Cow Clicker

The player is initially given a pasture with nine slots and a single plain cow, which the player may click once every six hours. Each time the cow is clicked, a point also known as a "click" is awarded; if the player adds friends' cows to their pasture, they also receive clicks added to their scores when the player clicks their own cow. As in other Facebook games, players are encouraged to post announcements to their news feed whenever they click their cow. A virtual currency known as "Mooney" can be bought with Facebook Credits; it can be used to purchase special "premium" cow designs, and the ability to skip the six-hour time limit that must be waited before the cow can be clicked again. ==History==

Creation and development At the 2010 Game Developers Conference, Zynga's game FarmVille was awarded the "Best New Social/Online Game" at its Game Developers Choice Awards. Ian Bogost (who was also in attendance) was critical of Zynga's success, as he felt that its business model was focused on convincing users to pay money to progress further in their "freemium" games rather than treating gaming as an artistic experience. He also believed Zynga's vice president Bill Mooney was trying to attack "artistic" gaming during his acceptance speech for the award when he personally invited independent game developers to join his company. After the conference, Bogost coined the term "cow clickers" to describe games such as FarmVille which only involve performing tasks at certain intervals, since in these games, "you click on a cow, and that’s all you do." Bogost compared the players of Zynga's games to the rats in B. F. Skinner's operant conditioning experiment, often receiving variable reinforcement rather than regular rewards. As one of the most vocal critics of Zynga's practices and business model, Bogost made further appearances at various events and panels to discuss his views on social gaming. Although continually disturbed by its popularity, Bogost also used Cow Clicker to parody other recent gaming and social networking trends; such as the addition of an API to allow websites to have their own clickable cows (in a process he dubbed "Cowclickification"), the spin-off game Cow Clicker Blitz (co-developed with PopCap Games co-founder Jason Kapalka), "My First Cow Clicker" for iOS (a parody of simplistic education apps; designed to "train" children on cow clicking and add the resulting clicks to their parent's total), and a "Cow Clicktivism" campaign where users could click on an emaciated cow to donate to Oxfam Americawith a goal of donating an actual cow to a third world country. The cow, known as the "Cowclicktivist Cow", could also be unlocked for the player's pasture with a $110 donation. After $700 worth of extensions, the countdown clock expired on the evening of September 7, 2011. At this point, the game remained playable, but all the cows were replaced by blank spaces and said to have been raptured. Bogost intended the Cowpocalypse event to signal the "end" of the game to players; when addressing a complaint by a fan who felt the game was no longer fun after the cow rapture, Bogost responded that "it wasn't very fun before." Data collection In 2018, Bogost wrote an article for The Atlantic discussing the collection of data by Facebook apps, with reference to Cow Clicker, following a scandal involving Cambridge Analytica's use of Facebook data. Bogost notes that Facebook apps appear to be part of the website itself, whereas they actually operate with almost no oversight. He claims that "without even trying", Cow Clicker stored its users' Facebook ID and any networks (such as workplaces) that the user was a part of, and that this information is still stored on his private server. Bogost notes that he could have used this data for malicious purposes, criticising Facebook's "move-fast-and-break-things attitude toward software development". ==Reception==

Cow Clicker received critical attention soon after its release. One early commentator was Alexia Tsotsis of TechCrunch, who acknowledged the game's intent as a commentary on the impact of social network games. In an interview, Bogost foresaw the transformation of the internet into a "compulsive virtual dystopia" through Zynga's use of social gaming. ==References==