[HN Gopher] Cow Clicker (2010)
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Cow Clicker (2010)
Author : sogen
Score : 102 points
Date : 2022-07-04 17:24 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cowclicker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cowclicker.com)
| elipsey wrote:
| In case it's not obvious, this game was intended as satire.
| Reposting previous comment:
|
| This seems like an appropriate moment to remember Cow Clicker[1],
| and reflect on it's lesson:
|
| "The player is initially given a pasture with nine slots and a
| single plain cow, which the player may click once every six
| hours. Each time the cow is clicked, a point also known as a
| "click" is awarded; if the player adds friends' cows to their
| pasture, they also receive clicks added to their scores when the
| player clicks their own cow. As in other Facebook games, players
| are encouraged to post announcements to their news feed whenever
| they click their cow. A virtual currency known as "Mooney" can be
| bought with Facebook Credits; it can be used to purchase special
| "premium" cow designs, and the ability to skip the six-hour time
| limit that must be waited before the cow can be clicked again."
|
| "Unexpectedly to Bogost, Cow Clicker became a viral
| phenomenon[...]Although continually disturbed by its popularity,
| Bogost also used Cow Clicker to parody other recent gaming and
| social networking trends;"
|
| "'bovine gods' eventually revealed that 'Cowpocalypse' would
| occur on July 21, 2011 (exactly one year since the original
| release of the game). From then on, every click made by players
| would deduct thirty seconds from a countdown clock leading to the
| Cowpocalypse. However, players could extend the countdown clock
| by paying to supplicate with Facebook Credits: paying 10 credits
| would extend the countdown by a single hour, while 4,000 would
| extend the countdown by an entire month. After $700 worth of
| extensions, the countdown clock expired on the evening of
| September 7, 2011. At this point, the game remained playable, but
| all the cows were replaced by blank spaces and said to have been
| raptured. Bogost intended the Cowpocalypse event to signal the
| "end" of the game to players; when addressing a complaint by a
| fan who felt the game was no longer fun after the cow rapture,
| Bogost responded that "it wasn't very fun before."
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| No doubt Bogost had offers to sell and/or saw avenues to
| zyngafy it to the max. He deserves a lot of respect for his (as
| I assume) crictial, scientific, maybe cynic but definitively
| ethical, human way to approach it. Ramp up the insanity and
| maybe teach people about the mechanisms of game addictiveness
| before shutting it all off.
| civilized wrote:
| "still playable on Facebook" was a broken link :(
|
| I was so excited to click that cow.
| codetrotter wrote:
| ______________________________________ / My
| disappointment is immeasurable, and \ \ my day is
| ruined. /
| -------------------------------------- \
| ^__^ \ (oo)\_______
| (__)\ )\/\ ||----w |
| || ||
| NylaTheWolf wrote:
| God I haven't seen ASCII art in so long
| [deleted]
| Sebguer wrote:
| _________________________________________ / if you
| have a terminal you can see this \ \ one whenever you
| want with cowsay /
| ----------------------------------------- \
| ^__^ \ (oo)\_______ (__)\
| )\/\ ||----w |
| || ||
| ricardobayes wrote:
| No HTTPS, no party
| DonHopkins wrote:
| A decade ago attempted to troll Peter Molyneux at the Unity3D
| "Unite 2012" conference after his insufferably vainglorious
| keynote presentation of his "Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube?"
| Cube Clicker game, jokingly guessing that the big secret inside
| the box was a cow, but he just didn't get the joke, even after I
| explained it:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity:_What%27s_Inside_the...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24380418
|
| DonHopkins on Sept 5, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on:
| Bullfrog After Populous
|
| His Cube game was the epitome of dopamine addiction games, all
| that was wrong with Zynga/Facebook games, the rage at the time.
| Nothing at all original about that: a total cop-out of game
| design.
