The end of cow clicker

http://kotaku.com/5846080/the-life+changing-20-rightward+facing-cow

by throw_away • 15 years ago

208 16 15 years ago

This is such an incredible article on so many counts. I stumbled upon Ian Bogost when we were in the throes of the (then acerbic) "gamification" debate, and Foursquare was the undisputed toast of the interwebs. I've been following him since, and have found myself quite intrigued by the Cow Clicker story.

For me, the takeaway from the article isn't so ironic when you look at Game Development as any of the arts. And bear with the cliche, but save the odd exception, an artists' life is almost always a compromise between staying true to one's principles and courting mainstream appeal. Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree, "perhaps the biggest rock band most people have never heard of", will certainly attest to this.

praptak2• 15 years ago

Ah yes, the misaimed fandom phenomenon :)

"The writer has a vision. They've created a character who represents everything they loathe, and have placed him in a setting that satirizes everything they hate about modern society. Bring on the Moral Guardians and Media Watchdogs; he's prepared for controversy!

Only... it doesn't quite work like that."

From http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MisaimedFandom

DanBC2• 15 years ago

Except, it's not misaimed fandom. People seem to genuinely agree with him about how stupid some aspects of modern gaming are. Having cowclick is a way of saying you agree. A clicky plusone.

praptak2• 15 years ago

The article says that not everyone got the joke:

"More surprisingly, Cow Clicker developed an active player base–-people who missed the humor and attached to it as if it were a "real" game. These players unquestioningly spent real-money Facebook credits to enjoy their cows and sent Bogost innocent player feedback in the hopes of improving their experience.

It subverted every expectation that he had, even as it reaffirmed his worst fears about the exploitive sadism of Facebook game design. Its success also became something to dread. A Slow Year represented everything Bogost loved about games; Cow Clicker was about everything he hated."

thristian• 15 years ago

If you have an hour to spare and Flash player installed, Bogost gave a talk about Cow Clicker at the Game Developers Conference, shortly before the "Cowpocalypse" mentioned in the article:

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1013828/

It's been a while since I watched it, so I forget whether he actually highlights his ambivalence toward the game, but it's more than obvious in the way he talks about it.

sp332• 15 years ago

Sounds like a "social" version of Progress Wars! http://progresswars.com/

smoyer• 15 years ago

What a great story ... and an interesting experiment! If I had an FB page, I'd put the empty pasture on it just to honor the irony behind the game - the irony that so many people thought it was a real game and that the inventor got sucked into his joke.

bendotc• 15 years ago

Frank Lantz, Ian's friend mentioned in the article who used to work at Area/Code and now at Zynga NYC wrote a response: http://gamedesignadvance.com/?p=2383

nmcfarl• 15 years ago

That was almost as good as the article, and very much worth a read. An alternate, and in my opion better, explanation of the phenomenon.

jerf• 15 years ago

Now that is some transgressive art, when the piece itself manages to ultimately affect the artist himself. And I don't mean the way any piece affects any artist or merely bringing up strong emotions, but actually changing the artist's opinions on the same dimension the work was intended to be about in the first place.

ThaddeusQuay2• 15 years ago

TLDR: I am upset that my customers are so stupid that they pay for something which was never meant to be a real product, while almost entirely ignoring the real product, which just happens to be a true labor of love. Therefore, I shall discontinue the thing that's bringing in more money, while also publicly talking about how little I think of my customers. I am smarter than them, and I like to rub this fact in their foolish faces.

I understand that there might be deep, philosophical implications here, with regard to the psychology of social gaming and whatnot, but throughout history, way before Facebook and the Internet, artists would frequently create "popular" art, even though they despised it, so that they could have the money to privately create the "real" art that they loved. It is not only rude, but a sign of poor character, for the artist to also despise the people who gladly pay him for what they perceive to have value. I don't know anything more about this guy than what I read in the above article, but HNers, given their tendency towards startups, should stand with his disappointed customers, and not with his lofty attitude. If someone paid me for the privilege of being able to click on the image of a cow more often than those who do not pay, I would try to figure out how to improve the experience for them, and/or how to charge them even more, all the while pocketing the money for some project that was important to me on an idealistic level. Making fun of your customers' intelligence, especially because they've simply made the choice to pay for your product, is never a good thing.

The end of cow clicker

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