Facebook and Cows Equals a Social Experiment

Here some background on the game, you get a cow. You click on said cow. In six hours, you can click the cow again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom "premium" cows through micropayments Facebook currency like the bacon or my personal favorite, the hello cow based off the cute and cuddly Hello Kitty.

The Cow Clicker currency called "mooney” allows you to buy your way out of the time delay. You can publish feed stories about clicking your cow and you can click your friend’s cow

There is an interesting story behind the development of Cow Clicker that was born during GDC 2010 and I had the pleasure of sitting in on this heated debate during a lecture on the rise of social gaming between "traditional" game developers, who make the sorts of console and casual games we've come to know well, and "social" game developers, who make games for Facebook and other networks such as cell phones.

The controversy that had been simmering for a while boiled over when one of the people in the audience brought up the success of Zynga's FarmVille along with the company's publicly malicious attitude which many in the industry of casual gaming consider to be the F-off attitude.

The F-off attitude is based on the fact that games such as FarmVille are challenge free and demand just a few basic clicks. Ian Bogost, the game’s designer, was so inspired by this controversy that he wanted to build a satirical game based on compulsion since most of our digital life is compulsive. I know from personal experience that I have an addiction to refreshing my RSS Feeds, Facebook page and checking my email at an alarming rate. I don’t deny that I am addicted.

Bogost used Optionalism in the development of Cow Clicker as most games require some non-trivial effort to play. Challenge and effort are often cited in definitions of games, as is a tendency toward meaningful interactivity. In this case, the game’s meaning emerges largely from the choices a player makes within a complex system of many interlocking and contingent outcomes, both user- and system-generated. These choices include what premium cow to purchase and whether to buy yourself out of a time delay.

Lastly, this game has an excellent way of being a time destroyer and Bogost knew any popular game on a social networking website needed this element. Many of today's console games exert a time crush. They demand tens or even hundreds of hours of attention to complete, some or most of which often feels empty.

In that respect, one could argue that many games seem to destroy time. But social games do something even more violent—they also destroy the time we spend away from them. This comment may seem harsh but in Cow Clicker you need to click a cow every 6 hours and seeing that there is only 24hrs in a day; you will need to customize your schedule to be successful in this game. This may mean an interruption in your sleep schedule or in extreme cases even force you to stay home.

Overall, Cow Clicker may not be as popular as Farmville or Mafia Wars but it shows us that the irony and how social media gaming is taking over our lives. I took part in this social experiment but will you?

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