Return of the Internet Vulgarian
If there is one takeaway from Vanity Fair's long profile of sordid FarmVille pimp Mark Pincus, it's that obnoxiously flaunting your funding and coarser instincts like a blowhard is threatening to come back into fashion, just like in 2000.
Pincus really likes his employees to feel the $250 million his videogames company Zynga reportedly raised in its last round:
On a recent evening in New York, Zynga threw an event at Deitch Projects, in SoHo, that felt like a party from 1999, with waiters passing out croissants on platters strewn with faux million-dollar bills... Photographs of Zynga employees' dogs were wheatpasted to the walls.
Meanwhile, Pincus put his heedless hustle on display for writer Vanessa Grigoriadis, explaining his wacky idea for the "Disaster Channel... with feeds from war-torn areas, like a Chechen helmet cam"; how he's "definitely friends" with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Zuckerberg apparently didn't comment); and how he demanded his wife—"the second we met"—consent to naming their then-hypothetical future daughters Carmen and Georgia.
Of course, Pincus does have his defenders, like NYU videogame professor Eric Zimmerman, who said of Zynga's games:
Millions of flies can't be wrong-if they're buzzing around shit, they're getting something from it.
