Some sports fans are led to think by watching sports, just as much as some movie viewers are led to think by watching movies and some just get a short thrill of entertainment.
There is drama in sports A player who has overcome personal hardship to excel in their sport like a no-hitter in baseball pitched by a one-armed man ; a player who fights through injury and demonstrat. And people actually play it, perhaps confirming Bogost's view that the genre of games is largely just 'brain hacks that exploit human psychology in order to make money,' which continue to work even when the users are openly told what's going on.
We know it's pointless, but we keep clicking that reply button. And when they deliberately make the stories misleading and poorly edited, they get even more clicks. I was under the impression Advertising only makes money if people click on the ads, not just the site.
I was under the impression Advertising only makes money if people click on the ads,. Some online advertising works that way, such as Google AdWords. But typically not display ads of the kind that slashdot runs. Those are paid by impression, not by the click. So, every time a page loads on slashdot that doesn't have ads disabled, slashdot gets income. Actually, not only does slashdot make money off of ads as several other people pointed out , but you can voluntarily give them real money [slashdot.
That's pretty much exactly the same model as most FB games or so I heard [tvtropes. Even better: Posting comments going for a "Funny" mod which doesn't mean anything for your Karma So a Buddhist monk goes up to a hot dog vendor. Vendor asks him "What'll it be? So the vendor fixes him up with a dog, with all the fillings. The monk, a little confused, asks him "What about my change? Many times the Informative ratings are from people who laughed but wanted to give you a better Karma rating.
I'm not sure how that started, but it's been going on for about 3 years. I had great karma IRL but burned it all about four years ago. It was worth it, even if I have to start as a freakin' ant again. I'm not sure I see the disincentive for posting informative information, could you please elaborate?
Unless you meant the rest of your paragraph, in which case, allow me to retort. Posts don't start off invisible. They start off generally equal and only those who have shown the ability to contribute to the community in a good way get a bit of a head start. Moderation relies on those individuals who contribute the most to the community, and not the clueless. The clueless ones don't get mod points. And when. I disagree. I think you're on to something. No fuck you, you stupid inbred tard.
I got more out of your post than I get out of my friends' Farmville updates. It's all relative, and I must say that crappy slashdot posts are still better than the best click-spam social games.
Slashdot exploits human psychology why exactly am I posting this? I am spending my time and energy and not getting anything tangible in return in order to make money. You don't? I get the statement that itemizes the payment in my email each month, but I never bother to read it.
Dude, if you're posting here and not getting paid, you're really wasting your time. Wait, the game is dead already? Dangit, I was looking forward to playing just as soon as I reach max level in Progress Quest!
However, the linked blog is slashdotted, and the link to the app on Facebook via a cache of the page is empty. If you're going to make a viral app as a satire of other apps, you should prepare your site to at least stand one slashdotting. Anyone read The Social Animal? This is just the initiation effect. To avoid humiliation people are likely to believe that something unpleasant that used a lot of time it must be valuable.
I totally invented this "game" concept back in with Click the President [thenetw0rk. Obviously, it's been updated twice since then. You get a wank, which you can click on every six hours. You earn additional clicks if your friends in your pasture also click. You can buy premium wanks with 'mooney,' and also use your mooney to buy more clicks. That sums up Progress Quest [progressquest. And it has over k players [progressquest. Sometimes, you shouldn't bother fighting stupid.
Instead, give up and take their money [giantitp. In cinema and theater, we often hear about method acting, a technique by which actors try to create the situations, emotions, and thoughts of their characters in themselves in order to better portray them. In creating Cow Clicker, I rather felt that I was partaking of method design, embracing the spirit and values and ideals of the social game developer as I toed the lines between theory, satire, and earnestness.
The Internet is paralyzing because it contains so much potential information. Even over the few days I spent developing Cow Clicker, I found myself watching people play, listening to feedback, and imagining changes. I "listened to my players" and made enhancements far beyond what was reasonable for a work of carpentry or a simple parody. It's hard for me to express the compulsion and self-loathing that have accompanied the apparently trivial creation of this little theory-cum-parody game.
