A Million Mad Hatters: The Tea Party “Revolution”

I know, I know – another month-and-a-half between posts. Sorry about that. Now let’s dive in.

For months now, I’ve been watching the absurd media coverage given to what’s been called the “Tea Party Movement” here in America. The Tea Partiers, as they are commonly called, are supposedly a loosely-connected group of people who have come together to “take back America” in response to certain recent events that have made them angry. On the surface, that’s not a bad concept. The definition of democracy is based upon dissent among the common people in response to an overreaching central government. Dissent is not wrong. Dissent is allowed, even encouraged, under the United States Constitution.

But for that dissent to reach national and even world-wide levels, it stands to reason that said dissent has a valid target, with valid reasoning. And no matter what you think about governmental concepts and philosophy, the Tea Party is wrong. Ridiculously wrong, on so many levels. A nice idea at the outset has become overrun by the fringe, the kooks, the lunatics, and the dangerously unstable. It’s at the point now that if you consider yourself a “member” of this Tea Party movement, I consider you to be, at best, an easily-led dupe. At worst, I consider you to be a danger to my country, borderline-treasonous, and possibly a hateful bigot.

As I’ve just shown, another concept that is allowed under the Constitution is my right to air my opinions, too. Here’s mine: shut up, Tea Partiers. I’m tired of listening to you. I’m tired of seeing you on my television. I’m sick of you morons claiming that you speak for America when you’re nothing but an embarrassment to America.

You have a problem with the government? Fine. Every American knows of something that they think could be improved. Even in America, one of the freest nations on Earth, there are problems. Some people think taxes are too high. Some people think we need to try harder to find alternative energy or spend more money on education or better roads. EVERYONE thinks something needs to be better. You can talk all you want about what problems you feel this country is dealing with.

Within reason.

Threatening to burn down people’s houses, like one nut did to Nancy Pelosi after multiple rants left on her Washington voicemail after the Health Care Reform bill passed, is not within reason. Shouting “kill him” in reference to the President, like several subhumans have at Palin rallies in the past couple years, is not within reason. Ignoring mountains of evidence while continuing to claim that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim Kenyan that is part of a 40+ year-long African conspiracy to “invade” America and turn it into Saudi Arabia West is not within reason. The first two are treasonous. The third is just monumentally stupid and racist.

So why did a movement that purports to have been put into motion to protest the bank bailouts not find its footing until the Obama administration? Why indeed? As is often forgotten by the lunatic fringe, the federal program to bail out the largest failing banks was not conceived by the Obama administration, but rather the Bush administration several months before Obama ever took office. Where were the Tea Partiers then? Where was the outrage? And here we tiptoe up to the sensitive underbelly of the Tea Party monster, the thing they know they can’t say aloud, lest what little credibility they have be forever destroyed – there’s a Negro runnin’ things now. And they don’t like it.

Several polls have been taken recently that revealed a general microcosm of the “average” Tea Partier – reasonably wealthy, white, and well-educated. On the surface, that might be mildly surprising to those who assume that Tea Partiers are white trash loons (of course, the “white” part is hardly surprising, but I digress). I read a great article a couple days ago that pointed out the trend throughout history of majority groups resisting the rise of minority groups through various means and linking that, rightly, to the Tea Party. So why would many white, well-off, well-educated people suddenly be upset about banks and taxes NOW after George W. Bush spent 8 years following what laws he liked and ignoring ones he didn’t, sinking hundreds of billions of tax dollars into a pointless war on the other side of the world, signing the Patriot Act and stripping Americans of their civil liberties, botching the response to Katrina, helping his father’s oil buddies make millions under the table, and on and on? WHY NOW are they suddenly so upset?

Because a black man is their President. They can veil that answer with all the denials they want. But that’s why. And that’s that. The world is changing. It’s not all about Whitey anymore. So now comes the anger. After dealing with 8 years of the least intellectually-curious and probably most corrupt president since Richard Nixon, NOW these people are suddenly enraged with the state of things. Now they need to “take back America”. They just know better than to mention that they’re adding the addendum “from the blacks” under their breath.

