I've been playing a little Mafia Wars lately on Facebook and on the iPod. Zynga classifies both versions as "Social Games" but I don't think the iPod version is social at all.
First of all, it's not integrated with the Facebook version at all. You can't easily recruit new members to your mob except to send emails to people in the address book on your iPod. It's not integrated with Twitter either so neither social graph is used in the game.
Secondly, you don't interact with the members of your mob at all. There's no shared stakes, no strategic coordination, no shared resources. The only way that the iPod version of the game is "social" is that you're encouraged to spam your friends in order to get them to to download it and play and thus maybe buy Reward Points and make some money for Zynga.
The Facebook version actually does take advantage of the Facebook platform and lets you send items to your mob members and you can ask for help with objectives. I just never log into Facebook anymore so I don't think to play it.
What do you think? Should the iPod version of Mafia Wars count as a "Social Game"?
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