|
| When Peter Molyneux gave his insufferably vainglorious keynote
| presentation of Cube at the Unity3D Unite conference at
| Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam, I chatted him up afterwards and
| attempted to troll him by guessing that the big surprise in the
| box was a cow.
|
| I don't think he got the point that I was trying to make an
| ironic reference to Ian Bogost's Cow Clicker, which is a parody
| of and social commentary on dopamine games.
|
| I tried to explain the joke to him, and he still didn't get it.
| At least Ian Bogost had the self awareness to design Cow Clicker
| in the service of making a critical statement about game design,
| and the capacity of shame to be embarrassed when it was an
| accidental run-away success.
|
| Unite 2012 : Keynote - Founders & Peter Molyneux (The BS starts
| at 1h 8m 21s -- It's been 8 years since I saw this live, and it's
| much worse than I remembered, especially now knowing how it
| turned out!)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24AY4fJ66xA&t=1h08m21s
|
| >1h 48m 06s, with arms spread out like Jesus H Christ on a
| crucifix: "Because we can dynamically put on ANY surface of the
| cube ANY image we like. So THAT's how we're going to surprise the
| world, is by giving clues about what's in the middle later on."
|
| http://www.cowclicker.com/
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker
|
| >In the wake of a controversial speech by Zynga's president at
| the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2010, Bogost developed Cow
| Clicker for a presentation at a New York University seminar on
| social gaming in July 2010. The game was created to demonstrate
| what Bogost felt were the most commonly abused mechanics of
| social games, such as the promotion of social interaction and
| monetization rather than the artistic aspects of the medium. As
| the game unexpectedly began to grow in popularity, Bogost also
| used Cow Clicker to parody other recent gaming trends, such as
| gamification, educational apps, and alternate reality games.
|
| >Some critics praised Cow Clicker for its dissection of the
| common mechanics of social network games and viewed it as a
| commentary on how social games affect people.
|
| https://qz.com/34024/life-really-is-a-game-with-a-lot-of-cli...
|
| >Life really is a game--with a lot of clicks--and then you die
|
| >Curiosity is just the latest in a series of social experiments
| that rely on user interactions with seemingly no point. Of
| course, Zynga is the king of this phenomenon, providing games
| full of sticky and addictive action that encourage more clicks
| for the sake of clicks. Arbitrary value becomes real value, even
| when it's not meant to. Just ask Ian Bogost, who created the
| satirical social game Cow Clicker that went on to such absurd
| popularity that he felt compelled to continue developing it,
| trapping himself in an ironic loop that refuses to end. In Cow
| Clicker, you literally click one cow every six hours to collect
| Mooney, which lets you buy other cows to click on.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27324466
|
| DonHopkins on May 29, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: Y
| Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatan...
|
| Is Peter Molyneux a scammer? Or just a pathological liar who
| believes his own hype? He made some fantastic games in the past,
| but then...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Molyneux
|
| The Lesson of Peter Molyneux
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/15/the-lesson-of-peter-molyne...
|
| Peter Molyneux - Dreamer? Or Con Man?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62-J4KDMAIk&ab_channel=Shott...
|
| Peter Molyneux Interview: "I haven't got a reputation in this
| industry any more"
|
| https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/peter-molyneux-interview-go...
|
| >RPS: Do you think that you're a pathological liar?
|
| >Peter Molyneux: That's a very...
|
| >RPS: I know it's a harsh question, but it seems an important
| question to ask because there do seem to be lots and lots of lies
| piling up.
|
| >Peter Molyneux: I'm not aware of a single lie, actually. I'm
| aware of me saying things and because of circumstances often
| outside of our control those things don't come to pass, but I
| don't think that's called lying, is it? I don't think I've ever
| knowingly lied, at all. And if you want to call me on one I'll
| talk about it for sure.
| dubswithus wrote:
| Obligatory:
|
| https://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/
| ciroduran wrote:
| Not today, Satan
| dubswithus wrote:
| The iOS app isn't available in my region?
| DanAtC wrote:
| Apple likes to destroy their own history by removing apps that
| are too old to run on their latest hardware.
| butz wrote:
| Could someone do similar write-up on "Cow Postman"?
| evacchi wrote:
| Hey, look, NFTs! http://bogost.com/wordpress/wp-
| content/uploads/cowclicker11....
| warning26 wrote:
| Ahead of its time!