Of course, this kind of looney-bin kookery is nothing new to Republicans’ response to Democratic administrations. The rural vote is heavily-Republican and has been for decades, thanks to the Republican political machine having successfully painted Democrats as pansy Liberal elitists while painting themselves as down-home country boys. The salt of the Earth. Yessirree. The irony of Republican politicians taking off their Armani suits and putting on cowboy hats and plaid shirts to go out and press the flesh while fooling gullible countryfolk with their supposed “common man” background and then going back to their mansions is totally lost on Republican voters. They’ve bought it hook, line, and sinker. So whenever a Democrat is elected President, the crazies in their log cabins start shining up their guns and putting their militias together again while waiting for some ridiculous repeal of the 2nd Amendment that they’re sure will happen, but never does. Every Democrat elected is the result of a conspiracy, every Democrat elected will take away your guns, every Democrat elected isn’t a “real” American.

But this time it’s different. Not only is a Democrat back in the White House, this one is an African. He was born in Kenya. He’s biding his time before repealing the 2nd Amendment, hell, the whole Constitution. And so on. Who knows what other diabolical plans he has for this great nation? After all, just look at him. He’s, y’know, not “one of us”.

And that’s the Tea Party. Sure, maybe some people in there somewhere really are just mad about taxes and that’s it. I honestly believe there are two wings of this Tea Party nonsense and they just don’t realize it yet.  There is the smaller “anti-tax” wing and the larger “racist” wing. The problem is that they look exactly alike. There’s no way to differentiate between the two. I think that some people have been sucked in to the movement because of the economy or some other valid reason. Of course, that still doesn’t explain why the anti-taxers just now decided to get pissed off about things, but maybe they’re just slow in the head. Maybe it takes them 8+ years to get angry about things. So I don’t think ALL of them are racist reactionary dupes. But those somewhat-reasonable people are in the minority when it comes to this “movement” of comically-stupid, hateful bigots.

On April 19, a group that almost gleefully asked to be described as a “branch” of the Tea Party movement protested in Washington, D.C. carrying loaded rifles, pistols, and semi-automatic weapons. Why? One, because they can, and two, to protest the supposed targeting of the 2nd Amendment. There is no such targeting. Obama has no plans to repeal any facet of the Constitution in any shape or form. It’s a figment of their imagination. But reality matters not to these people. So several hundred Tea Partiers showed up “locked and loaded” and stood around and ranted about an illusion. When you have a rifle slung on your back and strut around in public because it’s technically legal, I’m sure it makes you FEEL like a big man. But it makes you LOOK like a dipshit. I could buy a wizard’s robe and hat and walk up and down the street waving my magic wand and gibbering about the approaching black dragon army and it would be legal. But it doesn’t mean I don’t look like I need psychiatric help. That would hardly deter these people, though. When their chosen idol, Sarah Palin, tells rabid Tea Partiers to “lock and load” in response to the Health Care Reform bill, how does that not make rational people cringe and wait to see how many nuts actually take her literally?

The New York Times released a poll last week that put the Tea Party arrogance and self-importance to the forefront. One question asked Tea Partiers and non-Tea Partiers if they felt the Tea Party represented the ideas of most Americans. 84% of Tea Partiers said yes. When combined with the non-Tea Partiers, the “yes” vote dropped to 25%. That in a nutshell is the Tea Party – far more important to American democracy in their own minds than they actually are in reality, a group that deserves little mention but instead receives coverage around the country because they can shout words loudly, wear American flag t-shirts, and are happily oblivious to the fact that they are lying mimics, forcefed talking points by Fox News without a shred of evidence or fact to back up their claims.

A famous quote is attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism”. And upon thinking about that, I almost feel sorry for those in the Tea Party. They are being used and they don’t even know it. As the vast majority are middle-aged white folk, the backbone of the Republican Party’s voting bloc, Republican leaders have flocked to the Tea Party standard to use it for their own personal gain. Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and countless Republicans have fought to insert themselves into the movement, to steer it towards their campaigns, to use its sudden power to increase their OWN power, while pulling in tens of thousands of dollars a pop in speaking fees, of course. And these Tea Partiers don’t even see it, don’t even realize how they’re being scammed.

They think they’re true patriots (at least the non-racists do). They think they’re performing a proud public service. They think they’re standing up for America. But they’re just being conned. The Tea Party is a blip on the radar – the angry shout of the rich white man railing against his loosening stranglehold on society. It will all be over soon. As with all fleeting pointlessness, it will end with a whimper, not a bang. No third party will be created from this. No great social upheaval will be created from this. They will just stand around and yell and scream and hold badly-misspelled signs full of lies and propaganda and hate, showing off their holstered guns and flag pins, claiming that they’re not racist when rational people know they are, claiming that it’s not about a black man in the White House when rational people know that it is.