Have I fully represented the distillation I hoped to accomplish? Or is some feature missing? And ought I not to add it if so? Where's the vampire cow or the werewolf cow or the cthulhu cow? Ought I not to make them? Perhaps I became consumed myself. Such is the spirit of the day, it would seem: mundane, outward obsession whose worst trick is to disguise itself as fruitfulness. Another great example of this effect is Sherlock Holmes.
Conan Doyle definitely grew to dislike Holmes hence the attempt to kill him off and some claim Doyle originally intended Holmes as a parody of detectives. Me, I don't think 'failing to realize something is a parody' is an insult to the intelligence of people. Instead, I feel it is a failure of the creators. It indicates they have simply have not gone too far. If so, then it is a perfectly legitimate form of entertainment, and may well be worth the money they spend on it - not any less so than hardcore gamers playing Fallout or HL2.
The latter can similarly be simplified to the point of "you shoot things so that you can shoot more things", and from there on to "you push the button so that you can keep pushing the button", but it misses the crucial point - somewhere along that line of simplification, you lose that quantity called "fun".
It's like taking some gourmet dish, decomposing it down to raw protein, fat, carbs and minerals, blending them, and saying that the disgusting result is somehow representative of the original food.
It is, in some way, but it's not the way that matters. You do that and people won't eat it. The interesting thing here, at least from what I can tell, is that you do that to games and a lot of people will still eat that crap up - to the consternation of a lot of the rest of us.
Well they didn't go quite to that level here. If the "game" consisted of just a single black rectangle that you'd have to click when the counter gets to a certain number, and depending on how fast you click on it, the counter counts slower or faster, do you think people would still play it?
Then again, sugar is pretty basic stuff, and yet it's sweet and tasty in and of its own - even if much better in pastry. I don't think there's a one-dimensional score of "fun" that's the "only" thing that matters. Different media have different mixtures of qualities: they provoke thought, entertain, addict, inspire, horrify, bore, explain, question, etc.
And I think it makes some sense to look at why people are drawn to different media, and what we're getting out of them. What's compelling about reality TV, for example, and how is that similar or different to what's compelling about Futurama, or about Seinfeld, or about 24?
There may be more comments in this discussion. Without JavaScript enabled, you might want to turn on Classic Discussion System in your preferences instead. Do you develop on GitHub? You can keep using GitHub but automatically sync your GitHub releases to SourceForge quickly and easily with this tool so your projects have a backup location, and take advantage of SourceForge's massive reach. You get a cow, which you can click on every six hours. You can buy premium cows with 'mooney,' and also use your mooney to buy more clicks.
You can buy mooney with real dollars, or earn some free bonus mooney if you spam up your feed with Cow Clicker activity. A satire of Facebook games, but actually as genuine a game as the non-satirical games are. And people actually play it, perhaps confirming Bogost's view that the genre of games is largely just ' brain hacks that exploit human psychology in order to make money,' which continue to work even when the users are openly told what's going on.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted. Full Abbreviated Hidden. More Login. You found a lonely lost cow Score: 5 , Funny. Share twitter facebook. Re:You found a lonely lost cow Score: 5 , Funny. Parent Share twitter facebook. Re: Score: 3 , Funny. I misplaced a "to" or it is a missing comma? Click here to continue reading click "to here", continue reading.
Re:You found a lonely lost cow Score: 4 , Funny. I'll write a macro to click it for me so I don't have to read! Re: Score: 2 , Informative. Only if the click brings me to Omaha Steaks.
Re: Score: 2. Role Playing Genre game. My dis am bigger than yours Score: 3 , Funny. Progressquest [progressquest. Still wine only for Linux. Score: 2. Please Tell me what corner of Facebook you are hiding in, so I can join you. Re: Score: 3 , Insightful. When applications first came out, I just started hiding them every time, and hiding the people who announced them. I haven't seen any application-based spam in well over 6 months.
