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."

Comments

True but irrelevant

[shutdown -p now]

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.