Zynga's Brian Reynolds: Open Feint and Game Center are 'awkward'

Zynga' Chief Game Designer Brian Reynolds recently met with Games.com - The Blog! to talk about FarmVille, Zynga and the state of the social gaming world.

Among other things, he talked about Zynga's plans (or seeming lack of plans) to take their Facebook games and make them playable on mobile phones. In short, Reynolds says that it has been difficult to recreate the social/Facebook experience on mobile because, well, no one's created a platform that does it right yet -- not even Open Feint and Apple's Game Center, which are the two leading game-centric mobile social networks.

Here's a snippet of the larger conversation:

Zynga has been slow to get its games on mobile. What's the philosophy behind that as a company?

Well, the philosophy up to now, or the obstacles up to now in the mobile space have been -- what I would say are -- ironic obstacles. Cause you think about it, that phone has all your contacts on it, you text people on it, and then you email, and they're all they're on the list. When you hit someone's name, it'll ask you whether you want to text them, or call them, or email them. It's right there on the interface. It's an inherently, natural, social device.