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."
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.
I have the opposite perspective actually. He accidentally made something fun that a lot of people enjoyed, and instead of letting them run with it he closed it down out of, essentially, pique because he thought those people were having fun wrong.
It was always an absurdist demonstrative to prove a point about the hazards that the game industry would soon be forced to confront.
It is now so apparent how shamelessly game developers will exploit human psychology instead of pursuing actual fun.. so it's not as useful of a warning.
Was anyone actually having fun -- in any meaningful sense of the word -- or were they just indulging compulsion. I think for a lot of (even very predatory) games, there's a blend between the two, but here's it seems to be nakedly the latter.
I take the view that if someone says they're having fun you should probably believe them. I've known people who talked about games like addicts, that they'd spend hours "playing" and the best they'd ever get out of it was feeling numb, but those were always "deeper" or at least bigger games (mostly LoL and WoW), not Cow Clicker or any of the similar games that emerged later.
It usually starts with it being "fun", because you so release endorphins from playing/winning. The stage where they're only feeling numb is extremely late when they're already hopelessly addicted.
Not all fun things are equal however, otherwise you'd have to classify taking drugs and directly supplementing "fun" hormones as the best entertainment in existence.
At the time I thought Cow Clicker would be an eye opening moment for the Game Design Gatekeeperati, but they doubled down. This turned the whole thing into performance art, with the unwilling professors of fun as part of the show.
Yeah because there’s a real vacuum of pretty looking but content free addictive micropayment games. A real big loss to society that has not been replicated that one.
______________________________________
/ My disappointment is immeasurable, and \
\ my day is ruined. /
--------------------------------------
\ ^__^
\ (oo)\_______
(__)\ )\/\
||----w |
|| ||
_________________________________________
/ if you have a terminal you can see this \
\ one whenever you want with cowsay /
-----------------------------------------
\ ^__^
\ (oo)\_______
(__)\ )\/\
||----w |
|| ||
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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".
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:
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!)
>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."
>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.
>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.
>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.
"So, this episode, we take a look at these philosophical faux pas, these mental mistakes, and these anecdotal accidents, as I saaaay... But, hello you! I'm GuruLarry, and I welcome you to Fact Hunt: Five times Peter Molyneux was made to look like the total pillock he actually is."
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