The invites were steadily increasing in number. This weird sounding app on facebook seems to have taken everyone of my friends hold. I was continually being asked to help out in a boss fight or find someone's statue of a dragon or a snake. I had originally dismissed the thing as a true waste of time not worthy of my attention.

One night, surely out of pure boredom (which is how I assume a lot of bad incidents start), I “joined the mafia”. I quickly had a few friends assigned as my wheelman, bodyguard, and buttonman. Initially I could only rob an SOB for a few hundred dollars. “Rob” of course is as descriptive as it gets... as there were no graphics, no controls. Just a “do job” button to click. I clicked, I robbed, I was an instant criminal. But the worst is that I became a repeat offender. I remember playing a drug war game on the TI 83 in high school. In that game at least the police TRIED to stop you. Here there was no resistance. Only progress. I started to gain levels and began to increase my character's ability. After gaining a few quick levels I found that energy was by far the thing most holding me back from building my criminal empire of petty thieves.

Otherwise life as normal continued. I went to class, I drank some beer, and showered more or less with the same frequency as before mafia wars. It wasn't an addiction that would get the electricity turned off like World of Warcraft has done to some. It was very subtle. A large part of the appeal for me was to gain achievements. Like the “Working Man” or the “dependable” achievement from doing a job every day for seven days. As one can imagine, this might require an incidental amount of time commitment.

It became a daily, and eventually hourly routine however. 90% of the time it became the sole reason for logging onto facebook. Just to try to use some energy that regenerated or waiting for the chance to use an energy pack which is a kind of meth that gives your aspiring crook a jolt of energy so that one could go steal and rob and murder some more. I discovered that owning property though was the way to go as far as making money. It started off as a few apartment complexes which eventually earned me the “slumlord” achievement. Later I had 100 mega casinos, bringing in several million dollars per hours.

The game was never meant to be realistic and from now on the word “game” will be used quite loosely as the sole graphics are mild pictures and even if I “died” no serious repercussions would result unlike any other “game” I played. No lost progress, no game over. It was always a trip to the “hospital” if I died where apparently some magical doctor was able to revive my bullet riddled corpse so that I might kill again! And how! Every time I “Iced” someone, I would get a rewarding graphic of a sinisterly smiling killer thus triggering a small dopamine receptor somewhere deep in my brain.

With my real-estate career taking off I started to amass billions of dollars in illegitimate mafia wars money. And the jobs became even more over the top. Instead of robbing a guy on the street I was knocking off the federal reserve, netting millions of dollars in loot. All I needed were a few town cars and tommy guns and the gold was all mine. One might assume an army brigade would have been called in to stop my family before I reached level 3 mastery of the task, but alas. The only thing that stopped me was energy. Truly the belief in mafia wars is that if I have enough energy to get out of bed, I have the skills necessary to Steal an Arms Shipment or Extort a Corrupt Judge, but not before I had my coffee.

Soon my progress began to slow dramatically, it would take weeks to master a stage to unlock that which was truly rewarding: a bonus that would decrease the time between energy recharges. Ask a warcraft player why he would be doing a quest to get a “mount” (something that makes one travel faster). The answer would be so that one could spend less time traveling in a game where travel makes up about 75% the game. That would be reasonable if there was an end goal. After getting a mount, one is able to more quickly acquire new and powerful items which allow one to attempt a quest to... get more powerful items and faster mounts. It became a quest to increase my intake of energy. A quest that didn't have a means to an end, as there is no end.

And so it went on for months. Several times a day very casually icing and stealing and killing and dying (without repercussion). My eyes were on the ultimate prize though, the “nest egg” achievement. To amass TEN TRILLION dollars. Yes Trillion with a T. Which, incidentally, is the gross domestic product of the entire United States. Certainly more than enough to account for the rising cost of health care in this country and to fund my children's college education at the most prestigious(expensive) universities for generations. In fact I'm sure I could pick up a few Nimitz class aircraft carriers as a personal fleet of yachts.

And this could have gone on for a while, but it didn't. Late one evening at about 6 in the AM, I was playing another terribly addictive game: COD4: Modern Warfare. I looked at the clock, and thought, what the hell was I doing up so late? It dawned on me, no pun intended, that the same system in Mafia Wars was there in COD. The achievement system. It gave me the illusion that I was actually accomplishing something. The reality was that I not only did not accomplish anything, but truly messed up my sleep schedule by staying up so late.

I started to ponder how truly “harmless” mafia wars was. Sure it'd be only 5-10 minute cracks at a time. But add that up. Add up how much idle thought I spend thinking about the damn game, It became very clear to me that in-fact, Mafia Wars is NOT a harmless game. The real cost was in hundreds of wasted hours and thousands of watts of mental power lost to it. While I never sank any real money into it, it made a negative impact in my life with the only saving grace being that it kept me in touch with a deployed friend of mine. Because he REALLY had nothing else to do beside workout and play mafia wars, he was always johnny-on-the-spot with the energy packs.

I haven't been in the mafia wars loop now for some time. I haven't closed my account and it still tries to lure me back in with promises of loot and limited time only offers that I see in my facebook feed. I ignore it as I've been down the road before. I know where it leads: which is nowhere. There is no end and it will continue forever, always evolving and trying to change it's face to try and resemble something new and different and exciting. But it isn't. Much like the the real Meth, there is nothing to gain but a temporary high. Bless their hearts over at Zynga games but I myself am through getting jacked up on this smack. I can't say the same for Call of Duty. That shit is tight.

“Every time I think I'm out, they pull me back in.”




© 2010 Allan Hanson