Mafia Wars And Real Life

Posted: May 31st, 2009 | Author: miconian | Filed under: Media And Advertising | Tags: life, mafia wars | Comments

The “social media” game Mafia Wars is compelling and addictive, partly because of how similar it is to real life. In Mafia Wars:

• You can do a lot of “jobs,” earning you money and “experience.”
• You can use the money to buy cool stuff.
• The main value of the cool stuff is to win contests with other players, in which the winner is the person with the most cool stuff.
• The experience that you accumulate qualifies you to do harder jobs, which pay more than the easier ones.
• As you gain more experience, you find that your ability to accumulate money gets easier, but everything else gets harder.
• As you buy the cool stuff you always wanted, you are increasingly dismayed to find that there is an endless ladder of cooler stuff that you may never be able to afford.
• Real estate is the best investment you can make, but it takes a long time to pay off.

I was pretty caught up in the game for the first couple 0f days, as anyone who reads my Facebook feed can attest.

And yet, I wasn’t really enjoying it. I was nagged by the knowledge that this sort of rat-race mentality was exactly what I was trying to get away from in real life. Why was I engaged in a simulacrum of it? I started asking myself the same sort of questions about the game that I ask myself at least once a month, usually more like once a day.

Namely: What am I actually trying to accomplish?

And that’s when I realized something that changed my whole outlook on the game, and made playing it much easier.

In Mafia Wars, you don’t age.

In other words, it’s possible to make a small real estate investment, and then sit on it until it yields enough to make another one, and so on. And eventually, you’ll have enough money to buy all the best stuff that someone with your level of experience has access to.

So why doesn’t everyone do this?

The game (like many aspects of real life) is designed to give the player an artificial sense of urgency, at several levels. Real estate investments pay off thousands of dollars every hour, and the time to the next payout is displayed in a backwards counter at the top of the screen. This facilitates impatience; the time between the present and the next payout always seems like it’s being wasted. So you turn to the other activities available to you: buying stuff, competing with other players to see who has the best stuff, robbing other players’ stuff, and doing “jobs.”

After a few days, as I sat there trying to cram a lot of “work” and “experience” into every gap in my imaginary income stream, the parallels to my real life started to really kick in. Why was I “working?” Why was I trying to build “experience”? Why was I buying into the implicitly stupid idea that someday I would own more cool stuff than anybody else?

It was right about that time that I saw this TED video on the value of delayed gratification:

So I decided to try an experiment. I would play the game the way I’m playing my actual life.

I stopped picking fights with other players.

I stopped buying stuff.

I stopped doing “jobs” and gaining “experience.”

When I received money, I put it immediately into the bank, where it stayed until a solid investment opportunity opened up.

To my delight, I found that this strategy was extremely successful inside the game. Rather than falling behind, I felt like I was jumping ahead. My experience level didn’t change, so the game’s expectations of me didn’t change. My peers didn’t get tougher, and life didn’t get more expensive. Since I wasn’t looking for activities to fill the time between payouts, it was easier to sign out of the game and do other things. When I did sign, in hours later, I’d enjoy seeing the large amount of money I’d accumulated, and then I’d immediately deposit or buy real estate with it. After that, I’d have nothing to do, so I’d leave the game again and do something else.

Eventually, my imaginary real estate investments will yield enough imaginary money that I can afford the coolest possible stuff available at my experience level. And since I won’t be gaining any more experience, I won’t be exposed to any other stuff. Also, since I’m not picking fights, and since all the players I used to fight with before have now advanced out of my league, I have no enemies. Once in a while, somebody attacks me at random, and they usually win, but they get nothing, because all my money is safe in the bank. In fact, sometimes I actually lose experience in fights, which can only be a good thing, as it helps to ensure that I will never reach the point where I’ll be invited back into the endless loop of “jobs” and “experience.”

In this new englightened state of play, I’ve realized how much both Mafia Wars and real life are driven by being angry at other people. Having let go of my game-anger, I find that I don’t care if I lose fights with other players. The stakes are non-existent. In fact, after I log in and move my latest real estate earnings into the bank, I sometimes amuse myself for a few minutes by attacking much more powerful players, and losing on purpose, just to see the long lists of all the cool weapons, armor, and vehicles that they have bearing down on me and my little crew. It reminds me of that scene in Revenge Of The Nerds, where the nerds and the jocks are playing tug-of-war, and the nerds just let go of the rope and let the jocks fall on top of each other. Or the sequence in Fight Club where are the tough guys go out and get their own asses kicked by wimps. Because sometimes volunteering to lose is the only way to bring a silly game to an end.

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