The conents of this article have been taken from the wired article located at
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/12/ff_cowclicker/all/1 solely for educational
purposes.
The Curse of Cow Clicker
Bogost’s role in the gaming industry is much like that of the acid-tongued class
clown who knows he’s smarter than his teachers. He writes a column for the
news site Gamasutra in which he has compared Sony to “a baby that doesn’t
know its own arms aren’t alien beings.” His acerbic perspective has won him
invitations to countless gaming conferences, where he always commands the
center of attention—whether onstage or tweeting furiously from the audience. He
even looks the part of the rebellious grad student, with hair that falls to the base
of his neck, ebullient sideburns that almost reach to his goatee, and a lazy eye
that twinkles with every bon mot.
But Bogost’s irreverence belies a sincere belief in the potential of videogames.
He sees them as tools to educate and enlighten, to “disrupt and change
fundamental attitudes and beliefs about the world,” as he put it in his 2007
book, Persuasive Games. By immersing players in a foreign experience, games
can help them understand the challenges and choices that others face, whether
it’s cash-strapped diabetics trying to be healthy or agriculture-supply-chain
managers. Bogost’s games may not hew to traditional definitions of fun, but hey,
neither does life.
The 2010 Game Developers Conference, the largest annual gathering of
gaming professionals, was a tense affair. The year, though only two months old,
was already shaping up to be a bad one for makers of traditional videogames.
Console sales dropped 8 percent in 2009 and were destined to fall 12 percent
more over the course of 2010; console games were suffering a similar slide.
Some of the biggest publishers in the industry, including powerhouses like
Activision/Blizzard and Electronic Arts, had seen their stock prices fall by half
over the previous couple of years.
But while console games were crumbling, a new breed was flourishing: social
games. Nobody made the case as explicitly as Zynga. It was by far the most
prosperous of the new social-gaming companies, and also, to traditional
gamemakers, the most suspect. Its CEO, Mark Pincus, hadn’t come up through
the gaming industry but from the world of Silicon Valley startups; his company’s
focus on things like monetization and user growth seemed blatantly mercenary to
the digital artistes who were more concerned with rag-doll physics and rendering
engines. And though Zynga executives claimed their games were all about
bringing friends closer together, they carried a whiff of exploitation. FarmVille,
Zynga’s flagship franchise, encouraged people to publicize their every action on
Facebook newsfeeds and pester their friends to join them. It kept players coming
back by setting onerous time limits—return in 16 hours to harvest your rhubarb or
your fields would be riddled with withered stalks. And it compelled them to pay
money if they wanted to avoid mindless tasks or lengthy delays.
But there was no denying that FarmVille was a hit; at the time of the conference,
it had signed up 110 million people, with 31 million playing daily. So it was no
surprise when, at the awards ceremony on the third day of the
conference, FarmVille won the honor for Best Social/Online Game. Accepting the
award, Zynga studio vice president Bill Mooney urged independent developers to
join his company. “Two years ago, we were 20 people sitting together in a crappy
little room,” he said. The sentiment was not warmly received by the independent
developers in the audience, many of whom were proud to work in crappy little
rooms instead of at giant corporations. Mooney left the stage amid boos and
catcalls.
To Bogost, sitting in the audience, Mooney’s triumphalism seemed a direct attack
on gaming’s artistic potential. “The day after Mooney’s speech, this thought
popped into my head,” Bogost says: “Games like FarmVille are cow clickers. You
click on a cow, and that’s all you do. I remember thinking at the time that it felt
like a one-liner, the kind of thing you would tweet. I just put it in the back of my
mind.”
Mooney’s GDC speech catalyzed a backlash, and Bogost emerged as one of
Zynga’s most vocal critics, telling CNET that the company’s games were “like
behaviorist experiments with rats” and calling them “the Wall Street hedge-fund
guys of games” in the pages ofFast Company.
