Playing in clans in old FPSes (in my case the Jedi Knight games) was social gaming. What Zynga (and similar) calls social gaming is inviting your friends to avoid having to pay money to progress.
Edit: I'm probably being excessively snarky. If Zynga has a genuine mission beyond profit, i'd love to see it emerge under new leadership. But the current state of casual and mobile gaming really saddens me.
I worked for Zynga. It sucks. Pincus is a terrible leader and he screwed us all. All that said, why should a company have a "mission beyond profit"? Isn't profit the point of being in business? Should a company really need to do more than provide a service that customers find valuable and make money for investors.
Nothing has to be anything, but as long as humans are involved, shouldn't we try to maximize humanity? Maybe by attempting to make the world a bit more fun, interesting, and livable? Otherwise, what's the point of living, really. I mean, no one has to do that, but if being a profit-machine is one's goal, they shouldn't pretend that they are something else. Otherwise it starts to seem a bit sociopathic.
"I returned as CEO last spring to restore Zynga’s focus on our vision for social gaming. Zynga was founded with the belief that games could be a core daily activity for everyone. While mobile accessibility has made gaming a leading global industry, games are actually less social today than when they lived on Facebook web. Think about it. How often do you play mobile games with your friends, other than in Words With Friends? Our opportunity – the Zynga opportunity – is to deliver players innovative experiences that make it easy and fun to play together again."
This is what I was referring to, a claim of wanting to achieve something other than make money, which rings utterly hollow. If this was a true vision of Zynga, I want to see evidence of it.
This may not be entirely clear to you yet, but most (there are exceptions) of the f2p and "social gaming" online games (regardless of whether they're in a browser, mobile phone, or sometimes even on the desktop) do not by design have any mission whatsoever other than profit. The opposite, they are designed to abuse "bugs" of the human psyche (read up on sunk cost fallacy among others) to maximize profits while staying just barely legal.
Zynga and others, quite frankly, are some of the first companies i'd love see crushed by class action lawsuits. I'm sure they've ruined lives with the product they knowingly produce to be as addictive as possible.
I'd have thought my comment indicated all this was entirely clear to me, but no matter. Sometimes i've deliberately played these games to try and find the point at which you absolutely cannot realistically expect to progress without spending ridiculous money.
If Zynga has a vision of a future of games being social, they have to stop being inherently anti-social.
Edit: I'm probably being excessively snarky. If Zynga has a genuine mission beyond profit, i'd love to see it emerge under new leadership. But the current state of casual and mobile gaming really saddens me.