Last night was another of the incredible game-biz gatherings known as the Minna Mingle.  Jessica Tams and the Casual Games Association do a terrific job putting these events together, and bringing together people who love games.  It is nice to hang out and chat casually, without the overhead of powerpoint presentations, invoices, or term sheets.  I do have a criticism of the lecture content from the panel of experts.

MIND YOUR LANGUAGE!
This Mingle started with an hour lecture on Social and Community Games billed as The world as I see it: five minutes from ten social gaming virtuosos. It featured comments from such proven, venerable game authorities as Zynga, SGN, Gaia, “Bret”, MySpace, and Ooga.  Added together, those companies have almost 10 years in the games business.  Each company rep got to speak extemporaneously for 5 minutes on social games.  Most talked about the waves of VC cash, how the sector was set to explode, tricking users into playing, how this is just like -but Bigger than- the Dot-Com days, and how important it is to make horrible games that cater to the lowest common denominator.  In 60 minutes, the panel of game experts NEVER USED THE F WORD!!!

WHAT THE F#&%?!?
Once again, in 60 minutes, a panel of ten experts on how to make great social and community games never used the word FUN.  The lone outlier was Sean Clark of EA/Pogo, who did stress the importance of quality gameplay for building social networks.  One big diff is that Pogo actually owns their community, rather than piggybacking on others.  His heresy was countered by several others who said the best way to make a social game is to rip off Mob/Mafia/Gang Wars and reskin it with a different theme.

So the takeaway is that the game companies that have sprung up to capitalize on the popularity of Facebook and MySpace are not really game companies.  They are marketing companies that are building/buying/borrowing an audience to flip before the buzz fades.  They (notable exceptions are Kongregate and Pogo) use off the shelf web tools to borrow a segment of another company’s userbase.  Where is the long term value in IP, infastructure, and subscriber community?  Where is the FUN?