An offer I could refuse

I have dropped out of the Mafia. It remains to be seen if, like Michael Corleone, they will keep trying to pull me back in.

"Mafia Wars" is a game played as a Facebook application. You work your way up in an organized crime syndicate by doing various jobs ("Blackmail a Local Official") and investing the money in various business operations, from small neighborhood businesses to huge casinos. You can recruit other friends and acquaintances who play the game to be part of your Mafia, and you can also fight or attempt to rob other Mafia members.

At first, the game was addictive, and I would check in frequently to see if it was time for me to do some new jobs or if I had accumulated earnings which I needed to deposit in the bank so that they could not be stolen by other mob members.

But eventually, the game became sort of repetitive. I was just about to quit it when the developers added a new wrinkle, "Mafia Wars: Cuba," a sort of second playing field, with somewhat different rules and activities, from which you could shuttle back and forth to the New York setting of the original game.

But over the weekend I realized that, too, had become sort of repetitive and stale. Although you have some interaction with your fellow Mafia members -- for example, you can give or receive valuable items like weapons or loot -- there's really not much interaction with your allies, and none whatsoever with your opponents. And the game isn't so much based on strategy or creativity as it is logging in as often as possible so that you can wring every available dollar out of your activities. Over the weekend, I decided it had become a chore rather than a diversion and I just deleted the application from my Facebook profile.

That apparently doesn't take me out of some aspects of the game. I continue to get automatically-generated messages from my former fellow criminals, either saying that they have given me something or asking me to give them something. I'm not sure whether I will be deleted from the game at some point due to inactivity.

What is it about online games that you like or don't like? What makes you lose interest in a game? Let me know at jcarney@t-g.com.

Comment scatter

Like many bloggers, I have my personal blog set up so that it when I make a new post, Twitter and Facebook status updates are generated linking to the post. That's a great way to promote the blog, but it leads to one problem. Where do you respond? I always hope for comments on the blog post itself, but some people seem to prefer leaving comments at the Facebook link instead of at the blog. As I'm writing this on Monday, I just got through reading a post on a Nashville-based blog which I found through a Facebook link. I wanted to respond to it; there were two comments already at Facebook, and none of the blog itself. I wanted to chime in on the Facebook conversation, but I felt like the blog owner would probably want some comments left at home base. So I left the identical comment both places. That seems redundant.

--John I. Carney is city editor of the Times-Gazette and covers county government. He is also the author of the self-published novel "Soapstone." His personal web site is lakeneuron.com.