THe new breed of social games feeding off of Facebook is fascinating. In this NYTimes article Seth Schiesel summarily captures the essence of these games, which is that they are business machines ingeniously cloaked in the veil of interactive entertainment.

When you talk to most designers of great games they will tell you something along the lines of, “We make the kind of games we would want to play.” That never feels like the case with Zynga games. To me, a game like FrontierVille says, “We make the kind of games we think can best attract and monetize the most number of people with credit cards who don’t mind dropping $10 or $20 once in a while for a virtual tchotchke.”

He goes on to describe how the social reward systems for these games lead to additional customers. All in all, the article does a great job summarizing Zynga’s successful tactics.