Slashdot Mirror
Cow Clicker Boils Down Facebook Games
mjn writes "Game designer and academic Ian Bogost announces Cow Clicker, a Facebook game implementing the mechanics of the Facebook-games genre stripped to their core. You get a cow, which you can click on every six hours. You earn additional clicks if your friends in your pasture also click. You can buy premium cows with 'mooney,' and also use your mooney to buy more clicks. You can buy mooney with real dollars, or earn some free bonus mooney if you spam up your feed with Cow Clicker activity. A satire of Facebook games, but actually as genuine a game as the non-satirical games are. And people actually play it, perhaps confirming Bogost's view that the genre of games is largely just 'brain hacks that exploit human psychology in order to make money,' which continue to work even when the users are openly told what's going on."
Click to continue
I don't understand this "cow clicker" joke. Only game I ever played was Sorority Life and it appeared to be modeled after any typical RPG game (gain experience; level up; gain new powers).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"
I am predicting at least one defriending as I rub this piece of satire in some choice faces.
I don't think one can truly appreciate the evil addictive nature of those games until he has watched a loved one lose hours in a catatonic trance of digital fertilizing.
Wait.
Maybe there's something to her arguments about porn?
Moooo
I'd be concerned if this game didn't make a load of money. The people who play those games should be filtered out of life by having their money taken away from them until they don't have enough to pay for the basics of life. Facebook games are pretty much just a hopped up version of those retarded viral text based games that you need to sign your friends up for so you can go up the ranks. Internet text based games turned into lame graphics based ones. There will always be morons out there willing to pay real money for fake things that can and will disappear without warning as soon as the creators decide to sell the business (or quit because they've made enough money) or move on to other things (other interests or legal issues).
And people actually play it, perhaps confirming Bogost's view that the genre of games is largely just 'brain hacks that exploit human psychology in order to make money,' which continue to work even when the users are openly told what's going on."
Meh. Slashdot's been doing this for years.
We know it's pointless, but we keep clicking that reply button. And when they deliberately make the stories misleading and poorly edited, they get even more clicks.
... and then they built the supercollider.
lol
Who.
Are.
These.
People?
genre of games is largely just 'brain hacks that exploit human psychology in order to make money,' which continue to work even when the users are openly told what's going on.
Of course they are, but so is everything else. Slashdot exploits human psychology (why exactly am I posting this? I am spending my time and energy and not getting anything tangible in return) in order to make money. Ever felt pressured by your better half to buy a small piece of metal (jewelery) for $1000 dollars or a tiny bottle of water (perfume) for $100? Those also continue to work even after the users are told what's going on.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
At last. Decades of networking research and software engineering have led to this moment. Thank you, Facebook, for proving the internet was worth it!
...has said its last "Moo". Dead as a... cow.
Clever signature text goes here.
It's a cow, Vern, a cow!!
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
Great satire... and I'd love to push it to people I know on Facebook.
However, the linked blog is slashdotted, and the link to the app on Facebook (via a cache of the page) is empty.
Has Facebook already removed this app?
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Baby, come on, click my cow. You know you want to. Click it.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I enjoy we rule (for iphone and ipad) somewhat, and decided to see what all the fuss was about with farmville when they came out with the iphone client.
You click once on crops in we rule to plant from a list of crops, the hierarchy of a moderate number of crops, that are always the same, is easily understandable, you can collect more than one crop at a time, and you collect them by just clicking on them once.
Coming from my only exposure to this genre being we rule, I found farmville to be a magnificent exercise in patience and building anger. Not only are there a billion different crops and buildings and plants or whatnot, that all rotate and a whole lot cost the farmville bucks or whatever, but in farmville, you have to click on each crop just to harvest them, and then click a second time to plow the damn field. And, to add even more insult to injury in comparison, you can only do one of these actions at a time.
I realize how much of a colossal waste of time these types of games are, but it's amazing just how ridiculous farmville looks when your exposure started with we rule. I spend maybe 5 minutes of a day harvesting some crops, visiting some towns and buying some stuff from other peoples' shops in we rule. How exactly you could spend as long as some people apparently play farmville every day is mind boggling to me. Is there a way to just play farmville about 5-10 minutes a day to max out your daily allotment like in we rule?
Now excuse me while I go back to clicking on my cows and sheep on Island Paradise and FrontierVille.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If you're going to make a viral app as a satire of other apps, you should prepare your site to at least stand one slashdotting.
Anyone read The Social Animal? This is just the initiation effect. To avoid humiliation people are likely to believe that something unpleasant that used a lot of time it must be valuable.
I totally invented this "game" concept back in 1998 with Click the President. (Obviously, it's been updated twice since then.)
Now, who do I sue over this...
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
s/cow/wank/g
People here bitch about games that are on Facebook, and the people that play them. Yet when someone asks Slashdot how they can recover a friend lost to games like WOW, the responses are quite different. "It's his life, he can do what he wants!" and "It's better than being at a party passed out drunk!"
This is a virus. It works on the honor system. Please delete all the files from your hard drive and manually post a copy of this virus. Thank you for your cooperation.
the genre of games is largely just 'brain hacks that exploit human psychology in order to make money,' which continue to work even when the users are openly told what's going on."
That sums up Progress Quest exactly. And it has over 430k players.
Sometimes, you shouldn't bother fighting stupid. Instead, give up and take their money.