Tea Partiers, you can’t claim to be all about protesting taxes when you’re carrying signs with Obama wearing a Muslim headdress. You can’t claim to be all about peaceful assembly when you marching around wearing loaded pistols. You can’t claim that the United States is descending into tyranny when it’s doing nothing of the kind. If you could only go back in time and ask European Jews in the 1930s, or the Romans during the days of the emperors, or the serfs in medieval society, or commoners under Stalin or Mao or Hitler, about REAL tyranny, then maybe you’d know the meaning of the word. Those people knew about tyranny and suffered under it every day for their entire lives. You know nothing about tyranny, beyond what the talking head millionaires on Fox News blabber about when they’re just trying to get you riled up. You are ignorant. They’re trying to whip you into an idiotic frenzy. And you’re falling for it.

The excellent social philospher Eric Hoffer, who was far from a liberal and hated the term “intellectual”, wrote a book in 1951 called The True Believer, which dealt with mass social movements and fanaticism. Inside is another quote that I think is quite pertinent: “In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.” Simply put, the Tea Partiers’ perfect world no longer exists. It is up to them whether they want to become part of a forward-thinking society, to really and truly strive for a better nation, or instead wallow in their dreams of the dominant white man and the status quo. If they continue to choose the latter, their influence will be ever marginalized until they are nothing but a footnote in political history.

Jay Leno won the “Late Night Wars” how, exactly???

Those who know me personally know my stand on the earthshaking “Late Night Wars” of the past few months, but for those of you who don’t, the title of this blog should pretty well give you an idea.

Last night, after a 7-month “hiatus”, Jay Leno returned as host of the Tonight Show. And lovers of good comedy everywhere attempted to stab themselves with hilarious foldaway plastic knives or shoot themselves with guns that unfolded a “BANG!” sign upon pulling the trigger. Pretending to slip on a banana peel, falling down, getting up, and yelling “Taa-DAAA!!!” is funnier than Jay Leno has been in the last forever, and yet there he stood last night with that homey, common-man smirk and his huge chin and the head wiggle and the disingenuous, beady-eyed grin. And those at home who wouldn’t know a good joke if it kicked them in the throat smiled widely, settled into their plastic-covered couches, patted their new Reader’s Digest reassuringly, and checked the TV Guide to make sure that the 700 Club was on next just like always. Thank you, Jesus. Everything is back to “normal” again. And by normal, I mean nauseatingly stupid.

While Conan O’Brien, that of the competent writing staff, a clever wit, and jokes that actually cause people to laugh is barred, per his buy-out agreement with NBC, from doing so much as a 2-minute interview on TV until September, there’s Leno back to work, laughing at his own jokes, riffing feebly with Kevin “I’m trapped on this show and can’t find the exit” Eubanks, and filling the television with his patented version of awful.

So how did the “Late Night King of Comedy” (his marketing staff’s words) fill the time on his celebrated and triumphant return to the late night stage?

By opening with a skit that satirized (term used loosely) the scene in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy wakes up at the end of the movie and realizes that the whole thing had just been a weird dream. Except in this case, it’s Jay opening his eyes to find that the last 7 months had just been “a dream”, parts of it “wonderful” and parts of it “not so nice”. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to use some chat parlance here, namely “WTF?” Oh yes, Jay. Having a show in prime time instead of late night is a real hardship. I’m sure Toothless Joe on the corner of Martin Luther King Boulevard and Life is Nothing but Pain and Misery Road can really relate to your trials and tribulations of the past 7 months when he’s light on handouts and starting to get the ol’ crack withdrawal itch. You’re such a trooper, Jay Leno. What a brave man. What happened to you “retiring”, Jay? When was that no longer a thing? I could have sworn that you were graciously stepping aside to allow new blood on the Tonight Show after hosting it for 27,000 years. And now you open your show by joking (term used loosely) that you’re awakening from a dream, parts of which were “not so nice”. You literally couldn’t wait 15 seconds after getting your show back before taking a ham-handed shot at your employers WHO GAVE YOU BACK EVERYTHING THAT YOU WANTED and Conan O’Brien, who got screwed out of the show that he was promised and that he earned. Oh screw you, Jay Leno.

