I saw the title and actually thought it meant Zynga was going to be making games for hobbyist bot programmers. Talk about a let down upon reading. From the "ch

I saw the title and actually thought it meant Zynga was going to be making games for hobbyist bot programmers. Talk about a let down upon reading. From the "cheating mafia games" department: I wrote a proxy server that would allow you to cheat at an iPhone variant of mafia wars. I watched its packets and saw some holes in the normally pretty solid OAuth communication it used with their servers. I never published the trick because it really made the game even more unfun than it was. Cheating is pretty rampant in games like this, but I don't know how anyone can enjoy doing it because there's really no fun in any game where the rules are meaningless. If you're designing games, be sure you try really hard not to rely on the client for important game information, or put in other checks and balances to help catch lies and exaggerations coming over the wire. From the "when I was a kid" department: The first "software" I ever sold were scripts to automatically play BBS games like TradeWars. I'm glad that companies weren't flexing their legal muscles quite so much back then about auto-game-playing or it might have turned me off to doing software in the first place.