Neither social nor mobile games are designed in a vacuum. (In fact, the lion's share of both, at least in the US, are built by people with years or decades of experience in more "traditional" areas of the gaming industry.) They don't follow all the broadest trends in the industry, but in part the
very broadest trends in the industry are things GAF is frequently hostile to (with games like MW3 as convenient standins for said trends here) and one of the slightly less prominent trends is the long-tail/reconstructionist explosion which is mostly about how "broad trends" are less relevant than an industry where a thousand flowers bloom.
When you dig down on it, all the developments happening in the social and mobile space are drawing on the same library of game design that console games (or whatever) are. Zynga may be using studies of extrinsic reward for evil, but they're empowered to do so by building on the studies of behavioral reward loops that MMO designers have been obsessively studying for at least a decade; in a lot of ways, social games are a fringe of the MMO space, drawing off mechanics to implement in the most minimalist and extreme ways. Similarly, most mobile games are drawing on the gameplay lessons of the Arcade Revival movement and trying to emulate titles from the 1970s and 1980s, or trying to meld video game influences with ludic cousins like board games (look how popular Ascension, Words With Friends, Carcassone, etc. are on iPad.) None of this stuff is really coming out of left field, it's just picking up on different threads in the tapestry than what the biggest AAA games are doing (but not threads, IMO, that "traditional" indie titles aren't also exploring.)
I think the real reason these games tend to get so little traction with GAF is that they're
aesthetically so removed from GAF's interests. GAF's demographics lean towards the late-20s male (the demographic that supports gaming as a whole these days) but skew a good bit upmarket since this is an enthusiast forum with at least a bit of a reputation for thoughtful dialogue. There's a big range of content that works for people in that range (from solitary meditative affairs to salty one-on-one competitive games, from juvenilia to attempts at Serious Stories For Serious People, from extremely grounded to hyperrealistic or ultra-stylized) but it all comes back to those demographic groups.
When you start moving gaming outside of that 20something-male comfort zone, people get skittish. "Cute" games get short shrift with traditional gaming audiences. Games with slice-of-life or "mundane" aesthetics get gender-coded immediately and tend to be dismissed regardless of both content and platform. (Look how little attention Harvest Moon or the Sims get on GAF relative to their performance on the market.) Stuff that's explicitly marketed to kids or old people generates a huge backlash (look at the ongoing dissatisfaction with the Wii, Kinect, etc. -- and notice how of their ilk, the one franchise to originally get a pass was Guitar Hero with its 20-something-male-friendly aesthetic.)
And, I mean, the aesthetics of a lot of social/mobile/casual games
are legitimately awful. I can't blame anyone for looking at Farmville and thinking it's hideous, pandering, manipulative crap that sums up all the worst things about gaming in one place, because it kind of
is. But I really, honestly think the segregation of these fields is ultimately a demographic/aesthetic one, not a distinction that's borne out by real, bright-line differences in gameplay ancestry.
Whew. Sorry. I just said bullshit the first time because I knew I'd have to write something like this to explain myself properly.
