
I mean, when people play your game, you can't help but feel pleasure. And as more players poured in, Bogost was surprised to find himself feeling pretty proud.īOGOST: Gleeful. VOGT: Game journalists liked Cow Clicker because they got the joke. It was much more popular than I think he had ever predicted it would be. She wrote about Cow Clicker for the website Kotaku.ĪLEXANDER: He was in every gaming magazine and some non-gaming magazines regarding Cow Clicker. VOGT: Leigh Alexander is a game journalist who's also friends with Bogost. Or, you can get virtual money, either through clicks or by spending real cash that you spend to reset the timer and immediately click again. Wait six hours and you can click it again.

Maybe you pay for the privilege to click on a cow. The reductio ad absurdum of Facebook games.īOGOST: You know, a game in which all you do is click on a cow and that's it. That was Cow Clicker, the game Cindy found. He decided the best way to criticize those games would be to make the dumbest one he could imagine. VOGT: Bogost hates popular social networking video games â games like Farmville that clog your Facebook newsfeed with notifications about how your aunt just harvested her virtual crops or your dad put out a hit on mob boss. It's a first-person drinking game for the Atari. And you want to kind of time your enjoyment of the cup of coffee with the amount of time that it's going to take the sun to rise. It's dawn and you've got a cup of coffee which is slowly getting cold. IAN BOGOST: The winter game, the sun is rising. Take his most recent work, a game poem called "A Slow Year." The point of the game is to experience the seasons. Bogost's creations are usually more like art than entertainment, people don't typically get hooked on them. VOGT: The game is called Cow Clicker, it's the work of a game designer named Ian Bogost. And I was like, hey, Eric is there any way you can compete with me? 'Cause I think at that point he had six. Literally, within a day, I had something like 200 clicks. My brother would always have 12 clicks and it would make me frustrated. Cindy was battling her brother, Eric, who was routinely beating her.ĬINDY BARRETT: At that point I maybe had 10 clicks a week.

The way the game works, you get a point every time you click. VOGT, BYLINE: Last summer, Cindy Barrett got hooked on this Facebook game. Vogt from WNYC's On The Media has the story of an attempt at satire that didn't exactly go to plan. One videogame designer recently set out to parody Zynga's games by feel creating an absurd version of his own. Industry analysts have valued it at 15 to $20 billion. And before the end of the year, the company is expected to have its initial public offering. Over 200 million people play Zynga games each month. Zynga is the company behind popular Facebook games like Farmville and Cityville.

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
