You’re missing the potential with ubiquitous scoring mechs for Painting the Cowpaths. Sorry, I’m going to point you to a (short) blog post: http://hypergogue.posterous.com/paint-the-cowpaths

The banality of hyperlinked documents allows the exciting part — we’re all involved in multiple simultaneous/asynchronous/longitudinal conversational threads. The banality of grinding games and ubiquitous crappy Skinner-box game mechs will give rise to emergent games every bit as threaded/longitudinal as the wargames I use to play with imaginary forces in my childhood. Games all around means more vernacular materials to play with.

Possibly. Or, we’ll skinner-box ourselves into a societal OCD Gamepocalypse as Jesse Schell’s started calling it on his new blog.

Your point about Farmville and immunity is totally bang on.

So in the Mafia Wars game, once I finally found the best way to, as you say, “avoid playing the game”, (or doing it as efficiently as possible), I found the only better way to avoid playing the game.… I stopped. I reached an asymptote of playability. (I sense most other players reached this as well… even the highest leveled players only played for ~80 days.)

Now reading your post, it occurs to me: why do I bother with these games? A diversion from real life? Real life being, another system which we spend our lives trying to master. A system we don’t always enjoy playing, though we convince ourselves to play, because if we get better at it, it will “be more fun.” Something we must keep telling ourselves, so we will never think we have already gotten as good as we can be at this system. So we keep playing. After we have mastered life, the only way to increase our mastery of the system is to quit. Leveling systems are our way out of existential crisis. As long as we’re getting somewhere, we’re not nowhere.

But I’m not sure if there is any “universal game”. SF loves to depict universalities. The one TV show everyone watches, the most dangerous game, one ring to rule them all. As if real life was that simple. We get bored with universal systems quickly, and need to move on to something else, or need to change it up somehow. Start over with a new character. Try a new strategy. Doesn’t the average WoW player have like 5+ characters? It’s a new meaning to “multiplayer”. Even treating real life as a game is too simplistic, just because there are so many different lives to live, different chapters, etc. And different games at the same time. Even the hardcore Myst fans play solitaire once in a while.

Behold, the mini-game: a mindless diversion Easter Egged into a bigger game! Games upon games! Thousands of random number generators choosing to trigger thousands of random number generators! Enter user name for high score list: the multiplicity is at hand!