After basking in a self-congratulatory glow vis-a-vis Leno’s sheeple audience giving him a standing ovation for (being a cutthroat back-room double-crossing a**hole) his triumphant return, he launched into a typical lackluster monologue. It didn’t help that Leno seems to have returned to the Tonight Show with a mild case of Alzeimer’s. Jokes about Dick Cheney and George W. Bush? You do realize that this is no longer 2005, don’t ya, Jay?

Let’s see – we next got a skit called “The World’s Tightest Pants” about a guy with *wait for it* really tight pants. Go get the duct tape, Ma. Imma have to tape up mah belly before mah sides split. No explanation from the Tonight Show “writers” besides “we only had 5 seconds to come up with an idea and we were all already hungover” would be good enough to explain such an unfunny idea. It’s not even unfunny. It’s ANTIfunny. Instead of a signal traveling across my brain telling me that I should laugh, a signal travels across my brain that I need to break something. THIS is what cost Conan his job? The World’s Tightest f*cking Pants???

Then followed an interview with Jamie Foxx, which kinda falls in line with Jay’s overall view on comedy. If all of your jokes are, instead of actually being funny, nothing but easily-understood clunkers that appeal to them middle Americans who don’t wanna hafta think much when they’s a-listenin’ to Mr. Jokey Man, why not interview Jamie Foxx, who isn’t very funny either and has such a high personal opinion of himself that he doesn’t really need an interviewer? The man practically interviews himself. (Seriously, Mr. Foxx, your biggest movie being an impersonation of somebody far more talented than yourself and your biggest collaboration being one with Kanye West does not an otherworldly resume make. You are far more of a superstar in your own mind than you are in reality.)

But it works. He loves himself almost as much as Jay Leno does, so he was an ideal choice as second-first Jay Leno guest. I particularly enjoyed the part where Jamie led the audience in a rendition of “Welcome Back”. “When I say ‘welcome’, you say ‘back’! Welcome!” “Back!” “Welcome!” “Back!” It was at this point where I actively noticed myself forgetting faces, dates, and memories, as several thousand of my brain cells began committing seppuku en masse.

What else, what else? Oh, Alan Greenspan is old and appears boring. Oh HO! You certainly have a finger on the pulse of America, Mr. Leno. Tiger Woods jokes? Yep, we got those, too. You notice how those new chocolate Cheerios are like regular Cheerios, but they’re chocolate? Zing. I’d normally be the first to ask where they hid the million monkeys on the million typewriters that typed up these “jokes”, but there’s nobody available to answer me. They’re all busy digging a million monkey graves for all the monkeys that died of soul-crushing boredom from trying so hard to make Jay Leno appear like an actual comedian last night.

Gold medal skier Lindsey Vonn was also on last night, so Jay could crack some “titillating” (stupid) jokes (about how her husband is also her trainer; *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*) that went over about as well as jokes about overeating at an Oprah Winfrey Fan Club meeting. It’s as if he’s knows that he is just SO unfunny and SO intellectually lazy. And he knows that he will be sitting at that desk, grinning inanely, until he drops dead one day, 25 years from now, while joking about forgetting to turn his blinker off in his hover car.

And yes, there’s the return of “Jaywalking”, as you might imagine. You know, that bit where he walks around the streets of L.A. and asks people something like “what country is Canberra the capital of?” and then they say “Austria” instead of “Australia” and Jay leads millions of viewers in a good laugh at the expense of the poor idiot who doesn’t know the capital of Australia. “Ha ha, you’re a little rusty on your southern hemisphere geography. Boy are you a f*cking moron! Ha ha!” Humor, ladies and gentleman! Comedy gold! Meanwhile, let’s all try to ignore the fact that 80% of the audience doesn’t know the goddamn answer either. Then there’s “Headlines” where a poor, overworked copywriter’s misspelling or the wedding announcement of Joe Blow and Lisa Job is mocked for all the world to see. I guess that if you can’t come up with a decent joke, you just outright embarrass somebody. Jay Leno, man of the people.

