It’s five in the morning and I’m exhausted but I can’t get offline. The reason? A Twitter-based game called Spymaster, much like the Mafia Wars app on Facebook.

Mafia Wars never spoke to me, but Spymaster, with its espionage-based tasks and activities, had an immediate draw. Using OAuth, the game is directly linked to your Twitter account, so there is no need to create another profile to play. You simply click through from an invite on Twitter and begin.

You can pick from a selection of intelligence agencies including the British M16, the American CIA and the Russian FSB. For doing tasks like collecting dead drops or assassinating an ambassador, you get experience points and money–in the currency of the agency you have chosen. This money helps you buy weapons on the black market to increase your attack and defense sums.

Because this is a social game, your attack and defense sums are also related to how many followers you have on Twitter and how many of them you can get in the game.

The more tweeps you bring on board, the stronger you are and the less desirous other players will be of committing an assassination attempt on you. (If they do try and win, they can take a lot of your assets. If they fail, they lose assets to you.)

The game has spread in popularity because of the use of notifications on Twitter, which bear a link to the game and the hashtag #spymaster. Players have the option of turning these notifications on or off, though leaving them on makes a player more money every time he or she does anything. Savvier users turned most off, but many more did not, causing #spymaster to trend quickly, drawing the attention of even more Twitter users.

As of this posting, 140 of my Twitter followers are playing the game. This number includes programmers, graphic designers, CEOs, journalists–all of us deep in our agencies and assassinations ploys, playing at work and long into the night.

How did it come about?

“We all sat around one day, and decided we wanted to do something really fun on Twitter,” says Chris Abad, CEO at iList, the company that created Spymaster. “Eston Bond has been obsessed with the whole spy genre, so we took all that obsession and random knowledge and ran with it.”

iList has developing Twitter-related technology for the past year, but this game didn’t come into being until a couple of months ago, Abad tells me.

“We all kind of knew people were going to like Spymaster,” he says. “As we played in-house, we found ourselves becoming pretty addicted (which subsequently made it a little difficult to stay focused and developing). However, I don’t think anyone predicted the ridiculous levels of growth we’ve seen since the past few days.”

They started sending invites outside the company late on Thursday of last week. Since then, the game has exploded.

What drive in us does it so deeply satisfy that we can’t put it down? I contacted a friend of mine at the University of Melbourne, Darshana Jayemanne, whose studies on social theory and recent work exploring the video game as a form of art are incredibly relevant to the topic:

How has social media changed the way we play?

Games used to have a ritual or ceremonial character, in which a community could reaffirm its sense of cohesiveness and perhaps correct for traumatic events (think of Hektor’s funeral games in The Iliad).

So many of our collective behaviors are affected by technology, it kind of takes the place of ceremonial forms in traditional societies. So it’s small wonder that we observe play-behaviors accumulating around these supposedly utilitarian devices.

Why is Spymaster gaining so much popularity?

The game is similar to some other stuff that’s going around on other sites, and there’s a lot that could be said in general about why these games work. In particular though, I think the sync between the espionage theme and Twitter in particular works very well–Twitter itself feels kind of clandestine, like you’re immersed in these minutiae of other people’s lives as well as sharing select bits of information yourself.

The Twitterverse exists parallel to the mundane
world, a bit like Mail Art or the Trystero in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. The stress of just how much to share is central to the spy thriller genre in which various bait-and-switches, mirroring and foreshadowing techniques are similar to the feeling you get piecing together someone’s life from a stream of terse messages.

An unexamined life is not worth spying on.

The other thing is that we all tend to carry around more devices than any ’60s supervillain anyway. And we love to use them for fun as well as business, to use our devices in support of our vices. It’s a quasi-fetishistic activity, in fact, what Walter Benjamin would have called “the sex appeal of the inorganic.”

What drive does it satisfy?

It’s all in the design. Games are set up to organize desires around reward structures. So the design sets up the drive. Once you’re hooked to the reward structures, and can compare your success or failure to others (through points or money or what have you), it’s a self-sustaining process. Or so the designers hope. The “become a vampire/werewolf/zombie/banker/whatever” game apps on Facebook got old quickly–their scope was too limited.

Spymaster, on the other hand, is constantly developing.

“As the game unfolds at higher levels, the storyline will become more intricate and involved and there will be surprises along the way,” Abad tells me. “We really want to push more real-world cooperation and collaboration between players. Especially the experienced players who’ve mastered the basics and really want to get creative.”

Creating a successful game, Jayemanne tells me, “involves carefully gauging the resources you’re asking the player to invest among other things. With Spymaster, for example, they may have got the balance right for their platform. Unlike a video game where you have these huge overheads in terms of time spent playing, equipment investment, social ostracization and so on, Spymaster keeps it simple.”

It’s what he calls an “‘interstitial game’ which appears in the cracks between work and life situations rather than requiring the undivided attention implied in Huizinga’s ‘magic circle’ theory.”

“With mobile devices becoming smarter and ever-more pervasive, these games will come into their own,” Jayemanne says.

Abad is aware of the importance of mobile technology. So far Spymaster can only be played on a browser. He tells me that one of the comments they most often hear (other than “can I play?”) is whether they have an iPhone app out yet. It’s in the works.

Now you can really kiss all your productivity bye-bye.

Comments by Chris Abad were appended on June 2, 2009.

Three Things You Didn’t Know

1. There will be more awesome games like Spymaster. iList has built a platform around this technology and, according to Abad, “intend to aggressively pursue this direction.”
2. Usually players are wounded in assassination attempts. But they can be killed. Killing them takes them completely out of the game for 15 minutes.
3. You can’t buy the title of Agency Director in the game with n00dz. According to Abad, only the product team get that title. You’re welcome to send them to me, however. If I like them, you can even come play at my safe house.

Of possible interest:
The Spymaster Backlash Begins by MG Siegler at TechCrunch

SPIELRAUM: Games, Art and Cyberspace by Darshana Jayemanne at the University of Melbourne

Photo montage features an image of me by Derek Overbey and an image of a steam pipe explosion in New York by Peter Foley