In 
this op-ed, Gamasutra editor-at-large Chris Morris tries to figure out why investors are so down on what could be a good thing for Zynga.
So Zynga and Facebook have agreed to see other people — and Wall Street is freaking out about that.
Zynga shares were down 8 percent in early trading Friday after the companies restructured their working agreement. And while those investors certainly have a right to be mad at Zynga in general, I think they might be getting it wrong this time.
Gamasutra editor-at-large 
Chris Morris looks at two traditional publishers — Activision and EA — examining how the packaged game giants will square off in the emerging social media space.
EA and Activision, despite their ongoing war of words, tend to swim in the same waters. Both like the military shooter genre. Both used to like the music genre. And both want to own the MMO market.
To date, that rivalry hasn’t extended to the social gaming and mobile space. While EA has substantially expanded into both fields, Activision has been content to sit back and view the fray from a distance. That could be changing before too long, though.
Social network games maker 
Zynga may postpone its debut on Wall Street, giving the company time to address SEC concerns and ride out the current instability among investors.
The company’s IPO, initially planned for early September, had been looked at as one of the most promising listings of the year, perhaps even moreso than LinkedIn, whose shares more than doubled when they began trading in May.
The social war between 
Facebook and Google just got a lot more fun.
Google+, the search giant’s fast-rising social network, has added games to its offerings, encroaching on the most profitable and popular part of Facebook’s empire. And it’s boasting some big titles, too.
Phone app fans of word 
games likely already knows about Words With Friends — but adding the popular Scrabble-like game to Facebook should make dwell times on the site soar. You can play multiple opponents simultaneously. And the more games you have going, the more likely you are to stick around. At its heart, the Facebook version is basically the same as the mobile version, but adds a couple new features like Brag Feeds (letting you gloat about triple word scores) and the ability to challenge friends directly through their news feeds. For word aficionados, this is one Facebook that will be hard to resist.
Though it’s a Facebook exclusive, Pig Up! 
is a game that could easily be played on any platform. And that, in itself, is an incredible achievement. But the game’s real strength is its utterly addictive nature. It’s the video game equivalent of a potato chip: Playing just once is nearly impossible. Fighting to top your friend’s scores adds a fun, safe competitive edge to the game. It also motivates you to improve, since a special flapple is deployed — giving you thousands of points and three extra flaps — whenever you pass the most recent high score set by your friends.
The game is still in preview/beta mode and PopCap will likely be adding new power-ups and perhaps new enemies, but even in its incomplete state it’s one of the best games on the social network site.
Chris Morris: Journalist 