[elipsey]

In case it's not obvious, this game was intended as satire. Reposting previous comment:

This seems like an appropriate moment to remember Cow Clicker[1], and reflect on it's lesson:

"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."

"Unexpectedly to Bogost, Cow Clicker became a viral phenomenon[...]Although continually disturbed by its popularity, Bogost also used Cow Clicker to parody other recent gaming and social networking trends;"

"'bovine gods' eventually revealed that 'Cowpocalypse' would occur on July 21, 2011 (exactly one year since the original release of the game). From then on, every click made by players would deduct thirty seconds from a countdown clock leading to the Cowpocalypse. However, players could extend the countdown clock by paying to supplicate with Facebook Credits: paying 10 credits would extend the countdown by a single hour, while 4,000 would extend the countdown by an entire month. 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."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker

[UweSchmidt]

No doubt Bogost had offers to sell and/or saw avenues to zyngafy it to the max. He deserves a lot of respect for his (as I assume) crictial, scientific, maybe cynic but definitively ethical, human way to approach it. Ramp up the insanity and maybe teach people about the mechanisms of game addictiveness before shutting it all off.

[lmm]

I have the opposite perspective actually. He accidentally made something fun that a lot of people enjoyed, and instead of letting them run with it he closed it down out of, essentially, pique because he thought those people were having fun wrong.

[elif]

I was his student around the time of release.

It was always an absurdist demonstrative to prove a point about the hazards that the game industry would soon be forced to confront.

It is now so apparent how shamelessly game developers will exploit human psychology instead of pursuing actual fun.. so it's not as useful of a warning.

[hhmc]

Was anyone actually having fun -- in any meaningful sense of the word -- or were they just indulging compulsion. I think for a lot of (even very predatory) games, there's a blend between the two, but here's it seems to be nakedly the latter.

[lmm]

I take the view that if someone says they're having fun you should probably believe them. I've known people who talked about games like addicts, that they'd spend hours "playing" and the best they'd ever get out of it was feeling numb, but those were always "deeper" or at least bigger games (mostly LoL and WoW), not Cow Clicker or any of the similar games that emerged later.

[411111111111111]

It usually starts with it being "fun", because you so release endorphins from playing/winning. The stage where they're only feeling numb is extremely late when they're already hopelessly addicted.

Not all fun things are equal however, otherwise you'd have to classify taking drugs and directly supplementing "fun" hormones as the best entertainment in existence.

[somehnacct3757]

At the time I thought Cow Clicker would be an eye opening moment for the Game Design Gatekeeperati, but they doubled down. This turned the whole thing into performance art, with the unwilling professors of fun as part of the show.

[danachow]

Yeah because there’s a real vacuum of pretty looking but content free addictive micropayment games. A real big loss to society that has not been replicated that one.