Mafia Wars, FarmVille, Cafe World, Dragon Wars, Vampire Wars, FishVille. Just some of the games whose notifications are overwhelming the home pages of even the most socially awkward of Facebook users. A quick walk through any college library will reveal scores of screens with the tell-tale signs of various farm animals, waiters and roller-coasters lighting up the area for all to see. Even the most casual of Facebook users find it difficult to escape from the clutches of the ongoing Social Game revolution and quite a few have found themselves in a perpetual cycle that consists of moments of pure therapeutic goodness, swiftly followed by spells of inconsolable guilt as you realise that you’ve planned an entire day around your harvesting cycle / cooking times. You solider on though. You’re forced to, lest a friend leapfrog you in the leaderboards.
It can’t just be me.
In fact, I know it’s not just me. I’ve invested (read as: pissed away) days into these games. In Mafia Wars I was a latecomer and was trying to play catch up on those trendy early adapters whose lives had already changed for the worse. The final nail in the coffin of my Gangsta’ career came when I stumbled in the door one night and found myself without any energy to complete Bank Jobs and the like. Out came the credit card. As a complete degenerate gambler (certainly when drunk anyway), I’m not unaccustomed to taking out the credit card at 4am and having a desperate punt on anything from the X-Factor – which I don’t watch – to 40 game accumulators across every sport on offer. I’ve never woken up feeling as guilty after losing money on ludicrous betting as I did after spending €70 on Gold Coins! I wouldn’t mind but the eventual effect it had on my character was akin to upgrading the engine in a Mini… that’s in a race against a F16 fighter jet. I vowed never to play a game on Facebook again and I admit that I briefly felt somewhat superior to those I could see in the libraries feverishly clicking away their lives because I had the good sense to break the addiction.
Then Cafe World came along.
I happen to work in the hospitality industry so I justified my first foray into the world of restaurant ownership as an investigation to see if it was “authentic”. Talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel for excuses! Much to my delight, the game was about as authentic as an autographed photo of Jesus. I had hoped for micro-management of costs and the freedom to create your own meals but instead I was given cartoon characters that flipped burgers on a moldy old stove every 5 minutes. There seemed to be nothing going for the game – which was good, given that I was desperately hoping that I wouldn’t get sucked into a world of misery for a second time. I was just about to abandon ship and return to normality when I spotted the leaderboard at the bottom of the screen. What followed was something that could only be described as the most peculiar time of my life as my online existence deteriorated into trying my utmost to try win what was to develop into a bitter feud between two restaurateurs.
There was no prize. Not even pride was on the line as I didn’t know the person I was entangled with that particularly well. For some reason the mere sight of a big number was enough to motivate us to plough hours and hours into slicing and dicing day in, day out. At some point, the process of roasting and toasting various meals was no longer fun. My restaurant started to look more like a factory than an eatery as I tried to make my formerly beloved creation more efficient in a desperate attempt to hold onto my lead. My moves were quickly matched. It can’t have been much fun for my competitor either given that I was starting to plan my “cooking” around my day of lectures and work. I’m ashamed to admit, but I will, that I was once asked to go into work because someone called in sick but I declined purely on the basis that my 6 Roast Beefs would be spoilt and I’d surrender my lead. It had to stop. For the love of God it HAD to stop!!
And then I got word. “I surrender” was the gist of it. I was skeptical though. I was only too aware of the possibility of being tricked into leaving my guard down and being left helpless as they rode off with the prize (which was what again?). It turns out that they weren’t that sick and twisted though (had they done that I would have been positively bouncing off the walls for weeks!). I could return to my normal life i.e. the one that didn’t involve logging into Facebook at every available opportunity to see if I could better utilise my fictitious cafe.
Never again.