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Video game designer Ian Bogost creates 'serious' video games designed to make you think. One of those games, however, has become an unlikely success. It's called 'Cow Clicker' and though it started as a parody of Farmville-style social networking games - it came to be taken very seriously by a group of gamers who found it endlessly fun. OTM producer PJ Vogt reports on what happens when your creations take on a life of their own.
At the 2010 Game Developers Conference, a schism seemed to erupt 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. It was a storm that had been brewing for a few years, but the massive success of Zynga's FarmVille along with the company's publicly malicious attitude (as David Hayward calls it, a Fuck the Users design philosophy) had made even the most apathetic of game developers suddenly keen to defend their craft as art. An unfortunate award acceptance speech from the firm (cf "that Farmville asshole") hammered the last nail in the coffin, making this the year the year to hate social games.The ire isn't without rationale: these challenge-free games demand little more than clicking on farms and restaurants and cities and things at regular intervals. As I listened to some of the talks and the talk about them, a shorthand entered my brain, and I suggested the name "cow clickers" for them. It seemed like little more than a provocation, a concept that need not be further elaborated. A nod and a chuckle would do.Most will consider Cow Clicker to be satire, and that's true in part at least. But satire these days risks becoming mere conceptual art. The idea of the "cow clicker" arose almost involuntarily, as a playfully deprecatory name that seemed plausible enough that it might be real. The name was almost enough; surely it didn't need to be made, I reasoned. Then earlier this month, Jesper Juul invited me to take part in a game theory seminar he runs at NYU, which he provocatively titled Social Games on Trial. Researcher and social game developer Aki Järvinen would defend social games, and I was to speak against them. As I prepared for the NYU seminar, I realized that theory alone might not help clarify social games—for me or for anyone in attendance. It's nice to think that "theorist/practitioners" like myself and Aki can translate lessons from research to design and back like adept jugglers, but things are far messier, as usual. The dialectic between theory and practice often collapses into a call and response panegyric. This in mind, I thought it might be productive to make an example that would act as its own theory. It's a strategy I've been calling carpentry, and which I'll be discussing in more detail in my forthcoming book Alien Phenomenology (including this example). In the case of social games, I reasoned that enacting the principles of ........................http://www.bogost.com/blog/cow_clicker_1.shtml
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Topic: Cow Clicker (Read 495 times)
