One Year Anniversary of World Wide Mafia Wars

Zynga, the largest developer of social games, announced the one year anniversary of social gaming’s most popular crime-based game, Mafia Wars. Since its launch in June 2008, Mafia Wars has grown to more than four million daily active users; in the last three months, alone, the game has doubled the number of daily players.

In celebration of Mafia Wars’ one year anniversary, Zynga also launched Cuba, an entirely new destination, and extends the amount of time players can enjoy Mafia Wars. Players who have reached the rank of “Consigliere” (level 35) can leave New York City and cross the Cuban border which has been outside the reach of the Mafia’s influence for almost 50 years. Now with Cuba as a destination, players can expand their influence and increase their power with new loot, weapons, businesses, collections and achievements. Cuba offers more than 100 levels of additional jobs, items, a unique property system, and opens up a wealth of new opportunities including:

* 40+ new jobs to carry out
* 52 brand new weapons, armor and vehicles
* Four businesses that can be purchased and upgraded

“Mafia Wars is on its way to becoming a cult classic,” said Bill Mooney, executive producer, MMO Studios, Zynga. “We have the most dedicated and loyal players who have made the game a hit and we want to thank them by extending the game in a dynamic destination that makes the game unique and challenging.”

The Mafia Wars franchise has reached key milestones during its first year. The iPhone version which launched in April contains rich, high-quality graphics and interface including original animations and sounds, creating a fun and addictive gaming experience. Mafia Wars was also recently voted Best Game of the Year in the Webby People’s Voice Awards where more than 50,000 votes were cast by people around the world for their favorite sites, video, and ads. Additionally, Mafia Wars has garnered over two million fans on its Facebook Page making it the highest ranked page.

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Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, Taken Over by The Mob

Not so long ago, the faces of gaming on social networks were those of zombies, vampires, and cuddly virtual pets. Now it's more along the lines of Michael Corleone or Tony Soprano.

You've probably seen it in your news feed: From Facebook to MySpace and now Twitter, Mafia-themed games have more or less taken over. Mobsters, a game created by development company Playdom, is the most popular application on MySpace's platform. Mafia Wars, owned by Zynga, is a huge hit on Facebook. The Social Gaming Network has an iPhone app called Mafia: Respect and Retaliation. And earlier this month, a Twitter-based game called 140 Mafia launched. The craze appears to have started with a Facebook app called Mob Wars, which was built by a smaller company called Psycho Monkey.

The premises of most of these games are the same. You can found or join a "mob" with friends from the social network that the game has been built on. You can carry out missions, including "killing" other players in rival mobs, in order to earn points. Your activities are broadcast, via news feeds or Twitter posts, to your friends on the network in question.

With the mobster gaming craze, social-network developers may have found the secret to bringing multiplayer role-playing games--long the lucrative domain of ultrageeks--fully into the mainstream. They can build elaborate role-playing scenarios with points, levels, teams, and weapons, but without the nerdy stigma that's become attached to fantasy-themed games in the vein of World of Warcraft. (A 2006 episode of the Comedy Central cartoon "South Park" summed this up well.)

"A lot of the core architecture is very similar to role-playing games in the past, in the way that levels and achievements and so forth are often themed around the certain topic but are pretty generic, actually," said Justin Smith, who runs the blogs Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games. "When you compare a dragon game to a mob-based game, they're actually pretty much the same thing with different content."

"People just really like the crime genre," said Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga, which publishes Mafia Wars. The mobster game is currently the company's most popular app, with 15 million active users across social networks Facebook, MySpace, and Tagged. "GTA (Grand Theft Auto) and a lot of derivative games of GTA top the charts, and I think that it's more those games feel more culturally relevant to people than a lot of other games that go into other genres that are either historical or more fantasy. I think that people like fantasies that are closer to reality."

There's another side to it: Organized crime in the real world tends to be concerned with the illicit transfer of wealth in one form or another (drugs, laundered money, gambling, you name it). When you take the popular perception of the mobster lifestyle and transport it to a gaming environment, there are plenty of opportunities to bring money into the mix. Most of the Web's Mafia-themed role-playing games make money from display ads as well as the sale of virtual goods, and some make it possible to earn extra points and "level up" by completing offers and surveys. It's no secret that some social gaming companies are making a ton of money, but mobster games are a particularly lucrative enterprise.

