So go ahead and watch this:

Now, go ahead and work through your rage.  I implore you, resist the urge to track this guy down and stab him.  I know he SEEMS evil, but he’s actually totally spot-on – and not JUST about Zynga and “social” games.

A Simple Fact About Games:

If you’ve played nearly ANY “popular” game, you’ve played a derivative game.

World of Warcraft is just DikuMUD with a decade of somebody else (actually, NUMEROUS “somebody elses”) footing the bill to work out the kinks, expand, revise, polish and improve it.  All Blizzard did was come in and (to lift   Bailey’s phrasing) “add a +1″.  Ditto for every popular shooter, RTS, DOTA-clone, etc.  Even “jackpot” indie hits like Minecraft are built upon the shoulders of earlier, less-polished efforts.

I feel bad for indie developers who come up with wonderful new ideas, achieve moderate success and then see their ideas devoured by huge Mega-Studios, but that’s just LIFE in every form of industry.  Invent a new, magnificent widget in your garage that takes years of effort and every penny you have, then becomes the “darling” of gadget-heads everywhere?  A factory in China will be making a cheap-as-hell knock-off a week after it hits the market unless you have the kind of legal and financial muscle to influence the Chinese government.  And if you dodge that bullet, you can bet your ass major electronics companies will have lifted every significant aspect of your design within a year.

Yes, Zynga is a particularly soulless example of this behavior, but it’s foolish to pretend that there would actually BE a games industry without derivative “inspiration”.  What Zynga does is creepy, sad and (perhaps) ethically dubious, but it’s silly to pretend that it’s NEW.  So go ahead and be mad, but be realistic.

Sometimes – just SOMETIMES – I regret living in the post-Scientific Revolution era.  Sure, I like sanitation and the germ theory of disease and air planes and HDTV and all of that, but those goodies come at a price.  That price is the fact that we live in a world where we rarely accept things without evidence (except when it comes from talk radio or cable news).

The result?

You and I live in a world where we DON’T believe in lots of weird and wonderful things.

For example, we don’t believe that some lambs are the fruit of a magical super-plant.

No, really.

In an effort to figure out why cotton exists, medieval “scientists” decided that the best possible explanation was that a special kind of lamb sprouted from a plant and was connected to to that plant by an umbilical cord.  The Vegetable Lamb spent its life grazing about its host-plant and – once the plant died – the lamb died, leaving behind cotton.

THAT’s what science used to be like.  Totally insane, comic-book crazy explanations for EVERYTHING.

And I CHALLENGE you to tell me you’d rather live in a world where cotton comes from a stupid, boring little bush rather than from an insane plant/animal hybrid that exists in a legendary far-off land.