Not a typewriter
In cinema and theater, we often hear about method acting, a technique by which actors try to create the situations, emotions, and thoughts of their characters in themselves in order to better portray them. In creating Cow Clicker, I rather felt that I was partaking of method design, embracing the spirit and values and ideals of the social game developer as I toed the lines between theory, satire, and earnestness. The Internet is paralyzing because it contains so much potential information. Even over the few days I spent developing Cow Clicker, I found myself watching people play, listening to feedback, and imagining changes. I "listened to my players" and made enhancements far beyond what was reasonable for a work of carpentry or a simple parody. It's hard for me to express the compulsion and self-loathing that have accompanied the apparently trivial creation of this little theory-cum-parody game. Have I fully represented the distillation I hoped to accomplish? Or is some feature missing? And ought I not to add it if so? Where's the vampire cow or the werewolf cow or the cthulhu cow? Ought I not to make them? Perhaps I became consumed myself. Such is the spirit of the day, it would seem: mundane, outward obsession whose worst trick is to disguise itself as fruitfulness.
And his quote of Zynga CEO, Mark Pintus is relevant, "I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away." Where comes the need to disparage what benefits we provide to others?
Where I'm from they're called Video Lottery Terminals and they make the government billions every year.
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
Another great example of this effect is Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle definitely grew to dislike Holmes (hence the attempt to kill him off) and some claim Doyle originally intended Holmes as a parody of detectives.
Me, I don't think 'failing to realize something is a parody' is an insult to the intelligence of people. Instead, I feel it is a failure of the creators. It indicates they have simply have not gone too far.
For a better parody of simplified online games, look at SMBC Theater
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I played mafia wars for a little while. Up until I found a greasmonkey script that would play the entire game for me. At which time I decided, what's the point?
Even a cheap sham can be entertaining.
Entertaining people isn't very hard.
Sounds like this game is straight from an Onion article.
It's missing the most important aspect of a Facebook game: The "Post on you wall?" that should appear every time you click on you cow.
I'm already #1 in the rankings without spending any money.
The only question that matters is: do people who play Farmville (etc) have fun doing so?
If so, then it is a perfectly legitimate form of entertainment, and may well be worth the money they spend on it - not any less so than hardcore gamers playing Fallout or HL2. The latter can similarly be simplified to the point of "you shoot things so that you can shoot more things", and from there on to "you push the button so that you can keep pushing the button", but it misses the crucial point - somewhere along that line of simplification, you lose that quantity called "fun".
It's like taking some gourmet dish, decomposing it down to raw protein, fat, carbs and minerals, blending them, and saying that the disgusting result is somehow representative of the original food. It is, in some way, but it's not the way that matters.
This is a bookmark for later.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
"RPG game"... really? did you use your PIN number on an ATM machine to buy that typical RPG game?
As Wikipedia's RAS syndrome article explains, the noun after abbreviation helps disambiguate the abbreviation, so that RPG clearly doesn't refer to rocket-propelled grenades, and ATM doesn't refer to the networking methods.
anything more than $20 for a game is too much in my opinion [...] I'll usually get bored, sell it, and play Dance Dance Revolution
Dance Dance Revolution for $20? Give me a break. A 9-footer-worthy (dense foam) pad alone can cost well over three times that, and then you get into buying more mixes to get more songs.
i guess that is why someone invented the concept of CONTEXT
Facebook games do often seem a simple waste of time, and as they may be simple, approaching them from this perspective is a bit unfair. What is any game but a long sequence of taps and clicks? All any game on Facebook, Farmeville, Mafia Wars, etc., is only a simpler sequence.
I pretty much quit the Zynga games (and by extension, pretty much Facebook) cold turkey a few months ago, and savor that extra hour or two I have per day (to post to Slashdot, apparently :P ) But never looked back.
I reached level 200-something in Mafia Wars on two accounts (the only way to guarantee you always have energy and items) and also had a modest start with Starfleet Commander and Extreme, as well as a little bit of Yoville (which almost seemed like it could have been a legitimate visual chat platform if they didn't charge extra for creating "party rooms".
Anyway, it's a pretty nifty formula of rewarding people with bitmap "prizes" at *just* the right random intervals to keep them going, triggering the OCD collection/hoarding reflex, along with some requisite peer pressure from comparing their exp points and performance with that of their friends. Could do wonders to educational software if they could work that formula in just right...
Thank you for setting us straight that other people's lives are worthless if you don't enjoy their pastimes. However, coming from somebody posting to /., it really does seem like satire.
This is why I have just stopped playing games on Facebook. Use it for communication and outside that let everyone else have their mindless click fun.
iburnaga.blogspot.com
The irony is that if you took the same time spent on one of these games and actually farmed you could raise all the food you need for a family of five. A land mime is a terrible thing to taste.
Sometimes, you shouldn't bother fighting stupid. http://www.coachoutletfactory.com/
FarmVille and other Social Networking Games are "free" as in every user gets about 80% of the game. Users who want to buy better in-game items, with farmcash perhaps, are doing so just like WoW players buy a monthly subscription. This method works great. Get people to like the game for free, and then some users will actually pay to use it. Most people enjoy playing these games, but not just for the game part, they love playing the game because they can send their friends virtual gifts and do co-op farming together.
I can see that some people might want to play Farmville. But 82 million people? Are there that many people with no life?
Every time I look at that headline I swear it says
"Cow Licker Boils Down Facebook Games"
and all I think is "ew yuck"!
Is that my cow? It goes "baa". It is a sheep! That is not my cow!
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
;p
Can I mod something +1 Scary if it's true but I wish it weren't?
Someone needs to create a "desert bus" facebook app. Offer some "fabulous prize" for whoever scores the most points. Then have the prize be $1, or a free manicure of your left pinky.
This is Facebook, not Diablo.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
As the saying goes: "Computer games are a kind of computer virus that infects the users.".