Anything you can click you can cow click!

January 20, 2011 10:50 AM

Cow Clicker distilled social games to their essence, offering players incentive to instrumentalize their friendships, obsess over arbitrary timed events, buy their way out of challenge and effort, and incrementally blight their offline lives through worry and dread.
posted by Combustible Edison Lighthouse (18 comments total)

It sounds kinda like Progress Quest for the Farmville set.
posted by Mister_A at 10:56 AM on January 20, 2011 [2 favorites]

double
posted by zsazsa at 10:57 AM on January 20, 2011

That was just a game. Cowclickification is a platform.
posted by Combustible Edison Lighthouse at 11:05 AM on January 20, 2011 [4 favorites]

That was just a game. Cowclickification is a platform.

Sadly, the iPhone app Cow Clicker Moobile is only "coming soon".
posted by Joe Beese at 11:13 AM on January 20, 2011 [1 favorite]

"I was playing pixel clicker and only clicked my pixel 49 times so it died."
posted by oonh at 11:18 AM on January 20, 2011

Cow Clicker blitz is actually kind of fun.
posted by delmoi at 11:28 AM on January 20, 2011

OK, this is really strained, but from this:
I don’t think Kennedy’s KKK farce resulted in anyone sincerely joining the clan, and as for Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal...

A Moodest Proposal?
posted by gurple at 11:54 AM on January 20, 2011 [3 favorites]

It seems very odd to me that this joke of Ian's has such legs. He seems to think so, too: He finds it "incredibly disturbing" that the game went on to be what he calls the most successful piece of art he's ever made.
posted by Nelson at 11:55 AM on January 20, 2011

Variable reward is freakishly powerful.
posted by lumpenprole at 11:59 AM on January 20, 2011 [2 favorites]

I'm waiting for the Nut Kick Click game. It's mostly just like Cow Clicker, but you get to get to click-kick a guy in the nuts. It will be the social media version of Ow My Balls!
posted by Burhanistan at 12:14 PM on January 20, 2011

@ibogost's ongoing tweets today from the Gamification Summit (#gsummit) in San Francisco are hilarious, and frequently insightful. A sampling:

"I'd be less sardonic about #gamification if it were just framed as an evolution of loyalty programs."

"Metrics are the exhaust of systems. You design systems to produce results, not metrics to reproduce themselves."

"Misheard "random bastards" for "brand ambassadors""

"Jane [McGonigal]'s interested in how games make us feel good in complex ways. I'm interested in how games make us feel complex in good ways."
posted by oulipian at 12:17 PM on January 20, 2011 [2 favorites]

"I was playing pixel clicker and only clicked my pixel 49 times so it died."

I read that really fast and my brain kept wanting to pronounce it "pickle clixer"
posted by Tin Man at 12:56 PM on January 20, 2011

I read that really fast and my brain kept wanting to pronounce it "pickle clixer"
Peter Piper picked a peck of pixeled clickers... pickered clixles... dammit.
posted by NMcCoy at 2:31 PM on January 20, 2011

Think about it: would you rather order a pizza, submit a comment, or rate an escort service by clicking a boring button... or by clicking your cow?

Ohh Mathowie...
posted by America at 2:54 PM on January 20, 2011 [1 favorite]

Cow Clicker Trailer
posted by The Devil Tesla at 2:59 PM on January 20, 2011

That's fourteen dollars, not even counting brown ones!
posted by mendel at 7:14 PM on January 20, 2011

When I saw this on Hacker News a few weeks ago, I thought it was one of the most - no, the most brilliant pieces of art made with social media to date. And I say in all seriousness that I hope we see a lot more of this kind of critical practice going forward.

You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks.

Fucking poetry, that is. Click.
posted by fake at 6:33 AM on January 21, 2011

I just paid $0.99 for Cow Clicker on the iPhone. It's very nicely done (other than the hilarious bug where the "Allow" login button keeps scrolling just off screen before you can click it). Really I did it to unlock Dogcow. I also watched a Justin Bieber video ad to get 2 Mooney. Ian's call to action: "Sell Your Eyeballs! Watch this video ad crap and earn mooney, because you're too cheap to buy it."
posted by Nelson at 8:07 AM on January 21, 2011