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| A one-per-generation visionary game!
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| This was the first in a series of mindless clicker games which
| became quite a popular genre unto themselves. I downloaded one on
| Android called "exponential idle" which was quite a fun
| diversion.
| yegle wrote:
| Yep, I think it's called idle game, although wiki listed a
| different name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_game
|
| The game "Exponential Idle" is actually a very well made idle
| game in this category and I recently started playing it (with a
| lot of guilty pleasure!). For one, its auto-upgrade system
| allows you to specify an expression to maximize the earning on
| the currency in the game.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| I found an expression online that works extremely well and
| basically "won" the game for me. I did have quite a bit of
| fun with it prior to that.
|
| I downloaded one other such game called "Bitcoin billionaire"
| (although there was a cookie based game too). It was pretty
| fun actually. Amazing how our minds are so easily amused
| isn't it?
| karmakaze wrote:
| My favorite was/is Universal Paperclips[0] though not so bare-
| bones the farther you get into it, and it goes a long long way.
|
| [0] https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| I really like the kittens game:
|
| https://kittensgame.com/ui/
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _The end of Cow Clicker (2011)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20073432 - June 2019 (1
| comment)
|
| _The end of cow clicker_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3074501 - Oct 2011 (16
| comments)
|
| _A Facebook Game about Facebook Games_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1538621 - July 2010 (3
| comments)
|
| _Cow Clicker and Social Games on Trial_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1535049 - July 2010 (2
| comments)
|
| I bet there were more (I seem to remember this topic...)
| cowtools wrote:
| Good game.
| Genbox wrote:
| Your username is too fitting for this, so I had to check your
| submissions. There is a link to Cow Tools on Wikipedia. I did
| not know what that was.
|
| _" Cow Tools" is a cartoon from Gary Larson's The Far Side,
| published in October 1982. It depicts a cow standing in front
| of a table of bizarre, misshapen implements with the caption
| "Cow tools"._
|
| Thanks for the laugh.
| dllthomas wrote:
| My last team called our revamp of our admin portal "cow
| tools" :)
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I would have assumed it's the Debian package that includes
| cowsay and related tools. Relies on cowtools-common.
| nickip wrote:
| I totally forgot about Facebook games! Some of them were actually
| fun...
| enlyth wrote:
| I remember playing some vampire game on facebook that I wrote
| an auto-clicking script for, was fun.
| pigtailgirl wrote:
| -- most of the first millionaires I met either worked for
| facebook or made facebook games --
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Why did they drop games? While I hated people forced game
| shares in my feed as much as the next guy, it seemed like an
| extremely successful branch of Facebook features.
|
| Why did they drop it?
| BbzzbB wrote:
| I don't think they've dropped them, you can still find them
| under the Gaming tab.
|
| But their heyday was before the mobile wave, after which the
| two app stores became their main host while Facebook failed
| to become WeChat (albeit they still brilliantly/rapidly
| pivoted to mobile-first).
| hbn wrote:
| I originally made my Facebook account in 2007 to play a Flash
| game called Jet Man, which was basically Flappy Bird before
| Flappy Bird (I want to say the original famous version of this
| game both were ripping off was called Helicopter Game though?)
|
| You would invite friends to play the game to unlock more
| characters, including copyright violating ones such as Super
| Mario, so I assume the game was removed from Facebook long
| before the death of Flash.
| matsemann wrote:
| That game, and some mafia game, was what got our whole class
| to sign up in 2009 or so. Or, rather, if you didn't sign up
| someone made an account for you, so they could claim the
| benefits, hehe.
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(page generated 2022-07-04 23:00 UTC)