Mafia Wars And Real Life

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. Read the rest of this entry »