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.