Mafia wars: The Modern Day Skinner Box
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Zynga: Powered by Mice on Wheels
I can’t sleep, so I’m going to rant instead.
For those of you who haven’t answered the millions of Facebook app requests, this is Mafia Wars. Mafia wars is developed by Zynga, whose profits, according to an article published in October ‘09, were “likely to surpass $100 million this year.” Zynga also develops Farmville and a host of other Facebook “casual” games.
What is the secret to their wild success? They have all but perfected the virtual Skinner box. I have almost completed their original creation, pictured above, and will be focusing on that for the remainder of this rant.
This game sucks. No, I take that back, it’s not a game. Calling Mafia Wars a game is an insult to games. Like I said, it’s a Skinner Box; and I don’t mean that in any abstracted sense whatsoever. I mean that very literally. Let me explain: through operant conditioning, using rewards that don’t cost them anything, they train their players to click buttons and continue to play their games. They use a host of tricks; from dopamine inducing “maybe” rewards (which you may or may not receive for any given action) to the slow and steady “progress” through the game’s missions - which, by the way, are buttons. That’s right. The entire game consists of buttons. You click them, you get game-resources, and a bar slowly fills, increasing by a steady (and over the course of the many missions, steadily decreasing) percentage until you “complete” the mission.
Your reward? More buttons! And there you have it, that is the entire game. Well ok, not entirely. You have to trade your resources for items in order to click some of the buttons (this process is completed by clicking buttons). And you get random “loot” items which help you to “fight” other players. However the combat consists of clicking on another players name, from a list, as the server calculates who has the higher attack ordefense statistic.
Now, I can hear an argument being made “but bro, if you reduce any game down to its basics, don’t they all sound just as stupid. Like, Chess is just about moving pieces around a board.” No, because until we memorize the tree-diagram for the most opportune Chess move for any given position, the interaction of Chess pieces create myriad situations involving meaningful play. Meaningful play, as explained by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman in Rules of Play ”…emerges from the relationship between player action and system outcome; it is the process by which a player takes action within the designed system of a game and the system responds to the action. The meaning of an action in a game resides in the relationship between action and outcome”
In Mafia Wars, there is no wrong choice. All of the buttons benefit you, and if your goal is to complete all of the missions, then there is no ambiguity about how many times you need to click each button. If your goal is to be as efficient as possible, there are negligible choices you can make regarding which button to push next, however I would call none of these choices meaningful. It’s a matter of simple addition and division.
So then why the hell is it so goddamn popular? Why have I, someone who fancies himself a game designer and who absolutely loathes this game conceptually, been hopelessly sucked into it? Because as much as I hate to admit it, I am a slave to conditioning. Zynga has found that nigh-perfect rate of response vs reward… only they’ve gone one extra step past ol’ Skinner - they’ve wired the button to make them money.
