The Curse of Cow Clicker: How a Cheeky Satire Became a Videogame Hit →
More Cow Clicker rumination. I’m really fascinated by this, it seems. This article has a lot of the same as previous ones I’ve linked, but tidbits of additional insight as well.
EDIT: this friggin’ article has a FB APP embedded into it! Every instance of the word “cow” is clickable and brings up a prompt to give permissions to an app called Wired Cow Clicker, for the sake of spreading word on the article!
Bogost watched in surprise and with a bit of alarm as the number of players grew consistently, from 5,000 soon after launch to 20,000 a few weeks later and then to 50,000 by early September. And not all of those people appeared to be in on the joke. The game received its fair share of five-star and one-star reviews from players who, respectively, appreciated the gag or simply thought the game was stupid. But what was startling was the occasional middling review from someone who treated Cow Clicker not as an acid commentary but as just another social game. “OK, not great though,” one earnest example read.
…
Bogost delivered his response to this line of argument in a well-read blog essay called “Shit Crayons.” In the piece, he compared Cow Clicker players to the imprisoned Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka, who composed poems from his cell using whatever writing material he could find. Bogost writes that Cow Clicker—and, by extension, games like FarmVille—are akin to the Nigerian prison, trapping players in a barren environment. The fact that people are able to exercise creativity despite the cruel limitations of the game—to craft crayons out of shit—is a sign of the indomitable human spirit but no reflection whatsoever on the merits of Cow Clicker. “Even if creativity comes from constraint, there’s constraint and there’s incarceration,” he writes. “A despot in a sorcerer’s hat does not deserve praise for inciting desperate resilience.”
