1 Facebook Games Were Evil

This chapter began in the early 2010s as a way to investigate Facebook games—one of the newest, most talked about forms of videogames at the time. Looking back now, it seems quaint that one game platform could cause so much angst; words like evil and cancer were tossed about casually in referring to it. Yet the hyperbole felt legitimate. Facebook games—also referred to as social games—were a challenge in many different ways to traditional games, gamers, and game developers. Our case study therefore took them as a convenient and timely point of departure to investigate. If Facebook games were not really real, why was that? What was so disturbing about them that so much digital ink was spent trying to purge them from the ranks of the real? Which of their elements or component parts comprised that fatal flaw? This chapter, now updated and more historically contextualized for the time period in question, answers those questions, and provides an overview to our conversation about how the not real can tell us much about what is really real and why it matters.