If there's any proof needed that social gaming is targeted at 40 year old women, then all you need to do is look at my Angry Birds Friends invite list. Granted, I'm 40-something myself and it falls out that most of my friends would be 40-something too, but out of the hundreds of facebook friends, they seem to like to badger me to invite only those ones.

There's an Angry Birds invite list? Where?

On the facebook Angry Birds Friends app. I guess they think I'm this guy as I'm not playing against enough friends!

When I was at Zynga we'd have brainstorming sessions about how to make games not only more addictive, but more addictive to men in particular.

They did have a few properties like Mafia Wars which they described as "blue," but most of their biggest, most successful properties were "pink."

At least in 2010, they felt that they had a good feel for how to dominate in the pink market, but were looking for new ideas on how to get stronger in the blue market -- which I think most male gamers would say they are very weak in.

The brass also wanted us to try to come up ideas outside of the "-Ville" paradigm.

In retrospect, it seems that they should have spent more effort on that! The ville games seem to be crashing the hardest, lately.

zynga should have just made a good facebook RPG they couldve made it work. instead they just reskinned the same game and renamed it for men. It wouldnt have been hard for zynga, all they would have had to do is look more inward to console game developers which is dominated by the 16-30 year males. IMO

No, it wouldn't have been that hard.

They didn't want to do that because they have no experience with games of that kind of depth, and it would take longer to become profitable than just reskinning FarmVille in 3 months. They also lacked the engineering expertise to make those types of games, though they could certainly have acquired it.

I personally thought that the key to Zynga's survival was to develop increasingly sophisticated games to go after the more hardcore gamer market. I really think that online games are going through an evolution like we saw in console based games: primitive graphics with very limited modes of gameplay early one, but inevitably moving towards games that are more CPU-intensive (and developer-intensive).

Their monetization strategy of getting people hooked on a "free" game and charging them for good items would definitely work on RPG or shooter games.

Flash has outlived its usefulness. Standards-based technology like HTML5 canvas & WebGL are starting to allow for some very interesting gameplay that woudn't even require the download of an executable. It still has a ways to go before we can play Call of Duty in the browser, but that day is quickly approaching.

And Zynga will no doubt be dead by then.

I played Spore in browser. It actually worked pretty well despite a few hiccups initially starting up. I was sorta shocked it could be done.