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Cow Clicker: The Facebook Anti-Game

by Matthew Zuras on July 22, 2010 at 10:00 AM

ian bogost's 'cow clicker'Whether you love or hate 'FarmVille' and its Facebook-game brethren, you can't deny their reach or their influence on how we play today. Enter video game designer and critic Ian Bogost and his new Facebook app 'Cow Clicker,' a meta-game that pares down social networking lifestyle entertainments to the root of their essential mechanics. According to Bogost, "You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks." And, besides your standard, never-ending newsfeed options, that's just about it.

We played it for exactly 20 seconds. Cute! But, if it's "partly a satire," as Bogost says, it still seems a little too earnest. We'd much prefer a game that consisted of a square: you can look at that square for a given amount of time each day, and return again the next to look at the square some more. Your friends will be informed that you've been looking at a square. And then this happens. [From: Kotaku]

Tags: anti-games, CowClicker, facebook, FacebookGames, farmville, games, IanBogost, SocialNetworking, TimeWaster, timewasters, Tools, top, VideoGames, web

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