But it makes sense. It makes perfect sense that Jay Leno got his way and “won” the “Late Night Wars”, while Conan O’Brien, a man who is funnier than Jay Leno when he’s asleep, was paid off and banned from television for the next 6 months. After all, Jay is the epitome of mediocrity in mediocre times. He is the King of Meh, the Sultan of *shrug*. In an age where intelligent people and graduates of prestigious schools are reviled by those lesser than them, where “elitist” and “intellectual” are not compliments but insults, why shouldn’t Jay be back in his mediocre chair at his mediocre desk, blathering his mediocre jokes on his mediocre show?

You asked for it, America, and you got it. You don’t want to have to think too hard to get your laughs? You got it. Is witty doubletalk, silly skits, and a comedian who can actually think on the fly too much for your wittle brain to handle? You got it. Do you enjoy swallowing hook, line and sinker the whopper that Jay Leno is a down-home “common man” while he has 3 million corvettes sitting in the football-field-sized parking garage next to his shopping-mall-sized mansion? Whatever. Believe what you will. There’s no talking sense into you. By the way, tonight’s featured guest is Sarah Palin. Yeah. Sarah Palin. Of course she is. I await the hilarity.

Jay Leno is the Once and Future King of late night comedy. Whether any of you like it or not. Stupidity wins. “Good enough” tops “good”. Who said being a conniving half-ass never pays off? Witness today’s American Dream in action. And it sure as hell ain’t very funny.

Facebook social gaming (is) for dummies

I want to tell you a tale, dear reader, a tale of good and evil, of laughs and tears, of mind-numbingly stupid ‘pack mentality’ behavior, and of dark, dark addiction. You may think that you’re immune, that you’re strong enough to resist, that nobody that YOU know could ever fall prey to the sticky fingers of temptation. But you’re wrong. Look around. The bags under the eyes of Darrell, the mailboy. The blistered fingers of Mary, the frumpy receptionist. And look at yourself. The nervous twitch. The staring at the clock. That’s right. All of you are addicted. Helpless. Victims of that deadly drug called…

Facebook social gaming!

Sometime late in 2007, I logged onto the burgeoning social site Facebook for the first time, just to have a look. Back then, deep in the murky mists of time, the Interwebs were all about the MySpace and the Netscape Navigator and the MSN Encarta… ok, maybe it wasn’t THAT far back, but Twitter had yet to take over the blogosphere so that should tell you a big, frightening, lost-in-the-jungle kind of something. Life without Twitter?!? Oh the humanity!!!

Anyhow, when I logged on to Facebook for the first time, it was still in its “pupa” phase. Only college students could log in. The only “networks” were college networks. The only “groups” were college groups. (Imagine! A time in Facebook’s history when joining a “Can this roll of toilet paper get more fans than Adam Lambert?” was not an option. Oh, the past. How I miss you sometimes…). I inwardly shrugged and moved on, little realizing that the next time I checked Facebook would CHANGE MY ENTIRE EXISTENCE!!!!!

Fast forward to April of 2008, the next time the random thought popped into my head that I should check out Facebook again, in case something had changed. Interestingly, this behavior would be an eerie foreshadowing of my current Facebook usage, where I will check my Facebook, move onto something else, and then check my Facebook again 10 minutes later “in case something had changed”. Anyway, imagine my surprise when Facebook was nothing like it had been the previous winter. Now it was open to the public. Anybody could join, college student or not, and people were scrambling to get in on the ground floor of the newest and hottest social site in the world.

As the thousands of users ballooned into the hundreds of thousands and then the millions, some clever entrepreneurs realized the marketing potential of such a marketplace and began formulating ideas as to how to make the cashola. Facebook didn’t (and still doesn’t) have the video capability to host cutting-edge, graphic-intensive games as seen on the Playstation 3 or XBox 360. And millions of users or not, nobody could make enough money off of advertising alone, even with such a huge user base. So what to do?

Enter the advent of passive social gaming. When I logged on that fateful day in April 2008, I happened to stumble across a new “application” (tied-in installable programs on FB are called applications) called Mousehunt. It was in its infancy, as was much on FB in those days, and I thought it was a cute and clever little game. So I installed it. Facebook applications are absolutely free. You can install whatever you choose and ignore whatever you choose. Facebook is what you make it. But there are many people who would love to somehow siphon a little bit of money from you while you try to find your long lost high school classmates or your favorite band to follow. And Mousehunt is one such example.

