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
"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?
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.
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.
it's a minimalist presentation of the same ultimate waste of time typical RPGs are. the joke is YOU.
(side note: "RPG game"... really? did you use your PIN number on an ATM machine to buy that typical RPG game?)
Who. Are. These. People?
And what's their contact info?
...has said its last "Moo". Dead as a... cow.
Clever signature text goes here.
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.
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.
I've never actually played a Facebook game, but I've had friends try to draw me in by demonstrating the games at length. So I know the mechanics of a few popular ones.
Facebook games have, from what I've seen, three goals:
1. Keep you in the game regularly by setting events up so you have to visit frequently.
2. Send messages in your name to all of your friends to "join me in this fun game that's the awesomest thing ever!!!!!".
3. Hopefully occasionally sucker someone into spending real money to level up or gain new powers.
Facebook game developers, on the other hand, have only one goal. Access to your Facebook account so they can see information about you and all your friends. The actual mechanics of gameplay are almost irrelevant, as long as it's compelling enough to draw you in and maybe use your account to convince your friends to help with your lost sheep or by giving you a pink balloon or a warm huggie or whatever.
The upshot of this article is that the bar can be lowered significantly and still manage to sucker people in. Who needs a whole Farmville when you can just scan in a bad picture of a cow and have people click it every 6 hours, and get the exact same data on them that way?
Personally, I'd do a blue circle that sighs every time you click on it. Then, if you convince enough friends to join, your circle slowly turns from blue to red. I bet I'd get full account profile data on a million people within a month.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
My character Muffy in Sorority Life has special Paris clothing and hot cars.
Plus I think she's the US Ambassador to the UN or something.
Mostly I use my special powers to beat up French chix tho.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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.
F*ck [...] everyone I went to school with
Doesn't sound like a lonely game to me. Risky, yeah, but certainly not lonely.
Unless, of course, you were homeschooled, in which case it's just sick.
Personally I'd be at least choosy about, if nothing else, gender. But that's me.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Progressquest is more better. :-(
Still wine only for Linux.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
You fool. I don't just use ANY PIN number: I use my personal PIN number on those nifty automated ATM machines! Then I use that money to buy a MASSIVE MMORPG game and some extra RAM memory so my CPU unit isn't constantly putting stuff on the SDD drive. Gee, I hope my video card can handle all those CG graphics...
*cough*
Alright. I'm done.
Strike me down, so that I may become stronger than you could ever imagine. Or mod me up. Your pick.
Sometimes, you shouldn't bother fighting stupid. Instead, give up and take their money.
Not a typewriter
When applications first came out, I just started hiding them every time, and hiding the people who announced them. I haven't seen any application-based spam in well over 6 months.
"Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
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
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.
>>>RPG game?
Role Playing Genre game.
See? Wouldn't I make a great politician? I can backpeddle and bullshit with the best of 'em. ;-) Maybe I'll check-out this Cow Clicker game - see how many of my friends I can dupe into joining it.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
"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.
I'll tell the 40 or so women I've slept with and my two ex-wives what you said.
So you confirm that you fail regularly in your attempts at relationships with women? Interesting ;)
which is totally what she said
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...
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
Who. Are. These. People?
And what's their contact info?
And why does William Shatner want to know, anyhow?
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar