correction appended

This year, Mark Pincus, the founder and C.E.O. of Zynga—the company that created the silly Facebook games FarmVille, CityVille, and Zynga Poker, the most popular online poker game in the world—had plans to spend the whole month of March at his ranch outside of Aspen. Pincus, who is himself, along with his company, devoted to the concept of “play” in theory, practice, and also as an extraordinarily lucrative business model, was determined to have fun. “Aspen is just dialed in as a sports town,” he says. “You have skiing, hiking, road-biking, mountain-biking, golf, tennis … ” A slight five feet six, with large liquid brown eyes, Pincus looks down for a moment and purses his lips. “I have to say, though, I hate tennis here. The ball goes faster because of the altitude. It’s harder to win points.”

The genesis of Christopher Poole’s 4chan (Vanessa Grigoriadis, April 2011)

“America’s Tweethearts” (Vanessa Grigoriadis, February 2010)

George Lucas’s video-gaming empire (Frank DiGiacomo, March 2008)

Not surprisingly, the month was whittled down to a week because of professional obligations—after all, Zynga, shockingly enough, has become one of the most buzzed-about companies in Silicon Valley, one that was just valued at $10 billion, with more than 250 million players a month, and is thought to be preparing an I.P.O. for next year. But Pincus was determined to make the most of his brief time off—skiing, hiking, and renting a snowcat for a reunion of his friends from his days at Wharton, some of whom had attended the birthday party he threw here a few weeks ago for 50. “We did a 1960s NASA-themed party,” he says. “It was like Wings—everyone was in space-themed costumes.” Pincus doesn’t think hanging out with a glass of Pinot Grigio with his feet up in front of the fireplace is fun; for him, fun is programmatic, something that should be well planned by an invisible hand—a game. “I even became so obsessed with the perfect wedding that I spent all my time deconstructing other ones,” he says, about his marriage to Alison Pincus, the co-founder of the popular home-design “flash sale” site One Kings Lane. “Toasts ruin weddings, so we had those the night before, but we allowed everyone only three minutes. Also, after dinner, we took the seats away—they all had to go on the dance floor.”

So, on this Wednesday in the middle of his Aspen week, Pincus has been having fun all morning, slicing down Aspen Mountain before barreling down his driveway for a late lunch. Plus, the most fun thing ever happened today: he became a billionaire, at least on paper. It’s an amazing feat for a guy whom, a close associate says, “no one in Silicon Valley wanted to touch in 2007,” and whose ideas a big game manufacturer turned down early on, “essentially throwing up all over them.” In the Valley, Pincus has been famous for 15 years, but he’s always been plotting his big score. “There’s an A-list [in Silicon Valley], and then there’s everyone else—and I’m not on the A-list,” he lamented to The New York Times six years ago, even after his first company, a wonky tech outfit, was sold for $38 million. Anyway, the Forbes list came out this morning, and there it was, finally, for everyone to see—Pincus, worth a billion dollars and counting. He’s one of the seven new “Facebook billionaires,” a group which includes all those guys from the Social Network movie—Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, Sean Parker, libertarian investor Peter Thiel—plus Russian tech investor Yuri Milner.

Pincus’s BlackBerry has been pinging on and off throughout the day, with messages from friends and colleagues offering congratulations. “You know, I was hoping not to be on the list,” he says later, shaking his head a little. “I’m not looking to be famous for the amount of money I have, and it’s kind of socially awkward.” But from the glint in his eye, it’s clear that he isn’t exactly disappointed. After all, it’s a win.