"(It's about) climbing your way to the top, and the status, and the ego of being the biggest and the best and the toughest," said Jason Bailey, CEO and co-founder of Super Rewards, the company that has partnered with 140 Mafia to power its payment platform. In 140 Mafia, for example, players who want to speed up their "recovery" from a round of game play can petition to the "godfather" for a favor (and that'll cost them real money).

Plus, Bailey said, it gets personal: "It has that small violence factor as well, being able to feed on people and put them on the hit list. When somebody does that to you, when somebody kills your character...the rage that it conjures up in people is much much stronger and they're much more willing to retaliate than in a sports game or a racing-themed game."

As with any online sensation, though, the question remains: Is this just a fad? From film noir to "The Godfather" to "The Sopranos," mobster themes have a solid shelf life to them, but mobster games on social networks could easily fade from favor if something more exciting comes along. But the real lasting power, social gaming insiders said, is in the fact that Web development makes it possible to keep a game in a constant stage of evolution. Once these games hit critical mass--which Mafia games arguably have--it's easier to keep people around.

Short attention spans
They're also low-maintenance, said Dave Kahn, head product manager for Zynga's Mafia Wars.

"I would say the difference between what makes Mafia Wars more popular over time than your traditional console game or your traditional hardcore game is that you can have the same experience with five minutes of play and you can interact with your friends," Kahn said. "I would say a game like GTA or a game of that crime genre would be much more popular if you could interact with your friends on a daily basis, and it doesn't require much time investment for you and your friends to have that satisfactory interaction."

"You're able to come in and come out in short spurts. You can play for 30 seconds, you can play for five minutes," Jason Bailey said. "It's not like a first-person shooter or a real-time strategy game where, if the phone rings, you're going to get shot. It's really easy to come in and out of these games."

On the flip side, though, casual players who haven't put a massive time investment into a game are quite likely to be more fickle about whether they stick around or not. Time will tell when it comes to just how "sticky" mobster games turn out to be for players who aren't completely hardcore.

But beyond attention span issues, perhaps the biggest challenge to the creators of mobster games is that there are simply too many of them already, and the companies that make them have fallen into courtroom infighting that bears an ironic resemblance to actual mob warfare. There's an outstanding lawsuit between Zynga and Playdom, for example, over the latter's allegedly illegal use of the Mafia Wars name in advertising its own Mobsters game. And Mob Wars creator Psycho Monkey sued Zynga over copyright infringement in February.

"There's a variety of litigation that's still pending, and I think it just generally reflects the current culture of game development on social networks right now," Inside Social Games' Justin Smith said. "There's a lot of rapid iteration based on adapting other games and twisting them in a very slight way, and there haven't been many good examples of cases in which the IP has been successfully protected in the courts. So I think it will really be interesting in seeing how some of these cases play out over the next few months."

As we learned in the Scrabulous-Wordscraper-Lexulous affair last year, in which the manufacturer of board game Scrabble used litigation to force a Facebook-based imitator to change its name, intellectual property laws for games are complicated, and extremely similar games may legally coexist as long as they don't share a few key features. But it's not clear whether the mob wars over Mob Wars and its ilk will be without carnage.

"There's literally 20 or 30 mob-themed games on the Facebook and MySpace platforms, and that's conservative," Jason Bailey said. "If people find something that works, they copy it and copy it and copy it, ad nauseam."

The playing field for mobster games, as well as any other games on social networks that make money through virtual goods and transactions, could also change dramatically when social networks start introducing payment systems of their own. Facebook will start to do this soon, and it's also been circulated as a possible business model for Twitter. It's unclear what the rules will be in either case.

But Super Rewards' Jason Bailey--whose company will be a competitor to Facebook's in-house virtual currency platform, it should be said--thinks the dominance of mobster games won't change much if Facebook brings new rules to the applications on its platform. It may be too late for the massive social network to be the real kingpin when it comes to monetizing the likes of the mobster game craze.

"Facebook's issue, I believe, is it's hard to tack something like this on later...companies go out and spend millions of dollars building games for your platform," he said. Were Facebook to start requiring a cut of the revenues, "there would be literally a riot of people with torches at (CEO Mark) Zuckerberg's house tonight complaining about it."

Well, that's a whole different kind of mob.

Thanks to Caroline McCarthy

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Carmen "The Cheeseman" DiNunzio, The Reputed Underboss of the New England Mob, Pleads Guilty

The reputed underboss of the New England mob has pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges in a plea deal that will send him to prison for six years.

