Facebook cow clicker game

I can backpeddle and bullshit with the best of 'em. As Wikipedia's RAS syndrome article explains [wikipedia. I'm not laying down real money just to buy fake swords and crap. I can't tell if you're making a joke - but if you've never heard of Farmville or seen an announcement regarding farmville - while using facebook As far as I can tell, there was no maximum level and the storyline was simply "You steal a car. 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.

Send messages in your name to all of your friends to "join me in this fun game that's the awesomest thing ever!!!!! Hopefully occasionally sucker someone into spending real money to level up or. She has no special powers other than licking frat boys like a lollipop.

It was just a waste of time. 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 ;. Really, you, Beardo the Bearded, had facial hair? I am shocked to learn this! A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess? I've found that my personal productivity and satisfaction have increased tremendously since I canceled my Facebook account.

As I indicate in a response to a sibling, the deciding factor in me quitting Facebook was Mark Zuckerberg's statements characterizing a desire for privacy as disingenuous and socially unacceptable. He can think what he chooses to, and I can choose not to do business with him.

It's also very invasive. It's likely he cancelled his account for many reasons, but that less time on facebook altogether was a happy byproduct. And if we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. 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 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 platf.

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. 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.

Ann Klinestiver will be glad to know you approve of her former predicament. I sometimes wonder if my brain chemistry is wonky - I don't see the appeal of slot machines at all. I've tried a few, in a few different places, and it was just paying money to be bored.

I get equally bored by gameplay that is supposed to exploit the same mechanic - grinding in WoW or Diablo or whatever. The whole "random reward" thing leaves me cold. On the other hand, I still find MOO2 addictive.

I guess I'm too fascinated by optimizing. As long as they don't stop buying lottery tickets, I agree with you. They save me the trouble of paying too much in state taxes A movie is a message the creators are passing to the viewer. A movie can inform and make you think. A movie, like a book, can transform the viewer's understanding of the world. Claiming movies to be nothing more than entertainment is so reductive.

I think that's silly. Some sports fans are led to think by watching sports, just as much as some movie viewers are led to think by watching movies and some just get a short thrill of entertainment.

There is drama in sports A player who has overcome personal hardship to excel in their sport like a no-hitter in baseball pitched by a one-armed man ; a player who fights through injury and demonstrat.

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. 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. I was under the impression Advertising only makes money if people click on the ads, not just the site.

I was under the impression Advertising only makes money if people click on the ads,. Some online advertising works that way, such as Google AdWords. But typically not display ads of the kind that slashdot runs. Those are paid by impression, not by the click. So, every time a page loads on slashdot that doesn't have ads disabled, slashdot gets income. Actually, not only does slashdot make money off of ads as several other people pointed out , but you can voluntarily give them real money [slashdot.

That's pretty much exactly the same model as most FB games or so I heard [tvtropes. Even better: Posting comments going for a "Funny" mod which doesn't mean anything for your Karma So a Buddhist monk goes up to a hot dog vendor. Vendor asks him "What'll it be? So the vendor fixes him up with a dog, with all the fillings. The monk, a little confused, asks him "What about my change? Many times the Informative ratings are from people who laughed but wanted to give you a better Karma rating.

I'm not sure how that started, but it's been going on for about 3 years. I had great karma IRL but burned it all about four years ago. It was worth it, even if I have to start as a freakin' ant again. I'm not sure I see the disincentive for posting informative information, could you please elaborate? Unless you meant the rest of your paragraph, in which case, allow me to retort. Posts don't start off invisible.

They start off generally equal and only those who have shown the ability to contribute to the community in a good way get a bit of a head start. Moderation relies on those individuals who contribute the most to the community, and not the clueless. The clueless ones don't get mod points. And when. I disagree.

I think you're on to something. No fuck you, you stupid inbred tard. 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.

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. You don't? I get the statement that itemizes the payment in my email each month, but I never bother to read it. Dude, if you're posting here and not getting paid, you're really wasting your time.

Wait, the game is dead already? Dangit, I was looking forward to playing just as soon as I reach max level in Progress Quest! However, the linked blog is slashdotted, and the link to the app on Facebook via a cache of the page is empty.

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 with Click the President [thenetw0rk. Obviously, it's been updated twice since then. You get a wank, which you can click on every six hours.

You earn additional clicks if your friends in your pasture also click. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom premium cows and timer overrides through micropayments. Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence. Oh, come on. Back in it was a little startling, maybe. Now computers click on cookies absent human players , and people endlessly swipe dollar bills on their iPhones. In fact, so many years hence, Cow Clicker probably seems so normal as to be ordinary, even boring by today's standards.

Of course people would click a cow every six hours. Why wouldn't they? All we do anymore is click on things. Cow Clicker is still playable on Facebook. One thing: all the cows are gone, having been raptured. Not to worry, though. A leaderboard tracked the game's most prodigious clickers. Players could purchase in-game currency, called mooney, which they could use to buy more cows or circumvent the time restriction.

In true FarmVille fashion, whenever a player clicked a cow, an announcement—"I'm clicking a cow"—appeared on their Facebook newsfeed. And that was pretty much it. That's not a nutshell description of the game; that's literally all there was to it.

As a play experience, it was nothing more than a collection of cheap ruses, blatantly designed to get players to keep coming back, exploit their friends, and part with their money. Within weeks, it had achieved cult status among indie-game fans and social-game critics. Every "I'm clicking a cow" newsfeed update served as a badge of ironic protest.

