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OMGPOP's Dan Porter sold Draw Something for $200 million to Zynga on March 21, 2012. The social drawing game was on its way up. By April 3, it struck gold at 14.6 million users. The decline since then has been slow and steady - and it's not the kind that wins the race.

Drawing can be a social experience, but it is often times best as a solitary, nongameified couple of hours. Not everything needs to involve another person. The danger of these sorts of games is that the user believes they are connecting and communicating with another human. 

Last week, the smartest kids on the planet came to St. Louis to participate in the First Robotics Global Championship. The event drew more than 2,000 teams from schools around the world to build three different kinds of robots and compete for some serious prize money. It is a very fun but challenging event: Each robot has particular tasks to perform, both under human control and under its own autonomous programs. The teams have just six weeks to design and build the robots and raise funds for the contest. In a sense, it is a lot like running a miniature business.

Mass Effect. Grand Theft Auto. Halo. Farmville?

The gaming industry has long been dominated by franchises with hardware-crushing graphics, hundreds of hours of tightly scripted gameplay, and multiyear development budgets of $50 million or more. But now the hottest titles are mobile or Facebook games that took a couple guys a week to knock out. Does Z-Y-N-G-A spell “game over” for big gaming?

Disney is a household name in America. The corporation has its hands in everything, from film, video, theme parks, television, toys and other products, Disney is one of the main manufacturers of American pop culture. Yet its history of cold war propaganda, union-busting, exploitation of sweatshop workers and racist, sexist and homophobic imagery brings with it a darker look at the corporation that manufactures the ideals that seep into our cultural conscience. Its social games unit, Playdom, is making sure that Disney moves its reach into the world's largest social network, Facebook.

Still in its adolescent phase, transitioning from being a private to a publicly-owned company, Facebook is sinking into every aspect of American pop culture. So Disney is making sure its version of pop culture lives on through Facebook social games. In these types of games, players are implicated in their own narrative, interacting in a virtual reality with other users for one, common goal: to win. Its new hidden object game Animal Kingdom Explorers launches today. It brings forth the current generation of players, cultural ideologies and values, taking its inspiration from select aspects of Disney's Animal Kingdom Theme Park, specifically Harambe and Anandapur or, as Disney says, Asia and Africa, the two continents that American pop culture easily exoticizes.

The obvious lesson from Zynga's purchase of OMGPOP yesterday is that the games industry is still very much a hits-driven business. And when you're the giant in the business and a small startup like OMGPOP has a smash hit, it's easier to buy the hit than try to replicate it. That's why Zynga was happy to part with up to $210 million, reportedly, for the New York-based studio.

But there's more than meets the eye here. OMGPOP is a fascinating story in the life of a startup, with many lessons to learn here for entrepreneurs, developers, financiers, and dreamers.

Would it help you when reading the ratings for a video game as determined by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, to read a warning that states violent video games have been linked to violent behavior? Would it help you if that warning appeared on all ratings for nearly all games, including those that have no violence whatsoever? Would it help if you knew what "linking" means in this context?

The latest version of a bill to amend the video game ratings system with mandatory violent behavior warnings, was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives on Monday. It is (especially as bills go) very short - four paragraphs, with a bite-size format that suggests its readiness to be attached as a rider to other legislation, perhaps an appropriations bill more likely to pass without much debate. If the language finds its way into law, then a sensible means of informing buyers about the content of their software may be amended by mandate with a statement with which some scientists are not in agreement.

Zynga acquired the maker of the runaway hit mobile game Draw Something for a reported $180 million.

In addition to the purchase price, Zynga will pay $30 million in employee retention bonuses as part of its acquisition of OMGPOP, a 40-employee New York City shop, according to AllThingsD. The move is the biggest yet in Zynga's strategy to diversify its revenue stream from Facebook, but the acquisition announced Wednesday drew immediate questions about whether Zynga had overpaid for a competitor.

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt of "The Modern Parent's Guide to Kids and Video Games," by Scott Steinberg, which is free to download at www.ParentsGuideBooks.com.

In addition to understanding the many real concerns that today's parents have with video games, it's also worth considering the benefits and positive aspects that contemporary interactive entertainment choices provide.

Zynga is in talks to partner with other portals in a bid to wean itself off the Facebook teat.

The company is the largest game developer on Facebook and raised $1 billion last year in an initial public offering of its stock. But investor enthusiasm has been lackluster since then, in large part because the company, which credits 90% of its sales to Facebook, is seen as being too dependent on social networking giant. Facebook takes a 30% cut of virtual wares sold in Zynga games.

Today Zynga announced its fourth quarter earnings and 2011 financial results. Zynga now makes the top five games played on Facebook. Its non-GAAP earnings per share were five cents, or $37.1 million for the quarter. But even though it had a 59% gain in sales, it posted a loss for the period.

If Zynga is going to succeed, FarmVille has to lose its super uncool factor. And "play" must become a completely mainstream behavior that's as acceptable as buying $30 t-shirts at Urban Outfitters.

"We see [play as] a popular large-scale behavior, but we'd like to see play reach a level of search, shop and share, and we think the monetization opportunity will follow that," said Zynga CEO Mark Pincus. If Zynga is to succeed, it will be because the users make play as much a part of their daily routine as checking Facebook.