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."
Only if the click brings me to Omaha Steaks. ;)
Not that I'd buy steak priced that high over mail-order, but you get the idea.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
I got more out of your post than I get out of my friends' Farmville updates. It's all relative, and I must say that crappy slashdot posts are still better than the best click-spam social games.
The only information these games get are "name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends, and any other information I've shared with everyone", which anyone can already get off most profiles without requiring you to authorize an application.
Their goal is making money through ads and virtual currency, not collecting your "full profile data"
Making real people laugh is a HELL of a lot more important than artificially boosting virtual "karma". In fact, I'm frequently surprised when people mod my jokes (which most of my postings are) as "Informative" or "Insightful" when I was really going for "Funny". Trust me, I'm a Buddhist, I don't need any more Karma!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I'm pretty damn selective about my friends. Quality over quantity. I've seen a single update from a single person (she was 16) who needed logs or some shit for a cabin. Her uncle gave her some, and it's now been 3-4 months since that single update.
I guess I can be pretty damn proud of my technically literate, non idiotic friends and family.
Really - my extended family who are a 1000 miles away are my friends, a couple of good ones from high school, a couple of good ones from college, a few former coworkers, and about a dozen current friends make up my network. I've got 40 total, and I could pull 5-10 of those off really.
If you accept every friend request from every moron you ever met, you'll surely be spammed with all sorts of stupid stuff. Pick wisely.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
ProgressQuest works in your browser now... http://progressquest.com/play/main.html