As the debate over Zynga—and social games in general—became an industry
obsession, Bogost was asked to speak at several conference panels and
academic colloquiums. Before a seminar at New York University called Social
Games on Trial, he decided that instead of creating the usual series of slides to
accompany his talk, he would design a game that would illustrate what he saw as
the worst abuses of social gaming in the clearest possible manner. That way,
rather than just listening to his argument, people could play it.
Remembering his cow-clicker idea, Bogost threw together a bare-bones
Facebook game in three days. The rules were simple to the point of absurdity:
There was a picture of a cow, which players were allowed to click once every six
hours. Each time they did, they received one point, called a click. Players could
invite as many as eight friends to join their “pasture”; whenever anyone within the
pasture clicked their cow, they all received a click. A leaderboard tracked the
game’s most prodigious clickers. Players could purchase in-game currency,
called mooney, which they could use to buy more cows or circumvent the time
restriction. In true FarmVille fashion, whenever a player clicked a cow, an
announcement—”I’m clicking a cow“—appeared on their Facebook newsfeed.
And that was pretty much it. That’s not a nutshell description of the game; that’s
literally all there was to it. As a play experience, it was nothing more than a
collection of cheap ruses, blatantly designed to get players to keep coming back,
exploit their friends, and part with their money. “I didn’t set out to make it fun,”
Bogost says. “Players were supposed to recognize that clicking a cow is a
ridiculous thing to want to do.”
And then something surprising happened: Cow Clicker caught fire. The inherent
virality of the game mechanics Bogost had mimicked, combined with the
publicity, helped spread it well beyond its initial audience of game-industry
insiders. 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 considers A Slow Year to be one of his most important works. And yet, in
the months leading up to its publication, he found himself drawn to its evil
twin, Cow Clicker. Initially, Bogost planned to launch Cow Clicker and let the
game run its course. But now that people were actually playing it, he felt an
obligation to sustain the experience. When his server melted under the
unexpected demand, he was besieged by complaints until he signed up for a
cloud-computing service to handle the load. Social-game developers, many of
whom saw the game as good-natured ribbing, suggested ways to improve it: Let
players earn mooney by clicking one another’s newsfeed updates, for instance,
which would further encourage them to spam their friends. Bogost added the
feature, which he called “click on your clicks.” He also added transparently stupid
prizes—bronze, silver, and golden udders and cowbells—that people could win
only by amassing an outlandish number of points. (A golden cowbell, for
instance, requires 100,000 clicks.)
The number of players peaked at 56,000 in October before beginning a long slide
down to 10,000. WhatCow Clicker lost in numbers, however, it gained in fan
fervency. The people who remained may have begun playing in cheeky protest,
but they soon began taking it surprisingly seriously. “There is a fair amount of
strategy—maybe more than Ian intended,” says Kevin Almeroth, a computer
science professor at UC Santa Barbara who climbed to the top of the
leaderboard, earning a golden cowbell in the process. “You have to get the top
clickers in your pasture and lure them away from somebody else. I actually
started to understand the psychology of Survivor a bit better.” One player wrote
an online strategy guide, which included chapters like “Advanced Pasture” and
“Harvesting Strategies.” In November 2010, hackers discovered the game and
set up fake Facebook accounts and scripts to maximize their clicks. At first,
Bogost let the cheaters prosper, but outrage from the player community
eventually overwhelmed his resolve, and he added a verification system to crack
down on the counterfeit clicking.
Bogost was not the only game theorist disturbed by Cow Clicker‘s addictive
appeal. Nick Yee, a research scientist at PARC, the Xerox-owned innovation
center, has been studying massively multiplayer online role-playing games for 12
years. He says that good games usually offer meaningful opportunities for
achievement, social interaction, and challenge; otherwise, players become little
more than rats in a Skinner box, hitting a button to get a jolt of reinforcement.
“The scary thing about CowClicker is that it’s just an incredibly clear Skinner
box,” Yee says. “What does that say about the human psyche and how easy it is
to seduce us?”
Motivation researchers have studied the addictive qualities of games for
decades. Game designer and futurist Jane McGonigal summarized the research
in her best-selling book Reality Is Broken, in which she suggested that successful
games mimic the feelings of accomplishment we get when we do fulfilling work.
