Good to see you back at my blog again. BTW, if you haven' aleady done so, please subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The past year in the world of online social gaming has seen the rise of turncoats and thieves, a fitting backdrop to two of the industry’s frontrunning applications, Mob Wars and Mafia Wars, games designed to run on networking sites like Facebook and Myspace.

These games earn their dividends by getting users to apply for services and fill out paid surveys to win ?favor points? from ?The Godfather?, which can also be bought with cash. Now why would David Maestri choose to hide the fact that it was he who crafted this winning formula, when the game began to bring home big bucks in January?

Maestri adopted the pen name Jason Gilbert because, when he released the game, he was still working at Freewebs, the company that would go on to become SGN. As with most tech companies, Maestri?s contract stipulated that anything he created while employed would be the intellectual property of the company. Yet somehow SGN?s legal actions fell flat ? they were given a cash settlement and told they had the right to make a similar text-based mafia game should they wish. They did, as a trip to the iPhone app store will tell you ? their version includes a virtual shooting range and 3D navigation.

But for Mob Wars maestro Maestri the drama looks set to continue, as Mark Pincus? company Zynga appears to have emulated the exact theme and structure of Mob Wars with Mafia Wars. At last tally, the active-user-base of Zynga?s game had already outgrown Maestri?s, drawing in similarly huge amounts of money.

The outcome of Maestri’s suit will carry important legal implications for matters of intellectual property, especially considering the host of other clones popping up on the web, which threaten to render Maestri’s vendetta as hopeless as the music industry’s war on piracy.

Gaming tactics are the subject of many a forum and Facebook group. Some favor the Bulletproof boss, whose faster health regeneration allows him to engage in more prize-fighting, or the Tycoon’s faster pay-offs, which allow him to do more business. Still others prefer the higher energy levels of the Insomniac, by which he can accrue more experience by doing more jobs. One thing everyone needs to keep in mind is that it’s best to do everything in bulk. The bigger your mob, the more enemies you can take on, so start adding, deleting your new ‘friends’only once they’ve joined your posse. The bigger your property portfolio, the greater your hourly cash-flow, and the bigger the inventory you can maintain to equip your mob with the best armor, weapons and transportation. The trick to developing a big property portfolio is to wait until you have enough cash to buy, say, ten of a given property type, as their prices increase with each purchase.

Another way to speed your progress to the top comes via the Hitlist, where high ranking mobsters with too much money often post huge rewards for anyone who will take their vengeance for them. To win the pot, you need only strike the killing blow. By waiting until your target is severely weakened by other attacks, you can defeat far more experienced mobsters, and sidestep the laborious task of long-term wealth-building.

Of course, if you like you could always pay for favor points, fill in the online surveys or apply for services you probably don’t need. Alternatively, you could get into the roguish, cutthroat spirit of things, and become a cheater. There are a range of Javascript-based add-ons (like those available at userscripts.com) that allow mobsters to automate gameplay. These apps can run indefinitely on their own, reaching humanly impossible levels of experience. They’re the secret of most of the game’s top players, and aside from the introduction of a few inneffectual Captcha systems, the maintenance crew have done virtually nothing to stop them - silent acknowledgement, perhaps, that in gaming, as in business, fair play just lands you sleeping with the fishes.