Ian Bogost was on the Colbert Report, if you didn't see it, you can tell because his Facebook portrait says so. Bogost has long been using gameplay for dry satire, the variety best tasted with a spot of mustard on a cool day, but his latest work takes it to another level of meta-referentiality. It's a social game criticizing social games. To that effect, I'm going to meta-referentially explain my choice for a title for this review of this meta-referential social game about social games: it's a play on a typical phrase that adolescents use to summarize their eager capitulation with human sexuality which at once juxtaposes a very complex, nuanced and deeply social interaction with the most basic, one-dimension interaction of clicking; this summarizes how complex decisions have been reduced to context-senstive clicks, the whole becomes a mere unit, or perhaps, a unit operation. There's also this bestiality thing in there if you have enough neighbors to unlock it.
By the way, Leigh did a good interview on this.
Cow Clicker has you clicking on a cow once every six hours, because that's the statistically optimal retention periodicity according to a wealth of data I'm assuming exists in a proprietary DB somewhere in Mountain View. If you want to rack up clicks faster, you have to pay Mooney, you're given enough to start that you can try out the feature, get your beak wet, then you can buy the right to click more, although Facebook Credits are not yet supported.
You can also customize your cow.
Hey, look, all the people on my "social graph" who play this game are other game designers. That means I'm cool. Please think I'm cool.
I'm inclined to think that's
I'm inclined to think that's satiring social games as much as going and persecuting real life jews would be satirising nazi's. Ie, that's not a satire at all, it's just duplicating the evil.
Not to mention if it's got a bunch of designers on it, it's basically hitting that echo chamber of the in crowd of kewl people - ie, it's not aiming for social change by like, actually connecting with the people who might need social change.
"No no, it is satire"
Jeez, what would a 'satire' have to do to fail being a satire, in your own words? Copy the mechanism exactly, even to the cash element? That's what's happened here. Unless hey, Farmville is a 'satire' - there, now it's clever and hip rather than just more exploitation because we rebrand things we like as 'satire' and things we don't like as 'suck'.
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Philosopher Gamer Blog
Driftwurld : My WIP browser game
I'm inclined to agree
This is satire.
That is, if you define satire as a homophobe who finds homosexuality so disgusting that they feel compelled to start having sex with other men in order to prove how disgusting it is.
There is nothing in the evil of facebook social games that can't be also found in the evil of arcade games. In fact, they have many things in common.
silly indie nuovos
"There is nothing in the
"There is nothing in the evil of facebook social games that can't be also found in the evil of arcade games. In fact, they have many things in common."
The problem with social games, as opposed to arcade games, is that the rewards are based pretty much entirely on for how long you've played the game, with little to no strategy or skill involved. In that matter the game is a satire, because it strips down the "You come every day, you get more points" mechanic to the point where it is ridiculous.
Hmmm
It's more parody. But it serves its function well, by stripping these social games to their bare bones, that is to say, you just click. Just clicking a cow to make a number go up, is a little silly, so it suceeds in that it makes people stop to consider what it is that makes social network games compelling, and indeed what makes any game compelling!
Whereas it wasn't rediculous
Whereas it wasn't rediculous before?
Could you give an example of where a satire failed and just repeated it's subject, pretty much? Even a made up example?
A different kind of satire
This is not satire in the Swiftian sense of "let's make a story so ridiculous that it calls out how stupid the real-world system is." If that's what you expect from game satire, you're thinking too linearly. This isn't a story, it's game mechanics, and as a result satire is going to look a little different than we're used to.
This is satire in the sense that it is reducing a game pattern to its most basic, and putting a ridiculous-looking hat on it to underscore the point. It is satire in the same way that Linear RPG was satire, or Ginormo Sword, or Progress Quest (and now Progress Wars), or even that Triple Triad CCG from Final Fantasy 8 (wherein Squaresoft essentially turned Tic-Tac-Toe into a trading-card game). That all of these games are actually somewhat fun to play and compelling does not mean they duplicate what they perceive as evil; on the contrary, it is exactly this point that they make.
I think a satirical game HAS to be fun to play, even in a reductionist, absurdist sense. The point it's trying to make is "look at you, Player, and how easily you drool over the perceived value of a thinly-veiled Skinner box." Unless you make the player fall into that trap -- in this case, that involves the player realizing that OMG, I am seriously considering SPENDING MONEY on a game where the ONLY THING I DO IS CLICK A COW, what's WRONG with me -- the satire will fail to make its point.
Why does it fail only at the
Why does it fail only at the money spending?
"OMG, I'm spending part of my finite life clicking a cow"
The only way to engage this 'satire' is to fall into the trap. That's not satire. The trap doesn't start at the money.
And if you think your only falling into the trap if you start considering spending cash, I dunno.
I was thinking of progress quest when I wrote my comments - but it self automates. You can watch the trap, rather than step into it.
Or maybe I fell in the trap with progress quest and I'm BS'ing myself as well?
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Philosopher Gamer Blog
Driftwurld : My WIP browser game