It's social gaming, stupid

It's deeply ironic that Zynga, the new king of gaming, has its San Francisco offices in those previously inhabited by Atari, the great games king of the 1970s.

The two companies represent profoundly different eras in computer gaming. Atari, the early pioneer, which gave a job to a young, hairy Steve Jobs, built rudimentary but compelling games you could play through the TV sets of the day.

Zynga, something of a pilot fish feeding on the success of the great internet shark Facebook, makes rudimentary, but compelling, games that people play on the social network.

In Facebook's stock market offering published last month, which will value it at between $75-billion and $100-billion, it revealed that 15% of its income comes from Zynga games.

Zynga, which has unfortunately given the world the time-stealing Farmville and Mafia Wars games, this week spent $180-million on OMGPop, the makers of a wildly popular new gaming app called Draw Something.

Already downloaded about 35million times in the six weeks since its launch, it is the smartphone equivalent of Pictionary - you have to draw a picture of something based on a written clue.

The drawings can be easy or challenging - such as "an apple or Lady Gaga" in one online description, clearly depending on what food group the lady is wearing this week.

In 2010 Zynga bought a popular online game that updated the classic Scrabble board game, called "Words With Friends".

This upgrade of the iconic old game does the same thing as Draw Something. It makes it social.

But there's the rub. Gaming, never a solitary experience when we played it around a board, is back to being social - even if the participants are sitting (all alone) in front of a computer, or on a mobile gadget. Let's call it Shapshak's First Law of Pretending We're Not Alone When We Are.

Social gaming, as it's known, is a new growth area in an already massive business. Gaming, you see, is big, big business - hundreds of millions of dollars big. It is much bigger than cinema or DVD sales, and much more addictive. The average, hard-core console game, for Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, can take up to 100 hours to play. That's a lot of time to dedicate to a brand. Games companies know it; so do advertisers.

Last week Diablo3, the long-awaited sequel to one of the best-selling role-playing games, was announced for mid-May.

A modern take on Dante's Inferno, the game had the hero (you) journeying into Hell to defeat the devil (you hope) but with no hope of finding the lost love.

Basically, role-playing games are Dungeons and Dragons for the digital era.

You choose characters from a range of species, some with magical properties, and a range of strengths and weaknesses.

The most famous is the massive multiplayer online role-playing game, World of Warcraft.

About 10million subscribers pay $15 a month to play the game in the make-believe world of Azeroth, a kind of code word for geekdom.

Other action-game franchises you may or may not have heard of are Halo (guns in space against aliens), the controversial Grand Theft Auto (you play a Russian mobster, killer and car thief) and, recently, Mass Effect 3, another space role-playing game.

But these are the games associated with pimply-faced teenagers and so-called hard-core gamers.

Social gaming draws in housewives, grandmothers, secretaries and, well, anyone who doesn't like shooting things in games.

You'll notice the above are mostly women, but the industry avoids saying that - even as they become the fastest-growing market segment.

Shapshak is editor of Stuff magazine