Players gleefully clicked cows to send a message to their FarmVille -loving friends or to identify themselves as members of the anti-Zynga underground. The game began attracting press on sites like TechCrunch and Slashdot. And then something surprising happened: Cow Clicker caught fire. The inherent virality of the game mechanics Bogost had mimicked, combined with the publicity, helped spread it well beyond its initial audience of game-industry insiders.

Bogost watched in surprise and with a bit of alarm as the number of players grew consistently, from 5, soon after launch to 20, a few weeks later and then to 50, by early September. And not all of those people appeared to be in on the joke. The game received its fair share of five-star and one-star reviews from players who, respectively, appreciated the gag or simply thought the game was stupid. But what was startling was the occasional middling review from someone who treated Cow Clicker not as an acid commentary but as just another social game.

In fact, despite itself, Cow Clicker was perversely enjoyable. The cartoon cow was cute, with a boxy nose and nonplussed expression. After every click, it emitted a satisfying moo. The game may have been dumb and even mean. But it was also, for some reason that resisted easy explanation, kind of appealing.

But he—along with thousands of others like him—was still clicking. Bogost's office at Georgia Tech is crowded with in-jokes and personal obsessions. A basket filled with Garden Salsa SunChips sits below a window. Bogost once publicly stated his disappointment that Delta Air Lines had stopped serving the flavor, after which someone sent him an anonymous shipment of the stuff.

Bogost suspects his wife. In the corner rests a inch tube television attached to an Atari game console. A pile of cartridges sits beside it: Pitfall! Copies of Bogost's most recent project, a retro game with an accompanying book titled A Slow Year , are stacked on his bookshelf.

A Slow Year is a series of what Bogost calls "game poems," four minigames in which players accomplish leisurely, pensive tasks, like slowly sipping a cooling cup of coffee or focusing on a twig as it bobs down a stream.

Bogost spent three years sporadically working on the collection for the archaic Atari , which he says forced him to accept constraints similar to those self-imposed by Imagist poets, like Ezra Pound, who tried to use the most precise language possible in their work.

If Cow Clicker is Bogost's diagnosis of what games shouldn't do, A Slow Year is his vision of what they might aspire to—exploring the artistic frontiers of the medium to create new kinds of experiences. A PC version of the game was published in November And yet, in the months leading up to its publication, he found himself drawn to its evil twin, Cow Clicker.

Initially, Bogost planned to launch Cow Clicker and let the game run its course. But now that people were actually playing it, he felt an obligation to sustain the experience. When his server melted under the unexpected demand, he was besieged by complaints until he signed up for a cloud-computing service to handle the load. Social-game developers, many of whom saw the game as good-natured ribbing, suggested ways to improve it: Let players earn mooney by clicking one another's newsfeed updates, for instance, which would further encourage them to spam their friends.

Bogost added the feature, which he called "click on your clicks. A golden cowbell, for instance, requires , clicks. On one level, this was all part of the act. Bogost was inhabiting the persona of a manipulative game designer, and therefore it made sense to pull every dirty trick he could to make the game as sticky and addictive as possible.

But as he grew into the role, he got a genuine thrill from his creation's popularity. Instead of addressing a few hundred participants at a conference, he was sharing his perspective with tens of thousands of players, many of whom checked in several times a day.

Furthermore, every time he made the game better, he received some positive bit of feedback—more players, a nice review, a funny comment on his Facebook page. Tweaking the game was almost like a game itself: Finish a task, receive a reward. The number of players peaked at 56, in October before beginning a long slide down to 10, What Cow Clicker lost in numbers, however, it gained in fan fervency.

The people who remained may have begun playing in cheeky protest, but they soon began taking it surprisingly seriously. I actually started to understand the psychology of Survivor a bit better. At first, Bogost let the cheaters prosper, but outrage from the player community eventually overwhelmed his resolve, and he added a verification system to crack down on the counterfeit clicking.

Bogost kept his players hooked by introducing new cows for them to purchase using virtual mooney or real money. They ranged from the crowd-pleasingly topical a cow covered in oil and sporting a BP-esque logo on its rump to the aggressively cynical the Stargrazer Cow, which was just the original cow facing the opposite direction and for which Bogost charged 2, mooney. They may have looked simple, but they were time-consuming to conceive and draw.

By the end of the year, Bogost was devoting as much as 10 hours a week to Cow Clicker. Drawings of cows cluttered his house and office. I couldn't stop. Bogost was not the only game theorist disturbed by Cow Clicker 's addictive appeal.

Nick Yee, a research scientist at PARC, the Xerox-owned innovation center, has been studying massively multiplayer online role-playing games for 12 years. He says that good games usually offer meaningful opportunities for achievement, social interaction, and challenge; otherwise, players become little more than rats in a Skinner box, hitting a button to get a jolt of reinforcement.

Motivation researchers have studied the addictive qualities of games for decades. Game designer and futurist Jane McGonigal summarized the research in her best-selling book Reality Is Broken , in which she suggested that successful games mimic the feelings of accomplishment we get when we do fulfilling work. McGonigal argues that game mechanics—the rules and designs that govern gameplay—are captivating enough to make even the most miserable activities rewarding and compelling, from scrubbing a toilet to recovering from a brain injury.

Even nongaming companies are catching on to the power of games. Today, gamification—using game mechanics to influence real-world behavior—is a bona fide corporate buzzword.

Executives attend gamification summits to learn how to leverage game features to attract and keep customers. The US edition of Google News offers badges that let people "level up" by reading articles online. Kobo, an ebook company, has a program that doles out "awards" when a reader highlights a passage, jots a note, or consults the dictionary.