To do this would make acquisitions all but impossible, if every last whim was adhered to. No company does that, not zynga, FB, google, no one.
Especially in Zynga's case, when they are quite used to people having side projects. What the author didn't mention was that Z has a standard Prior Inventions addendum. I should know, our company was acquired by Zynga, and 100% of the offer letters were accepted. Several of us had prior works and side projects, including my cofounder, and we simply listed them.
What he wanted sounds like some specific addendum that called out his app and maybe made some forward looking promises about it... Or... Something.
Yeah, just venting frustration, I obviously do care - it bothers me.
And the idea that games have some kind of special power that other things don't have is exactly the kind of bogus thinking I was trying to talk about. Almost EVERY piece of entertainment, especially mass entertainment, is designed to make you love it/spend your money/come back/buy the tshirt/tell your friends/get the happy meal.
Sports are built, and largely exploit, the innate sense of tribalism that our brains have developed. Fiction, whether comics or movies, is designed to make us feel a stronger and purer set of emotions (whether sexuality or comedy or power) than we can readily get at the drop of a hat on a Thursday at 7:30pm. It's a crack shot of an emotion that we want to feel.
It's just no one talks about it that way. Because it's okay to say, "I want to laugh, I'm going to a comedy instead of actually talking with my friends and engaging with them and telling jokes." Whereas doing the same with a game is somehow horrific.