McGonigal argues that game mechanics—the rules and designs that govern
gameplay—are captivating enough to make even the most miserable activities
rewarding and compelling, from scrubbing a toilet to recovering from a brain
injury. In recent years, companies have successfully used gamelike challenges
and reward systems to encourage people to exercise (Nike+ and Wii Fit), explore
their cities (Foursquare), and create models of proteins (Foldit).
Even nongaming companies are catching on to the power of games. Today,
gamification—using game mechanics to influence real-world behavior—is a bona
fide corporate buzzword. Executives attend gamification summits to learn how to
leverage game features to attract and keep customers. The US edition of Google
News offers badges that let people “level up” by reading articles online. Kobo, an
ebook company, has a program that doles out “awards” when a reader highlights
a passage, jots a note, or consults the dictionary. Corporations spent an
estimated $100 million on gamification in 2010, and that figure is expected to rise
to $2.8 billion by 2016.
To some industry stalwarts, the gamification craze looks a lot like Cow Clicker—
mindlessly deploying gaming’s most superficial and addictive features, such as
leaderboards and badges, without providing the underlying experience that gives
them meaning. Bogost himself made this argument at a gamification conference,
during a talk called Gamification Is Bullshit, in which he suggested an alternate
term, exploitationware. That, he said, represents the true mission of gamifiers: to
use game mechanics to cynically ensnare their customers, much
as Cow Clicker had unwittingly hooked its prey—including, as it turned out,
Bogost himself.
In February, disturbed by simplistic software that purported to be educational,
Bogost created My First Cow Clicker, a “repetitive cow-clicking drill cleverly
disguised as an entertaining videogame,” as Bogost’s promo copy described it,
that promised to teach kids “how to click a cow effectively” for the low, low price
of $1.99. (He sold dozens of them.)
Not everyone agrees that the months they spent cow-clicking have been for
naught. Jamie Clark, a student and military spouse living on Ellsworth Air Force
Base outside of Box Elder, South Dakota, says that she has made close
friendships with her fellow clickers. “I don’t meet a lot of people who discuss
politics and religion and philosophy, but these people do, and I like talking to
them,” she says. “I’d rather talk to my Cow Clicker friends than to people I went
to school with for 12 years.” It’s a common refrain among
dedicated Cow Clickers, who have turned what was intended to be a vapid
experience into a source of camaraderie and creativity. They post witty cowthemed comments and poems along with the announcements that clutter their
newsfeeds. They design Cow Clicker T-shirts and stickers.
Gabe Zichermann, a gamification expert, also dismisses Bogost’s critique of
Zynga’s games. “Other gamers may think FarmVille is shallow, but the average
player is happy to play it,” he says. “Two and a Half Men is the most popular
show on television. Very few people would argue that it’s as good as Mad Men,
but do the people watching Two and a Half Men sit around saying, oh, woe is
me? At some point, you’re just an elitist fuck.”
After two months of delays thanks to donations totalling $700, the Cowpocalypse
finally arrives at 7:20 pm on September 7. At that moment, all the cows
disappear. They have been raptured—replaced with an image of an empty patch
of grass. Players can still click on the grass, still generate points for doing so, but
there are no new cows to buy, no mooing to celebrate their action. In some
sense, this is the truest version of Cow Clicker—the pure, cold game mechanic
without any ornamentation. Bogost says that he expects most people will “see
this as an invitation to end their relationship with Cow Clicker.”
But months after the rapture, Adam Scriven, the enthusiastic player from British
Columbia, hasn’t accepted that invitation. He is still clicking the space where
his cow used to be. After the Cowpocalypse, Bogost added one more bedeviling
feature—a diamond cowbell, which could be earned by reaching 1 million clicks.
It was intended as a joke; it would probably take 10 years of steady clicking to
garner that many points. But Scriven says he might go for it. “It is very
interesting, clicking nothing,” Scriven says. “But then, we were clicking nothing
the whole time. It just looked like we were clicking cows.”