I discovered Mafia Wars by Zynga on the prompting of a FaceBook friend of mine.  The way she described it was that it’s a game she feels compelled to play anytime she has free time on the internet.  I didn’t want to be left out of all the action so I joined though my FaceBook account.

My initial impression is that the game reminds me of those classic text-based games I used to play in the 1980s.  I, preferring the more visual/realistic shoot-em-up type games, do admit that I wasn’t too impressed at this seemingly simple no-brainer temptation.

I spent about four hours playing and was able to ultimately able to easily reach the 11th level of the game the first day.  At the end of the session I decided that I wouldn’t be playing this game that much anymore and decided to commit a sort-of mafia member suicide by selling off anything off anything of value my character possessed in favor of purchasing and gifting items to my friend’s character – self-sacrificial style – big mistake.

Curiously, a few days later when I was bored I decided to see how my character had fared since his essential bankruptcy and surprisingly the damage didn’t look too bad to salvage.  Long story short – I’m now on the 26th level of Mafia Wars and have been playing several times a day.  To what end?  Essentially, if you add it up, a BIG WASTE OF TIME!  Time that could have been spent earning actual real-life money working on the various GPT sites.

I did notice that Mafia Wars has a unique hook in the way they present the usual GPT style offers to members in hopes that a few may be curious and complete a few towards nothing but useless (in real life) mafia experience points.

In conclusion, I will most likely continue to play Mafia Wars regularly as a conversation piece to share with my many FaceBook friends.  The reality is that the more time spent playing the game, the further I tend to get behind in my real-life work projects.

I do send kudos to Zynga in finding another way to incentivize a web site / online application without actually having to provide rewards that cost them anything whatsoever.