Or they just didn't get it or they just didn't care. LEIGH ALEXANDER: Somewhere along the line, his larger user base began to be people who either they understood it was a joke and they still enjoyed it. PJ VOGT: The resulting buzz brought in more players, but most of them weren't in on the joke. And I did feel that way for some time, especially when, you know, there was a relatively even distribution of, of different kinds of reactions. 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. PJ 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. LEIGH ALEXANDER: He was in every gaming magazine and some non-gaming magazines, regarding Cow Clicker. She wrote about Cow Clicker for the website Kotaku. PJ 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. IAN BOGOST: 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, the reductio ad absurdum of Facebook games. He decided the best way to criticize those games would be to make the dumbest one he could imagine. People don’t typically get hooked on them.īogost hates popular social networking video games, 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 a mob boss. Bogost’s creations are usually more like art than entertainment. It’s the work of a video game designer named Ian Bogost. And I was like, “Hey, Eric, uh, is there any way you can compete with me,” ‘cause I think at that point he had 6. Literally, within a day, I had something like 200 clicks. Cindy was battling her brother Eric, who was routinely beating her.ĬINDY BARRETT: At that point, I maybe had 10 clicks a week? My brother would always have 12 clicks, and it would make me frustrated. The way the game works, you get a point every time you click. PJ VOGT: Last summer Cindy Barrett got hooked on this Facebook game. One such critic, game designer Ian Bogost, figured the best way to slam these games would be to build a vicious parody of them, but despite his worst intentions, that’s not how it played out, as OTM producer PJ Vogt reported last fall. Zynga, the leading Facebook gaming company, has some 240 million monthly active players logged into games that critics say do little more than suck money out of their pockets. Tim Schafer’s game attracted nearly 90,000 backers. No one really knows what makes a game click.
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