The Odd Popularity of Mafia Wars

Good evening. Please, don't be alarmed. You may call me ... Don Grossman. You might know me from such Facebook status updates as Don Grossman won a fight with your help! and Don Grossman sent you a gift in Mafia Wars. Yes, that's right. I'm in the mafia. Uh, wars. I'm in Mafia Wars.

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Mafia Wars is a game you can play on Facebook or MySpace or various other social networks. It's insanely popular: Zynga, the company that makes it, claims that it has more than 25 million players. (Zynga also makes the ubiquitous agri-sim game FarmVille.) Part of the appeal is that it costs nothing to play Mafia Wars. That is, if nothing is how much your immortal soul is worth to you. (See the top 10 video games of 2008.)

When you sign up for Mafia Wars, you become a newly minted mafioso. You move up in the ranks by gaining experience, which you can get by doing jobs. For example, I gained experience by confronting a character named Giancarlo Morillo, who had apparently roughed up my uncle (apparently I have an uncle). I did this by clicking a button. Morillo and I "fought." I hurt him more than he hurt me. Success: "You faced Giancarlo Morillo and forced him into seeing things your way." This seemed like a good way to get experience, so I explained my point of view to Morillo five more times. I went up a level. Nothing personal, Giancarlo. Strictly business.

You don't play Mafia Wars alone. Your friends on Facebook (or whatever network you're playing on) who also play Mafia Wars make up your family. They help you with your business and fight with you and send you gifts. The bigger the family, the better for business. And you have a lot of business: you develop real estate, act as a hired gun and attack other players. The more money you get, the more stuff you can buy, like weapons and vehicles. The more stuff you have, the more jobs you can do and the more money you get. Round and round you go. (See the 10 worst video game movies.)

One of the keys to Mafia Wars' appeal is that it's easy. Unlike in a "real" video game, you can't really lose. The constant stream of rewards is addictive; you become like a rat who can't stop pushing the lever to get the little pellets. Your resources constantly regenerate, and the game is always giving you random items that you don't even know how you earned. People in your mafia send you gifts too. The game will try to make you give them in return, and tell them about things you're doing and — this is important — recruit more members to your mafia. It's all for the good of your business. And Zynga's. (Read "Are You Getting Scammed by Facebook Games?")

The truth is, you don't really play Mafia Wars; it plays you. It rewards you lavishly for doing next to nothing and for propagating its viral spores further and further into your social network, thereby perpetuating its existence. In fact, Mafia Wars isn't so much a game as a parasite: it lives in the petri dish of the social-networking sphere and feeds off your attention. Try to quit, and it begs and bribes you to fall off the wagon again. It's just a game, but it's like the real mafia in that one respect: just when you think you're out, it pulls you right back in.

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