Video games appeal to our desire to explore and interact with our environment, and adding real-world phenomena-such as fluid motion-allows game developers to create immersive and fun virtual worlds.

LOS ANGELES — In a quiet outpost near Marina del Rey, Zynga Inc. has been building an empire. Its troops, a few dozen game developers and designers with a penchant for bringing their dogs to work, ...

Mark Skaggs, Zynga’s senior vice president of product, summed up one of the company’s design mantras during a talk at the Game Developer Conference in February in San Francisco. “Fast, light and right ...