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.

Today we launched our new website for The Digital Life show - which is where you will find the latest episode, as well as all future episodes. Bookmark it:

Year-End Spectacular. Special guest Juhan Sonin. Bull Session and It's News to Me.

Social Game Design. Special guests Brenda Brathwaite and Soren Johnson. Bull Session and It's News to Me.

"Design Thinking". Special guests Michael Dila and Peter Merholz. Face-Off and It's News to Me.

Mobile and the Future of Computing. Special guests Jim Leftwich and Luke Wroblewski (LukeW). Bull Session and It's News to Me.

This week's much-ballyhoed launch of RockMelt is again getting the tech intelligentsia in a lather about a potential new browser. What they seem to be ignoring is that the battle has already been won and lost: the best case scenario for RockMelt is, romantically, they become a plucky cult favourite like Flock before running out of steam and sinking into obscurity; pragmatically, they are doing things so well and advanced that they are bought and assimilated by the companies who have already won this space.

What search engines do best is immediately give us lots of scattershot information. It may be relevant, or it may not. It may be timely, or it may not. It may be useful, or it may not. While search engines used to be magic, as we become more mature users of connected computing devices, increasingly their results are clumsy. While it remains remarkable that they can bring us so much so quickly, the uneven nature of what they are providing is increasingly frustrating as we continue to expect more.