Lavonardo

Stewart Butterfield’s new company, Tiny Speck, has revealed their first product. Glitch looks like a MMO version of Little Big Planet. The site is not very forthcoming with extra details, but some are available in a CNET article.

… it probably is.

As proven by the Techcrunch analysis of the scammy habits of “game sponsors”.

Zynga’s Mafia Wars is a massively single-player game of building a criminal empire. Despite being billed as multi-player, the player-to-player interaction is very limited.

Mafia Wars is one of the most popular games on facebook (and available on many other platforms as well). Official figures are hard to come by, but daily users do number in millions.

The object of the game is simple – gain experience, money and other rewards for extending your criminal empire. The quest begins as a minor hood (confined to simple muggings), but the journey winds forward through acquisition of better tools, properties and prestige. The action is governed with energy points – each criminal job consumes some, and it returns at a trickly pace.

And then there’s achievements. Like in so many games these days, the act of doing something a bit outside the main storyline is rewarded with a tag. Some of the achievements will be acquired during the story almost automatically (picking up ten knives from fallen foes), whereas some need quite a bit of extra effort (selling 50 casinos).

Mafia Wars begins in New York. The first expansion moves the action to Cuba, and a forthcoming supplement allegedly significantly alters the gameplay in Moscow.

The short bouts of gametime and variable tasks available lessen the feeling of doing nothing but a grind. But ultimately Mafia Wars is a grind – the same missions need to be repeated over and over, both for experience and for loot. Plenty of the later missions require special items that can only be acquired through appropriate missions (eg. disposable cellphones are best taken by looting an electronics shop). Quite a few of the loot items are one-shots, which of course means return trips to the missions that reliably reward them.

Mafia Wars is popular enough to have given birth to multiple strategy guides. A lot of the tips are usable by all, but some require quite an investment (like a separate account to maximize the number of fellow criminals, most of whom will not be real friends on the social network).

There is no official aftermarket for items, but since trading is easily available, any transactions for mutual benefit occur outside of the game itself.

In addition to item trading and gifting, Mafia Wars provides means to ask favors (items, extra family members and such) from the godfather. The favors cost points that are slowly gained through experience (or purchased with real money).

Zynga has been very successful in setting up the game in such a way that it can be connected to through multiple gadgets and social networks. And with the constant evolution and expansion, it doesn’t look like stagnating any time soon.