The object (and I use that term loosely) of the game is to pick a mouse trap and one out of many varieties of cheese, “travel” to a location in the game, be it a meadow, a mountain, or a town’s streets, and then…wait. And wait. And wait. Every 15 minutes, as long as you are actively logged in, you will have the opportunity to “sound the horn”, i.e. try for a mouse catch. Sometimes you catch a mouse. If you do, you are awarded points and gold depending on the mouse you catch. You use the gold to buy better, stronger, more expensive traps, or better, more expensive cheese. Sometimes you catch nothing. Sometimes a mouse actually defeats the trap and steals gold, points, or cheese from you.

Herein lies one-half of the genius of passive social games. You don’t actually DO anything. Even if you’re not logged in, as long as you have a baited trap, the game will give you a chance at a catch every hour. The next time you do check your trap, Mousehunt shows you the result of all of the “hunts” you participated in while you were away. So easy! But here’s the OTHER half of the genius of social games – the real super-MEGA genius of passive gaming. Are you tired of slogging through the game’s backstory or wimpy levels while more advanced players are far beyond you, basking in their glow of fat pockets of gold? Do you not want to have to spend such a long time collecting gold for that super-awesome trap that you desperately want? No problem. There’s a way around that. Guess what it is. Yep, pull out your credit card and start forking over the cash.

When I started playing Mousehunt in April 0f 2008, HitGrab, Inc., the little group of guys who created Mousehunt, ran the game on a half-dozen servers in the corner of some modest office building in Ontario, Canada. There were constant game hiccups, issues to iron out, and lagging problems. You know what fixes problems like that? Money, and lots of it. The developers offer a special kind of cheese, Superbrie, that has a very high attraction rate for mice. Tired of sitting in a difficult location and watching mice walk off with 4 out of every 5 pieces of your cheese? Fork over a 20 and in return you’ve got a few hundred pieces of Superbrie in your inventory. Suddenly, you have more success catching mice, you get more gold to buy traps faster than those who don’t donate and you’re moving through the game faster. And all you had to do was pay real money in order to catch virtual mice that have  absolutely no value in reality.

HitGrab will never reveal their total “donations” for their game, but I think that hundreds of thousands of dollars would be a feasible figure. HitGrab’s pet project Mousehunt has now been joined with their second foray into social gaming, MythMonger. The half-dozen servers have grown to several dozen. The old, semi-crummy office is out and a new, swanky office is in. Instead of a few guys slaving over code, they now have a paid staff. They even have an online store with Mousehunt-themed items that you can buy, like shirts, mousepads, coffee mugs, etc. This is all thanks to the nearly 500,000 monthly users of Mousehunt (players that log on Mousehunt at least once a month) and their 500,000 wallets that could, at any time, open to pad HitGrab’s bank account. Once a month might not seem like much, but probably 50,000 of those log on every day. I’m pretty much one of them. I still play Mousehunt, and if I don’t log on EVERY day, it’s nearly every day. It’s a rare day that I don’t check Mousehunt at least once at some point. In the nearly 2 years I’ve played, I’ve accumulated over 56 million points (which puts me in the top 1200 worldwide) and have caught over 22,000 mice (top 500 worldwide). But does it really matter in the grand scheme of things? Of course not. It means nothing. Absolutely nothing.

As large as the piece of the pie that Mousehunt commands when it comes to social gaming, it is nothing compared to the big dog of Facebook – Zynga Games. Mousehunt’s 500,000 monthly users may seem impressive, but when stacked against Zynga’s flagship game Farmville, it’s a drop in a bucket. In Farmville, the player plants crops, harvests trees, and milks cows to (you guessed it) accumulate gold. With this gold, one can build farm buildings, plant more crops, increase the size of your farm and generally put together a nice little country scene to look at. How popular is this quaint little time-waster? Farmville currently has 83 million monthly users. The number of people who log onto Farmville at least once a month eclipses populations of entire small countries. You can play Farmville without paying a dime if you so choose. But (naturally) if you want the REALLY cool buildings or decorations or trees or animals, get out the credit card because only REAL money will afford the player the most desireable farm properties.

I play Farmville, too. Leora got started on it a few months ago as a way to cool down after a hard day’s work. And after a while, I went ahead and installed it as well. After all, what’s the harm? You get to watch your little guy or girl walk around and till some soil, plant some seeds, etc. You feel like you’re really DOING something, that you’re a budding amateur architect, an artist even. With a few clicks of the mouse, entire buildings can razed and built, animals moved to their pens, trees planted, entire environments created from scratch. In that world, you are God.

