The Mafia Wars demographic
After months of resisting urgent messages from friends that I simply must join them in the exciting world of Mafia Wars, I relented this past week and took the plunge. After a couple days of play, I have a few observations:
- This is not a game. When I asked my good Chocolate Bear to join me in this madness, he replied, “I don’t need to play Mafia Wars; I have real video games.” And, dammit, he’s right. This is not a game. This is spreadsheet with very nice artwork made for unproductive office workers, unemployed weirdos and stupid children. You don’t actually “play” anything in the sense of solving puzzles, matching wits or responding to stimuli with timed reactions. You just click on buttons and your stats change. If you die, no big deal. You’ll be back to life like the Energizer Zombie in a few hours. You gain items and money along the way, but all they are used for is unlocking more buttons to click on.
- Money is irrelevant almost immediately. At the beginning of Mafia Wars, you are asked if you want to have higher attack ability, higher defense ability or a higher ability to make money. Naturally, I chose option 3. As a result, my character makes gobs of cash every minute just by existing. I “bought” several properties and added a few friends, and now I make enough money every hour to buy everything in the game twice. I’m only on the second of five sets of level experience. People “fight” me all the time. If I lose, I can pay gobs of cash to have them “whacked” by another player. But I don’t need gobs of cash. Dumb hitman kids abound on this thing, and they do jobs for peanuts.
- This is data mining. The only real gangstas at work here are CEO Mark Pincus his company Zynga Inc. For I suspect that the only reason this “game” exists is to glean data from members’ Facebook profiles. That would explain the lack of variety, lack of a fee and constant emphasis on recruting more friends to the cult. They are building a database and selling it to advertisers. You might want to lock down your profile (as I did) before joining up.
Update: The game does have another money stream. You can get “favor points” from the “Mafia Don” by signing up for offers or simply buying them. None of the offers look like good deals to me.
hey, that hurts:) we really do work to make mafia wars and other games into fun *games*. sorry we fell short. we continue to work on the game and hope we come closer in the future.
best,
mark
I started playing Mafia Wars a few weeks ago and have to admit that I am addicted. I keep telling people that we need a 12-step program for Mafia Wars addicts. I have a few problems with the game, though. First off, I like the new idea of doing all the jobs 3 times. The problem is that in the upper levels when you need ‘Illegal Transaction Records, Concealable Cell Phones’, etc, it is next to impossible to find them. I attack and attack – don’t get them. I do the 1 job where they can be found as loot, keep getting ‘computer setup’. There should be other ways of getting these important tools. The worst problem is that while they are adding these new features, there continues to be a problem with the game and its features loading. I am constantly having to refresh and it is really making the game un-enjoyable. Being able to play the game un-impeaded is what makes it fun. When you spend most of your time waiting, it isn’t much fun. They need to attempt to get this fixed before they go spending time adding new features.