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.
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Comments [4]
Loved hearing about how this has played out! I first heard about Cow Clicker on a Canadian podcast, Search Engine. Host Jesse Brown spoke with Ian Bogost not long after the game launched:
http://searchengine.tvo.org/blog/search-engine/audio-podcast-93-how-farmville-hurts-our-souls-repeat-0
This piece had me laughing and crying at the same time. You should warn listeners to turn it off if they are driving.
Could you please let us know how many cows were donated to the third world? Which countries received them?
I need to find something redeeming in this.
I found myself walking from the car to the supermarket entrance today looking at people around me, wondering how many of them are cow clickers. You've just gotta tell me that this thing did some good in the world in exchange for its existence at all.
I'm so out of it, I play solitaire with cards. But I love the concept of just ending it with Cowpocalypse. What was the background music?
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