Building upon his popular social game satire Cow Clicker, Ian Bogost has launched a Cow Clicker platform offering a programmable API, a new Facebook game, an iPhone app, a Moogle search engine, and more.
Initially designed as a parody of shallow social games and launched last July, Cow Clicker "challenges" users to click a virtual cow every six hours to earn clicks and publish their accomplishment onto their Facebook feed. Players can then spend those clicks to buy custom premium cows and in-game items.
The game has since taken off and convinced more than 50,000 people to click over 50 breeds of cows at least 5 million times.
Game designer, professor, and author Bogost says he's realized through this success that people want "as many opportunities as possible to click a cow every six hours."
Thus he's expanding the Cow Clicker Platform to include a Cow Clicker Connect web-widget that allows content publishers to "cowclickify" their properties by integrating clickable bovines into their sites, and a programmable Cow Clicker API allowing developers to build their own cow clicker applications.
"It's called cowclickification -- the application of cow clicking mechanics to non-cow clicking applications," Bogost explains. "Now everyone can graze on the sweet grasses and step in the pungent pies of Cow Clicker's pasture. Businesses can employ new cow clicking mechanics such as clicking a cow to distract customers from the vapid pointlessness of their products and services."
To show the Cow Clicker API in action, the developer announced a new Cow Clicker Blitz puzzle game on Facebook, a Cow Clicker Moobile iPhone app (Mac App Store edition forthcoming), and a Moogle search engine enabling users to search the web by clicking on their own virtual cow.
He announced that companies will be able to "moonetize" their cowclickified application with an upcoming app store called The Stockyard, which will provide a hub "where developers and businesses can publish their cowclickified applications, and where eager cow clickers can find new opportunities to click."
Bogost adds, "Moove over gamification, it's time for gamoofication. The Cow Clicker platform is here to turn your marketing and branding initiatives into a thunderous stampede of clicks!"
I wonder if Square-Enix is gonna get tied in a knot over the name. I don't know if they hold a copyright on it, but it does make one wonder cause Final Fantasy's Moogle was the first thing I thought about when I saw the name. The cownnection (sorry) was made secondary. Maybe its just me.
Am I the only one seeing an intelligent satire suddenly being transformed as a cash "cow" (pun semi-intended)?
$0.99 for the iphone app, pay to play more often the Cow Clicker Blitz mini-game, cow t-shirts...
Where's the satire in this?
I have no problem with the overall idea of making money out of a popular "game" in the end, I just think that the audience who was really behind the original idea might not be the kind of audience who want to spend money for those other products.
I thought that the satire of Cow Clicker was supposed to be based on the minimalism of the game. You click your cow, it moos, and you get more points to click your cow.
Then more and more features kept being introduced, which kills the satire.
No, Cow Clicker was a satire on social decorating games, he's now moved on and is satirizing gamificaiton, as well as the state of what passes for the game industry as a whole. It is Satire 2.0!
I'm trying to think of a terrible pun that's a play on SETI@home and "till the cows come home" but have had no luck. I mean could you imagine the profitability of an amoozon cluster?
Ian, I laughed so hard reading this that people in the San Francisco airport started to stare. This is a great Mo00ve and I can't wait to "step in the pungent pies" of cowclickification all over the web : )
While I realize it's a satirical, isn't the foundation of this game based around human addictions -- like gambling and OCD -- that Zynga tapped into with Farmville?
I mean, I hope that the entirety of CowClickers are just looking for humor, not fodder for their psychosis.
$0.99 for the iphone app, pay to play more often the Cow Clicker Blitz mini-game, cow t-shirts...
Where's the satire in this?
I have no problem with the overall idea of making money out of a popular "game" in the end, I just think that the audience who was really behind the original idea might not be the kind of audience who want to spend money for those other products.
Then more and more features kept being introduced, which kills the satire.
+1 to Dave Mark's observation: Best Satire Evar!
I mean, I hope that the entirety of CowClickers are just looking for humor, not fodder for their psychosis.
Wait...I am moo less. I am without moo.