I just came across this article about Zynga CEO that knew he was scamming user on mafia war and farmville but didn’t care at the time. The article was written in october 2009 and you can see the evolution of fix and ban that zynga have got for there game since the article from techcrunch.

The best part is probably the quote from the zynga ceo found in this article.

“I did every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues,” -Mark Pincus

There a lot of game that use to have these stupids offers, I never bothered to check them except when it was just an offer that say “check that website”, you click and then got the money.

Here the techcrunch article and all the update if you want to know more about this.

Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell

I ran on another interesting article about farmville today. Cultivated Play: Farmville from the blog media common.

My favorite part : “Again: if Farmville is laborious to play and aesthetically boring, why are so many people playing it?”

Read the article if you want the awnser but for me I’ve stopped playing farmville a while ago. Still don’t understand somebody willing to pay 1400$ for this game or even get fired for playing it, but it seem that the social aspect of it is really waht drive this addiction.

So go ahead and read it here : Cultivated Play: Farmville

It seem that farmville hit the news again when a kid spent around 625 pound (1400$). When the parent found out they tried to ask for a refund and zynga didn’t want to give anything back.

Should Zynga pay something back ? When something like that happen with cloth or material goods you can exchange back what was bought. But where the line with virtual good ? Should Zynga remove the virtual good from the kid acount and give some of the money back?

What your opinion on that ? The full article here.

Game can be addictive sometime and sometime you just can’t stop playing. I remember having to login at work to lauch my troop in tribal war so the troop will arrive at the same time my allies sent them. (note that’s not on my current job at least …) Or waking up durring the night in King of Chaos so I could use my cash so nobody would steal it. It seem that someone have done even worse, he played farmville during a town council and got fired for it. You can read some more of it here

It’s not the first time that we hear these kind of story, WoW was probably one of the game that really mess up poeple, like on this forum thread :

“World of Warcraft stole a year of my life and ironically got me fired from Gamestop. It will take over your life, and just one month ago, I got out of the addiction.” -PsiRedEye22

They’re even employer that instruct their recruiter to screen any world of Warcraft players.  Note, it was just on recruiters if you dig up a little, but still should you have to tell your playing online game to your employer. Here the original article at f13.net. The thread point out that online game might have the reversed effect, it might actually help you get a job like here or that it helps you learn about leadership and project management skill (more here).

Did some of you got the same problem? Tell us your story.