CYBERPUNK: Geekz 4Life

Yeah, Pimpwar is as bad as you'd suspect. It certainly isn't the kind of online game you'd want your kids to play with, or anyone who is already too Caucasian-centric. It traffics in some of the worst gender and racial typecasting possible. (And there's no bonus points for guessing which sex and which race gets stereotyped.) And just like those first-person-shooter video games that supposedly glorify violence, it can be argued that Pimpwar enshrines another questionable behavior: It turns its unsuspecting outlaw playaz into database managers.

I came across the ethically challenged but eminently playable game through a mailing list of buddies. I wouldn't exactly call Pimpwar an underground phenomenon -- anyone with a Web browser can participate (at least until the player quotas are reached; after that you have to wait until the next round) -- but as successful as this game has been, it has rather limited commercial prospects. After all, the established gaming industry is under enough pressure defending their goods from the John Ashcrofts of the world to offer anything more politically incorrect than, say, Deer Hunter, which takes a few shots at granola-crunching animal lovers. It took two savvy kids from Florida, Ron Jamison and "Zavon," to fuse hip-hop culture with online gaming, to put the language of rappers Kid Rock and Eminem into an interactive dimension. So who cares if the country's biggest real pimps are white guys in Nevada, or that the kids shooting up schools are suburban crackers? On Pimpwar's log-in page, it's a brother, with the purple suit and gold-chains, who backhands a party girl. "Bitch, give me my fuckin' money," he whines.

"Pimpwar is a very controversial game [in the online gaming community]," Chris Krueger, one of the curators for the Multiplayer Online Games Directory, tells me in an e-mail interview. The directory almost didn't list the game, Krueger says, but ultimately decided to include in in the interest of free speech. It describes Pimpwar as "not intended for the weak-minded."

Here's how the game works: When signing in for the first time you get a small stable of hos and thugs and a few thousand in cash, which you'll need to buy supplies (condoms, medicine, beer). Every few minutes a you get a few additional turns, during which your hos bring in money from tricks and your thugs protect your ass from other pimps trying to move in on your territory. Periodically you need to use your turn to scout for new hos and thugs, or make crack to keep your hookers happy and beholden to you, lest they are snatched away by another scheming Mac Daddy.

"Success for a pimp is calculated in a simple equation. Hos = Money," the site's introduction states. "The more hos you have the more money you make."

According to Atomik, one of maintainers of the Pimpwarhq discussion page, the audience is "Mostly teenagers ... some become [so] obsessed with the game it's kind of scary." I can see why. It'd be hypocritical of me to take a moral stand when I've already spent many an hour dispatching thugs in lowriders to attack other pimps and bring back the resulting booty. Pimpin' was an daily obsession of mine for almost a month.

And it had an unsettling effect. I haven't felt the urge to raffle off some young lass' chaste charms, nor have I started calling my friends "homey." I have, however, found myself doing a lot of mental calculating, the kind I'm loath to do when it comes to, say, balancing my checkbook. Would it be more fiscally sound to use my turns making crack, or should I buy it from "Pip's Deals on Wheels" and use the time saved to scout for more hos? Do I have the correct ratio of hos to thugs? Too few thugs would leave me open to attack, but you can't have too many either, unless you break the bank on bullets and booze. Without enough guns to play with or beer to drink, your crew is liable to abandon you.

In other words, despite the bad-ass signifying, Pimpwar is essentially a numbers game. Up in the top ranks, the pushing and shoving get rough between the warring pimp alliances, but I bet that you could ask all 21,000 or so players about the game and each one would ultimately break it down as a matter of stats. For instance, Tjames Madison, a player on a mailing list I'm on, has actually put together a cogent analysis of how to be a succesful pimp, one that relied largely on explaining some of the game's mathematical variables. "Pistols get one shot off, shotguns two, Tek-9s nine, AKs 30," Madison writes of the choice of weapons one can buy. "But this is not expressed in a linear sense of value within the game. Shotguns cost nine times as much as pistols. Tek-9s cost a little less than three times what shotguns cost, and provide 4.5 times the firepower. AKs cost three times what Tek-9s cost, and provide more then three times the firepower."

Translation: You'd have to be a stone-cold sucka not to invest your green in AKs.

Another participant, Fred Salari, Webmaster of the hip-hop news site Truthugs, gives me the low-down on joining formal alliances of other pimps. Again, it comes down to numerics. Salari e-mails that I should avoid alliances that take more than one percent of my earnings as dues: "A good alliance founder will start his alliance with one percent and generate a little revenue for the alliance. Once he or she has the alliance of about 10+ members that are doing well, they will boost it up to about 15 percent." But that's o.k., as "the alliance will then purchase defensive thugs and offensive thugs to stand [on] your side in attacks."

What I gradually realized is that, when you strip it of the thuglife trappings, Pimpwar is just a database. Instead of spitting out mailing addresses in response to tightly defined conditional queries, this one responds with relationship-driven yeas or nays to the specific number of crack rocks offered up to steal hos away from someone else's crib. You can't even call it a game of probabilities. I bet very little is left to chance here; the only uncontrollable factor is the other players' aggressiveness. And the real pay-off is not so much unloading clips, but in tallying tables into statistically brutal figures.

Even when cloaked in outlaw culture, us computer geeks still revel in computation. "The street has its own use for things," sci-fi author William Gibson once wrote; now the tech set has its own use for the street.

E-mail Joab Jackson at ez@joabj.com.