Five million people play Mafia Wars every day of their lives. I am one of them and this is my story. Earlier this year, I had four weeks off work, sick. Lacking the depths of stupor necessary to appreciate Jeremy Kyle, I turned to Facebook for amusement and accepted my first invitation to play 'Mafia Wars', an internationally popular RPG/strategy game developed by Zynga and hosted on social networking sites.

Like most games in its genre, 'Mafia Wars' involves fights and fights mean weapons. What follows is closer look at the hardware, history and heroes behind the cool artwork that flashes across the computer screen as gamers acquire guns, by direct in-game 'purchase', or as 'loot drops' won by performing 'jobs'. Weapons can be purchased through normal game play, as 'Limited editions' or with 'Godfather points'. Tables show where and how most of the weapons may be added to your inventory, as well as their point values in terms of attack and defense.

This article will concentrate on guns 'purchased' within the context of the 'Mafia Wars' game. Weapons won through 'loot drops' are listed in the tables here and will be covered in more detail through subsequent articles.

Photographs, although they would add quality, interest and blogging brownie points, are absent, at least for the moment. I made a commitment to myself to only publish my own work and, strangely, I haven't taken any original out pictures of guns...yet. If any readers have photos of your own that you would be happy to see here (snapshots, portraits, vid caps from security cameras), by all means send them.

All aspiring Mafia bosses begin their careers as street thugs in New York. The first gun available for purchase is the 45 Cal Pistol, or Colt 45, a single-action semiautomatic with an inner bore diameter of 0.45 inches. Originally designed by John Browning in 1904 and adopted by the US Armed Forces in 1911 as the standard handgun until the mid-1980s. Part of its attraction lies in what is called its 'stopping power', the ability to cause a penetrating ballistic injury to incapacitate its target where he stands. Experiments on live cattle and human cadavers demonstrated that large, low-velocity bullets caused more tissue damage than smaller, faster bullets.

The long barrel of a hunting rifle can be shortened from a normal length of 26-32 inches to either 18-20 inches ('riot gun' or 'trench gun') or 8-12 inches ('whippet' configuration, as carried by Doc Holliday and Clyde Barrow). The sawed-off shotgun is less bulky and easier to conceal under an overcoat.

Dictionary.com defines a machine pistol as 'a fully automatic pistol' or 'submachine gun', also known as a 'burp gun'.

The final gun on sale from the Mafia Wars inventory in New York is the Tommy Gun. Originally designed by General John T Thompson as a 'trench gun' for use in World War I, ironically the weapon never served in this capacity, having been shipped from the factory on the day the war ended. Bereft of its intended market, the Tommy Gun received a shot in the arm with the passing of the Valstead Act in 1920 banning the sale, import or manufacture of alcohol. Nicknamed the 'Chopper', the 'Gat' and the 'Chicago Typewriter', it became the weapon of choice for Prohibition Era bootleggers and gangsters like Al Capone, John Dillinger and Machine Gun Kelly. The .45 caliber cartridge that was used in John Browning's M1911 was also incorporated into the Tommy Gun by its designer, General Thompson, who had also participated in the experiments described above.

Once the ambitious young mafioso has achieved Level 35, he or she has the option to go away and stir it up in Cuba, where the cheapest gun is the RAS-29. It appears to be purely fictional and designed specifically for the Mafia Wars game. There is evidence that it is based on the AKS-47, the folding stock version of the AK-47. The AK-47, or Avtomat Kalashnikov, is the most widespread weapon in the world.

It has so far been impossible to find any information on the Internet about the Gadyuka-5 Pistol that doesn't lead straight back to Mafia Wars. Gadyuka by itself is a Russian language film from 1965, directed by Viktor Ivchenko and set in the Ukraine. The word, 'gadyuka' translates to 'viper', which is a reasonable enough name for a handgun.

A Google search for .308 Sniper Rifle takes you straight to 'Sniperworld.com. I find this slightly humerous and very, very scary. They sell sniper rifles to 'tactical marksmen'. But that's a story for another day. A rifles has spiral etchings on the inner wall of its barrel, which give the bullet the property of 'spin' and enhance accuracy in the same way as a quarterback in gridiron football spins the ball if he throws it correctly.

A bazooka is 'a shoulder-held weapon consisting of a long metal smoothbore tube for firing armor-piercing rockets at short range' (Thefreedictionary.com). This powerful but comparably primitive weapon has threaded itself through Cuban history on at least three prominent occasions:

• In 1964, the Novo Brothers fired a bazooka at the United Nations where Che Guevera was speaking. They bought it for $35 at a shop on Eighth Avenue and rebuilt it.
• Ignacio Novo fired one at the Cuban Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal World's Fair.
• The 1968 attack on the Polish ship, Polanika, docked in Miami.

Not for the young and foolish, only Mafia Wars players above Level 70 are permitted to pack heat in Moscow. Shortly after arrival, a choice must be made to join the traditional Voya or the more modern Russian Mafiya. I chose Voya and these are my weapons.

The APB (Avtomaticheskij Pistolet Besshumnyj), is an automatic silenced pistol developed in 1972 for use by the KGB and the Soviet Spetsnaz. Sharp-eyed 'Far Cry 2' fans will recognise the APB as the Makarov 6P9.

The remaining two guns, the Shturmovaya Vintovka and the RAS-28 SMG, are difficult to document.  Whether this because they are figments of the Mafia Wars Team's imagination or because they are rare items in the real world is unclear.  I will continue to dig.  Within the context of the game itself, I own four of the pistolets and none of the other two.  With 501 members in my mafia relying on me to provide firearms, I fear my career in the Russian Voya may be brutally short. 

And thus concludes my first-ever survey of the world of weaponry.  I don't know where this sudden fascination comes from, any more than I know why millions of normal-seeming people all over the planet, people whose profiles contain photos of cute little babies and fluffy kittens, find amusement in online games based on the dark and grisly side of life.  A safe way of channeling our own inner demons?

I hope you've enjoyed reading this as much as I have researching and writing it and I hope you will come back to read my next article, 'Heroes and Zeroes:  The Real Characters behind the Guns of Mafia Wars', where I will write about designers, gangsters and lawmen who gained notoriety as a result of these lovingly crafted works of engineering.  I will also pick up where I left off in my catalogue of game firearms and describe the weapons gained through loot drops.

Time now for me to sign off and kick some Russian Mafia butt.  Has anybody seen my Pistolet Bisshumniyj?