Carmen "The Cheeseman" DiNunzio pleaded guilty Wednesday to bribing an undercover FBI agent posing as a state highway department official in an attempt to win a $6 million contract on the Big Dig highway project.

DiNunzio is expected to plead guilty next week to separate state gambling and extortion charges.

Prosecutors have agreed to wrap both cases together under one plea agreement and to recommend a sentence of six years in federal prison. Sentencing was scheduled for Sept. 24.

Authorities say the 51-year-old DiNunzio has been underboss of the New England branch of the Mafia since 2004

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Mob Hit on Reputed Bonanno Crime Family Solider Anthony Seccafico?

A man identified by a law enforcement official as a soldier in the Bonanno crime family who was under federal investigation was shot to death early Thursday morning near a bus stop on Staten Island, the authorities said.

The man, Anthony Seccafico, was waiting for a bus near his town house on Ilyssa Way about 4:30 a.m. when an unknown number of attackers opened fire, law enforcement officials said.

Witnesses told the police that they heard seven shots and passers-by discovered Mr. Seccafico bleeding in the street about 100 feet from the bus stop, on Arthur Kill Road, the authorities said. Mr. Seccafico, 46, who was waiting for the X17 bus to take him to work in Manhattan, was shot several times and apparently tried to flee his attackers, investigators said. He was taken to Staten Island University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival, the police said.

On Thursday, detectives were trying to determine the motive behind the killing. A police official said it was possible that it was related to Mr. Seccafico’s criminal history, including a 1996 case in Coney Island in which he was charged with four counts of assault and illegal possession of a weapon.

The medical examiner’s office has scheduled an autopsy for Friday morning.

In November 2002, Mr. Seccafico was arrested with 19 others on charges of participating in a $2.5 million-a-year gambling ring as part of a Bonanno crew.

Mr. Seccafico pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges, and received a three-month sentence. Also involved in that case was Salvatore Montagna, who had been elevated to the head of the Bonanno family and was recently deported.

A federal law enforcement official said Mr. Seccafico had been under federal investigation when he was killed, though the official would not describe the nature of the investigation. When Mr. Seccafico was arrested in 2002, he was in the mobster Patrick DeFilippo’s crew, the official said. Mr. DeFilippo, who lived in Manhattan, operated out of the Bronx, and Mr. Seccafico “spent a little time in the Bronx,” the official said. Mr. DeFilippo is serving 40 years in federal prison for racketeering conspiracy, gambling and loan sharking. Mr. Seccafico became a “made” member of the Bonanno crime family after 2003, the official said.

The official said that according to a list obtained by federal authorities, Mr. Seccafico was proposed for membership in the family by Mr. DeFilippo.

An investigator familiar with Mr. Seccafico said he had been a laborer and a member of Local 79 of the Construction and General Building Laborers’ Union. That investigator said Mr. Seccafico was “just a runner” for the 2002 gambling operation.

Before his arrest in connection with the organized crime ring, Mr. Seccafico had a criminal record dating to 1984, when he was arrested on drug and gun charges. He served less than a year for selling a controlled substance. After his 1996 arrest in Coney Island, Mr. Seccafico pleaded guilty to criminal possession of a weapon and served eight days in jail and three years’ probation.

In stark contrast to his life as a soldier for the New York mob, Mr. Seccafico was described by neighbors as a blue-collar family man who worked to support his wife and two young children. “They’re very, very nice people,” said Mona Gaber, a neighbor of the Seccafico family. Ms. Gaber said she would often see Mr. Seccafico come home still dirty from his job as a construction worker.

Thanks to Dominick Tao

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Mafia Drama, Brotherhood, Cancelled

Showtime has confirmed that the drama Brotherhood, about two Irish brothers on opposite sides of the law, has been cancelled.

After three seasons on TV the show, set in Providence, will not be renewed. Brotherhood's story was one told many times before, but with a New England mafia twist: Tommy (Jason Clarke) and Michael (Jason Isaacs) Caffee, Irish-American brothers, find themselves on enemy fronts, the first being a policeman and the second a mafia professional.

E! Online's Watch With Kristin reports that, "News that the ax had officially dropped was first reported when TVShowsonDVD.com discovered that the season-three discs were to be branded 'the final season.' The cancellation news might have been surprising even for the show's own cast since, according to the same article on E!, actress Fionnula Flanagan was awaiting news from Showtime regarding the show's "on hiatus" status in February.

Thanks to Romina Massa

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