Word: game
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Inspired by Shumway's success, the world's surgeons got back in the game. There were 172 transplants done in the U.S. alone in 1983, and as antirejection medicines improved in the 1980s, heart transplants grew more common. There were 1,647 in 1988. By 2007, the number had jumped to 2,210, according to the American Heart Association. As of May 2008, more than 85% of patients survived for a year...
Mafia Wars is a game you can play on Facebook or MySpace or various other social networks. It's insanely popular: Zynga, the company that makes it, claims that it has more than 25 million players. (Zynga also makes the ubiquitous agri-sim game FarmVille.) Part of the appeal is that it costs nothing to play Mafia Wars. That is, if nothing is how much your immortal soul is worth to you. (See the top 10 video games...
...hired gun and attack other players. The more money you get, the more stuff you can buy, like weapons and vehicles. The more stuff you have, the more jobs you can do and the more money you get. Round and round you go. (See the 10 worst video game movies...
...keys to Mafia Wars' appeal is that it's easy. Unlike in a "real" video game, you can't really lose. The constant stream of rewards is addictive; you become like a rat who can't stop pushing the lever to get the little pellets. Your resources constantly regenerate, and the game is always giving you random items that you don't even know how you earned. People in your mafia send you gifts too. The game will try to make you give them in return, and tell them about things you're doing and - this is important - recruit more...
...truth is, you don't really play Mafia Wars; it plays you. It rewards you lavishly for doing next to nothing and for propagating its viral spores further and further into your social network, thereby perpetuating its existence. In fact, Mafia Wars isn't so much a game as a parasite: it lives in the petri dish of the social-networking sphere and feeds off your attention. Try to quit, and it begs and bribes you to fall off the wagon again. It's just a game, but it's like the real mafia in that one respect: just when...