Re: Score: 3 , Informative. I'm pretty damn selective about my friends. Quality over quantity. I've seen a single update from a single person she was 16 who needed logs or some shit for a cabin. Her uncle gave her some, and it's now been months since that single update. I guess I can be pretty damn proud of my technically literate, non idiotic friends and family. Really - my extended family who are a miles away are my friends, a couple of good ones from high school, a couple of good ones from college, a few former coworke.
Re: Score: 2 , Funny. Re: Score: 2 , Insightful. My character Muffy in Sorority Life has special Paris clothing and hot cars. Mostly I use my special powers to beat up French chix tho. My girl's name is Lika Lollipop. I don't know if that's any better, dude Only about 1 in 20 facebook. Strange Game Score: 4 , Funny. Re:Strange Game Score: 5 , Interesting. Re:Strange Game Score: 5 , Insightful. You know, it's entirely possible to have a Facebook account without spending excessive amounts of time on it.
Nothing forces you to play these insipid games, update your profile every day, or respond to every message you get. Re:Strange Game Score: 4 , Funny. I have a Facebook account just so people don't think I've died or been mangled in some kind of accident. I hardly spend any time on FB at all, which leaves plenty of time to emit smugness about it on Slashdot. Re:Strange Game Score: 4 , Insightful.
And besides, users probably never read the policies, which were linked unassumingly from the application-permissions interface. They might easily, and reasonably, have assumed that Facebook was simply reiterating its own privacy policy when presenting new access to an app. They would have been wrong.
That might explain why so many people feel violated by Facebook this week—they might never have realized that they were even using foreign, non-Facebook applications in the first place, let alone ones that were siphoning off and selling their data. The website always just looked like Facebook. In the case of Cow Clicker, which only ever aimed to let people click on pictures of cows, I was able to access two potentially sensitive pieces of data without even trying. This is a numeric, unique identifier attached to every Facebook account.
These days, Facebook generates a unique, app-specific ID for each user, in order to prevent an app from connecting someone directly to Facebook profiles. Those data could be correlated against other information—data collected from Facebook, fashioned by the app, or acquired elsewhere. A terms-of-service update prohibits some of that activity, but not everyone cares about violating the Facebook terms of service.
The second type of information is a piece of profile data Cow Clicker received without asking for it. In some cases, those affiliations required authorization, for example having an email address at a domain that corresponds with a university. Over time, verification became less important to Facebook, and now users can affiliate with schools or workplaces arbitrarily.
The less friction, the more data. Facebook allowed apps to store data for which user permission was granted, but urged developers not to request or store more than it needed to operate. Putting affiliation data in the Cow Clicker database allowed me to provide leaderboard rankings by network, allowing my players to compete for clicks with their work colleagues or classmates.
But because I stored the numerical identifiers for user affiliations, I still have them. Until , I could use a database-query tool called FQL, Facebook Query Language, to retrieve the details of those networks, and correlate them back to my users.
Had I wanted to, I could have recombined that information with other data and used it for retargeting. What does it matter if a simple diversion has your Facebook ID, education, and work affiliations? That information is now in the hands of thousands, maybe millions of people. Technically, users could revoke certain app permissions later, and apps were supposed to remove any impacted data that they had stored. If your data was taken, it has very likely been sold, laundered, and put back into Facebook.
But so did its move-fast-and-break-things attitude toward software development. The Facebook platform was truly a nightmare to use and to maintain. It was built like no other software system then extant, and it changed constantly—regular updates rolled out weekly.
Old code broke, seemingly for no good reason. But many more were just struggling to eke out a part of their living in an ecosystem where people might discover them. Millions of apps had been created by , when I hung up my cowboy hat. But hundreds of thousands of creators of dumb toys, quizzes, games, and communities that might never have intended to dupe or violate users surely did so anyway, because Facebook rammed their data down our throats.
On the whole, none of us asked for your data. But we have it anyway, and forever. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword.
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