed to grow your army) genre had to be admitted, the creators of Castle Age offer a much better game. It has story, characters,  weapons and armor, and a much better development than anything I've seen from Zynga.

Second, should "social-gaming" developers be accepted as "real" developers, and should they be given the same kind of recognition as those that have have been a great influence in the industry. Some argued that Zynga was doing a positive thing by exposing a new audience to video games.

But, giving people with only a passing knowledge of a bastardized sub-genre of games the confidence to call themselves "gamers" is not a positive thing. You get a large influx of people who have no idea what they are talking about trying to bring about changes to make games accessible.

These changes are not always good. Look at Blizzard's World of Warcraft. Since the release of their more "casual-friendly" xpac, Wrath of the Lich King, the quality of the game has fallen to cater to players who can't be bothered to be proactive in controlling who they play with and flood the Suggestion Forum with a ridiculous amount of threads demanding that Blizzard step up and protect them from these "big, bad, mean" players. When told there are tools in-game to change their experience, they throw a hissy fit saying they shouldn't have to exert any effort because a game shouldn't require any effort.

A few posters on Escapist, including myself, used the current teen sensation Twilight to try to illustrate the point, from both sides of the fence. My viewpoint is that our culture is quickly disintegrating to the point where the cheap and tawdry is praised far more than the artistic and meaningful.

Twilight is praised, and its readers come to accept it as a high bar in the literary world, rather than for the drivel it is. Some argued that getting into Twilight may cause them to branch out into the great authors of the genre (Rice, King, etc). But in my experience, for every single one of those readers, there are a hundred more like this irate fan who send the message to corporate side of the artistic community that this is the standard that they should give deals to and hype the most.

Future writers dumb down their own writings in hopes of getting meeting the market's demands and get there works published. New generations are introduced to more drivel  and tripe, and the downward spiral continues.

The whole point of this is that we need to stop giving validation to any tripe just because it hides under the misnomer of "casual" and therefore if we don't accept it with open arms, we're just elitist pricks who can't stand change.

Not all change is good. So why do we continue to accept all change as if it were?

At least the anti-Zynga movement picked up enough momentum to finally put them out of this competition. A competition they never belonged in. I can only hope that they damage they have caused the game industry will remain at a real minimum.

Unfortunately, I don't believe this blight shall be ended so easily.