I totally know what you're talking about with this, I too have a number of friends and family members who are really into their Facebook games. Games are good -- I'm a big fan, personally -- but I try to keep my Facebook experience focused on more personal and business, not gaming and games. I've blocked hundreds of apps in my time, but with the streamlined little invites that a lot of games can now issue, it's a bit more complex to get rid of 'em once and for all.

I don't think that's an accident, by the way. The more we use Facebook, the more eyeballs that their adverts get and the more money the company makes. Don't really have a problem with that except when it pollutes the experience (tried Facebook mobile for Android recently?) at which point it seems like they're, as my Mum would have said, cutting off their nose to spite their face.

(yeah, I never really understood it either. :-)

Anyway, let me show you how to permanently block game invitations. To start, here's a pretty typical set of notifications and requests I see on the top right of my main Facebook view:

The top one are birthday reminders and that's good. The second are events, mostly good (though I wish Facebook were smart enough to say "here's an event at a place you once visited, years ago, but is now in a different city so it's probably not actually a good match after all". But it's not). The third is the culprit: Corey is inviting me to join him on SimCity Social. The fourth is yet another app, but we'll ignore that for now.

If you've poked around, you'd already know that you can remove the invitation by simply going to the right edge and waiting for the remove "X" to show up:

That removes this specific invitation but doesn't block the app, so probably in a few days another invitation will appear, leading to great frustration!

Instead, click on the "request" link to get more info about the app in question:

This is where you can tell that Facebook is putting effort into making this process hard, because none of the links in this particular pop-up window are what you want either. None block the app, and with some apps, clicking "Cancel" seems to take you to the app anyway, which is far beyond lame in my opinion.

Instead, click on "Visit in App Center". Really. You'll see.

Now you'll be taken to a page about the particular game, and in the right column should be a set of links like this:

If you're guessing that "Block" is the desired target, you're spot on. Click on "Block" to block this particular app and a window pops up:

That's exactly what we want, it'll prevent invitations and requests from being sent and will prevent the app from getting any of your own info. All good. Proceed? Click on "Confirm".

That's it. Finally. Quite the complicated journey to truly block the application, isn't it? Oh, and since people will ask, no, the person who invited you to join the game won't get any sort of notification that you've blocked the app.