Zynga's Brian Reynolds trying deeper, more clever social game design

Hey, you asked for it. Zynga's chief game designer Brian Reynolds never rests, and even now he's working to bring deeper game mechanics to social games without increasing their complexity, Gamasutra reports. Good call, Reynolds, because we're not sure these games could become more complex, really. (Have any of you seen Kingdoms of Camelot?)

In an interview with the game industry news site, the FrontierVille creator was asked whether he expected to social games to become deeper. Reynolds replied, "I think we'll continue to learn how to design games that way. We'll be better and better at hiding the friction, but making there be depth."

In fact, that's what the former Civilization designer has been up to all along. The mechanics you see happening in FrontierVille today were intentionally designed to intuitively teach you how to play without reading a manual or 700 pop-ups. How close he got to that point is up for debate, but he presses on regardless in the name of deeper Facebook games.