286 levels later: a Mafia Wars story

People all over were talking about it and, to boot, I was in the process of applying to Zynga for a summer internship so the only logical choice at the moment seemed to be to just go to my Facebook profile and enroll in Mafia Wars. Four months later, with a slightly nostalgic look in my eye, I clicked my last Mafia Wars button. I felt, above all, relieved.

Mafia Wars is defined all over as a glorified spreadsheet. An evil glorified spreadsheet, if I may say so. There’s not much more to it than a messy UI, heavy on the black and yellow, and a lot of stats. Which is, of course, enough to hook me for eternity.

Mafia Wars is exactly the kind of game I love to strategize on. It has one main thing you need to do in order to keep playing: gain experience so you can level up and replenish your energy. Energy is the resource you spend to perform jobs (which give you experience, thus completing the circle) and, as would be expected of a microtransaction-based game, renews slowly over time unless you are willing to part with a couple dollars for a quick energy fix.

There are other aspects to Mafia Wars: you can fight other players, steal from people, buy properties and more; all, in my opinion, distractions from the main energy-experience relationship -  things to distract you while you wait for your energy to replenish. I immediately saw these as secondary gameplay and almost flat-out ignored them so I could focus my attention on what really interested me: keeping my energy/experience ratio high so I could level up as fast as I could without spending any real money.

The dangerous thing about Mafia Wars, I found, is that it is very good at providing excuses with which you can convince yourself that what you are doing is not particularly wrong. First of all, it is a free game, which hacks away a huge part of the guilt. And second, you can only play for a limited number of minutes a day - maybe two fifteen-minute sessions, or not even that.

But the truth is that Mafia Wars is pure evil, it is my kryptonyte. My World of Warcraft, if you may.

It is extremely sad, I know, and I am not particularly proud to admit it. But the truth is that I quickly found real joy in calculating which jobs I should perform and in what order so as to optimize my leveling-up speed. I would make sure to log in at the right times of day so as to maximize the effectiveness of my energy refills. I was basically reverse designing the game and succeeding at it, which made me feel great. And somewhere within the tubes that are the Internet, on the depths of Zynga’s server, all my efforts were being translated into painfully simple spreadsheet operations which were then translated into messy, black-and-yellow UI form for my enjoyment. But I knew this, and I was okay with it.

About a month ago I clicked my last Mafia Wars button. I completed all the jobs in Mafia Wars New York, then on Mafia Wars Cuba. I performed my last experience by energy cost division, vaulted my last collection.

286 levels later, I have learned to identify the subtle aspects of Mafia Wars that make my mind perceive it as an addictive substance. And I’m thinking carefully about them, trying to learn how to channel them into the creation of new experiences to make gamers that resemble me a bit happier; and a bit more miserable at the same time.