Zynga is also the brains behind Mafia Wars, another application taking the Facebook world by storm. Although not quite as popular as Farmville, Mafia Wars currently boasts a player population of roughly 40 million, every one of them a potential gold mine for Zynga. As can easily be guessed, in Mafia Wars, the player’s goal is to purchase expensive properties, armies of bodyguards and machine guns and armored trucks to amass a fortune. In this game, you are not only God, but the Godfather.

So after you have spent hundreds of dollars to leapfrog non-paying players in the point standings and have purchased the greatest mouse trap or fanciest chalet-styled farmhouse or warehouse full of Gatling guns, you’ve won, right? Therein lies the problem and addictive format of passive social games. You literally CAN’T win. You will never win. Because the game never ends. There is no ending point. No ‘Congratulations, you win. Game over’ screen. You just keep going and going. Perfect for the creators of a game styled towards players who grew up playing basic ‘beginning – middle – end’ games throughout their childhood. In Super Mario, you win when you save the princess. In most fighting games, you win when you beat the biggest, baddest guy. In these games, you will never win. But millions of players keep playing as if they’re heading towards an eventual final goal – a goal that literally does not exist.

Now from these descriptions, how can one not start sensing the correlation between these games and cigarettes or alcohol or drugs? I’m not about to be “that guy” who is shrieking about the “dangers” of gaming or any of that nonsense, but seriously. You can start for free, you can only get the “good stuff” if you hand over some cash, and you will never, ever win. This sounding familiar to the junkies out there yet? The only logical next step is for Zynga to just go ahead and release Farmville’s sequel, Crackville. At some point nearly every single day, the thought crosses my mind that “I’d better check Mousehunt” and “dangit, I need to harvest my crops”. To what end? I have no answer for that. I’d like to think that it’s just boredom and downtime that keeps me playing, because the alternative is that I’m just waiting for the other lemmings to jump off the cliff so I can take my turn.

Is it bragging rights? Who am I going to brag to? “Yeah dude, I hit level 30 on Farmville. I unlocked the Cabbage, so I can plant cabbages now. They bring in good gold.” Ten years ago, a conversation like this would get you mocked to your face if you were lucky, locked away in a mental institution if you weren’t. To make matters worse, Zynga has amped up the “social” aspect of their games by allowing gift-giving as part of the gameplay. Every day, you can send the Facebook friends who also have installed that particular game little gifts, like a tree in Farmville, and so forth. That encourages like-minded friends to increase their inventory by helping out their friends – “if I send Nancy a tree, hopefully she’ll send me back that goat that I need”. It is supposed to make the game feel more interactive and “real” but what it ends up feeling like, after the initial fun of the game wears off, is a carefully-maintained clusterf*ck of enabling behavior. Facebook is home to hundreds of games just like these. Most aren’t as popular as Farmville, or even Mousehunt, but they’re out there, looking for a piece of the pie.

I couldn’t honestly say that Farmville is “fun” or that Mousehunt is “fun”. It’s more of a chore, a routine that must be followed. After all, I have a high place on the scoreboard that must be maintained. And if I stopped playing, I would lose that. And beyond that, I can’t really think of a single reason to keep playing. I’ve played Mousehunt almost every day for nearly TWO YEARS. Why do I keep playing? I honestly can’t tell you a reason that doesn’t sound just completely pitiful. There is a virtual group that Facebookers can join that is called “I don’t care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia”. It currently has over 5 million members. And the funny thing is that I’m tempted to join even though I “have” a farm, because this kind of pack behavior is something that I generally mock to no end. But here I am playing the game.

Chalk me up as a sucker in this instance, I suppose. But at least I’m not using the rent money to buy a Japanese-style pagoda for my farm, or stocking thousands of pieces of superbrie. I must admit that Leora and I have donated for both games, but only once in each case. I know people through Facebook who, from the looks of their farms or mafias, have spent thousands of dollars of REAL MONEY for pixels on a laptop screen. It’s the kind of thing science fiction movies are made of. Just wait until virtual reality gets big. Instead of hanging out with hot chicks or sitting at the virtual beach on the Holodeck, everyone will be farming and checking their mouse traps.