Benjamin Jackson, a New York-based game designer and writer, has a terrific essay in The Atlantic arguing that “too many video games treat players like rats in a Skinner Box, lulling them into easy stimulation but requiring little creativity.” (The essay is part of a longer piece Jackson has coming out in the new journal Distance. I was impressed enough with the project to subscribe (or donate, or whatever term you want to use) via Kickstarter.)

What jumped out at me was a quote from one a Zygna executive talking about where the real strategic challenge in a game as easy as FarmVille can be found:

the hard fun coming in is in perhaps surprising places, like thinking about your social graph and how you, in real life, are managing that – well, am I sending, you know, friend requests to these, these people?… [T]hat’s actually part of the game, and designers know that.

Another agreed,

The games themselves aren’t where the action happens; the strategy component is: when do you reach out into your social graph? When are you going to spam that list? How frequently are you gonna do that?

Or as Jackson explains,

I’ll reiterate this in plainer language, just in case the quote wasn’t clear: Detsaridis said that one of the most compelling parts of playing Zynga’s games is deciding when and how to spam your friends with reminders to play Zynga’s games.

Now, in some way I suppose it might be “hard fun” to decide how much to pester your friends, but– actually, no it’s not. It’s just plain immoral to use behavioral levers to get people to exploit their friends. Of course you want your friends to join in something you’re enjoying– that’s quite natural– but the ease with which these ordinary motives dovetail with Zygna’s need to constantly grow their membership numbers in order to have a hot IPO is just, well, too perfect. It’s like a cool game involving chain letters, where all the money goes to one person and you get the intrinsic reward of having sent letters.

It also nicely illustrates something that I’ve been writing about recently: the different ways the Web 2.0 world and human worlds recognize what “friendship” is. For us, friends aren’t mainly nodes in a social graph from which we extract resources; they’re, well, people we spend time with, or share ideas with, or do things with, or care about. For a company, friends are potential players who you just haven’t pestered enough.