I'm in the midst of a four week trip to downtown Venice in Santa Monica, a little enclave amidst the commercialism and sterility in this little part of the world. While driving down Wilshire the other day something inescapable hit me: Silicon Valley is the capitol of software, just like Hollywood is the capitol of movies and television.

This series on technology in Africa is written by Involution friends and emerging markets experts Niti Bhan and Muchiri Nyaggah.

Involution Studios Boston is located in Arlington, MA on Mass. Ave., in what was formerly the city's grand ballroom. When we took it over in late 2008 it was a pilates studio with wild green-and-blue paint and fixtures, along with mirrors lining the walls. To the discerning eye it was all potential.

After a conversation on The Digital Life with Brenda Brathwaite and Soren Johnson about "Social Game Design", it became clear that I needed to get to know Facebook Games better and see if there was more there than I thought. So right after the show I signed up for about a dozen Facebook Games. I played all of them for at least an hour. Two of them, Millionaire City and City of Wonder, I liked better than the rest and played them for a week or more. Then I decided that I liked City of Wonder best of all and have been playing it ever since. I even recruited my wife, my family and my friends to play it. And what I noticed early on, and what become glaringly obvious now the longer we play it, is the entire balance and conception of this game is seriously flawed. So, here it is in a nutshell: the design of Facebook Games has abandoned the old-school approach of trying to design a great game experience for players and instead is trying to design an engine to optimize revenues from the players. It is a huge difference in philosophy, where the marketers who are paid to make money have taken over from the engineers who are paid to make great experiences and in the process are reducing video game design from a deep and joyous hobby to a prettied-up form of interactive advertising. It is ironic, because we are at a moment where these games can be made much more cheaply than before, and there is plenty of money to be made even if the outcome is a great experience not a cash optimization engine. But these designers just can't help themselves. Either through corporate mandate or their own misguided design philosophy, they are focused on taking more money from the player while giving them far, far less.