What is the big deal about Mafia Wars?

I have a family member who is (literally) addicted to this game, having become involved in it while recuperating from a work-related injury. Apparently it starts out as a free application, but if you wish to progress, there are fees involved. At this point, he has run up a debt into the tens of thousands of dollars, spending $300-$400 at a time. Yes, you read that correctly. He’s out of control, and it doesn’t help that he suffers from OCD.

So what is the attraction with this game? Why is it so (apparently) addictive? How does the fee structure work? I’m very worried about this person, who has kids in college and a hefty mortgage, and whose spouse doesn’t seem willing to put the clamps on things.

The idea is to grow your mafia empire. You select “jobs” and get paid, then buy equipment to let you do more jobs, then you gain experience, and get to do more jobs that require different equipment, etc. You can also interface with your friends, help them on jobs, let them join your mafia, join their mafia.

I refuse to spend money on games like this, and played for a while. Eventually, I got to the point where jobs weren’t unique things to do, they were just Job A, Job B, Job C, and equipment/property wasn’t a thing in itself, just Item A Item B Item C.

It’s essentially a zillion little goals to achieve, in order to get the “big” achievement, in order to open up a new option for a “bigger” achievement. Spending money helps you get things faster, so you can achieve your goal faster.

Looking back, it’s a terrible game, it doesn’t even have the cutesy personalization of FarmVille.

It’s a pretty standard Zynga game (they make a number of the popular games on FB).

  • You do tasks, to become more powerful in the game
  • You can do the tasks more easily / more quickly if you have a lot of friends who also play the game, which is Zynga’s insidious way of getting their players to do their marketing / recruiting for them.
  • They offer “exclusive” (i.e,. paid) content, which may make it able to play the game more successfully / more quickly than if you stick solely to the free content

Press buttons to make your numbers go up. You want your numbers to be bigger than your friend’s numbers, don’t you?

Looking at those descriptions, I’m more puzzled than ever with his obsession over it. $30,000 for a game that returns nothing? At least with poker one has an outside chance of winning some cash, but this is just. . .incomprehensible to me.

It’s kinda typical for Zynga games in general–they might as well be used as testing devices for addictive personalities.

All these games basically work on tried and true conditioning models–you get steady but somewhat random small incremental rewards for performing tasks in sequence. As you get more skill and resources, the tasks increase in difficulty for the same proportional reward. Same as World of Warcraft or any other thing.

Where Zynga short-circuits it is that there’s a tipping point in almost all of their games where continuing to advance at the same pace requires an infusion of real-world cash to buy extras–be those extra turns, or better equipment, or “friends” (if you haven’t evangelized the game enough to get your buddies playing as well) to unlock higher-level rewards that require a certain number of your FB friends playing as well.

I mean, I played “Empires and Allies” for a while, and it was kinda fun, but then it started slowing down and I started hitting that old “hey, for just $$$ you can get a little extra” message more often. So I said “hell with this, I’m outta here”. Some people see that and $2 is worth it to them. And then it’s $5. Then $15. And so forth. The individual amounts are small, and you’ve been getting a lot of fun out of this game for hours for totally free, what can it hurt?

To combine the previous two posts into a more accurate description:

It’s a pretty standard Zynga game (they make a lot of the popular games on FB).

  • You click on buttons to “do tasks”. Then you wait a while before clicking on the buttons again.
  • You can click on buttons to “do tasks” more easily / quickly if you have a lot of FB friends play the game, by cluttering up your status feed with game updates.
  • You can pay money to avoid clicking on buttons.
  • You can pay money to avoid waiting a while between sessions of button clicking.
  • And apparently since I swore off FB games (due to MW and FV), you can now pay money to click on buttons that play-for-free people can’t click on.

Cracked has a pretty good article on how games like this work and how they are specifically designed to be as addictive as possible. The one they are talking about there is Farmville, but Mafia Wars is the same idea.

It’s basically setting it up so that you have little goals that you can/must achieve every so often to get you coming back, along with letting you play long enough to get really invested in the game and outcome to where you don’t mind putting in “only” $5 or so…this time, maybe more next time.

$30k sounds extreme though. If this guy is OCD, that probably contributes as these games seem set up to where you almost need to be to progress.

Actually, this article describes even better the methods that these games use to get people addicted. This is especially true with MMORPG or any game that is not a one-time purchase event.

Emailed to the person who needs it and his brother, who is very close to him.