Congratulations, you just clicked a cow!

Credit: Persuasive Games

~Becky Crew

Over the holidays I read a fantastic article in Wired Magazine about a little Facebook game called Cow Clicker. Developed by Ian Bogost, an American game developer and academic at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Cow Clicker is described by journalist Jason Tanz as a "borderline-evil piece of work that was intended to embody the worst aspects of the modern gaming industry".

If you want an example of the worst aspects of the modern gaming industry, says Bogost, look no further than Zynga studio's FarmVille, the explosively popular Facebook game with 110 million subscribers recorded late last year, 31 million of which play daily. The premise of FarmVille is simple - upon signing up, you take control of a farm, cultivating various crops and livestock herds within certain time limits to ensure that they don't wither away and die. Every time you do something in your farm, your friends on Facebook will be notified about it. And if you want your farm to grow better and more quickly, you can invest real dollars into it. Of course you can.

"Games like FarmVille are cow clickers," Bogost tells Tanz. "You click on a cow, and that's all you do." Which is how Cow Clicker, Bogost's cynical response to Zynga's thinly-veiled success story in exploitation, came about. The premise for Cow Clicker is even more simple - upon signing up, you get a cow. A beady-eyed bovine with skewed nostrils and the body type of a compressed accordion. Every six hours you are allowed to click your cow, which triggers a Facebook notification announcing as much. You will also receive a point, which will go towards your cow clicking tally, and you'll cause your cow to emit an inexplicably satisfying "moo".

You can invite your friends to join your pasture, which will benefit your tally, as each click on each cow in your pasture means an extra click for your cow. The ultimate goal? Racking up a high enough cow clicking score to earn pointless pictures of things such as golden udders and cowbells, the most coveted of which is the golden cowbell, for some 100,000 clicks. You can also invest real dollars into acquiring different types of cows, including the seaweed-green, tentacle-muzzled Cowthulhu, the wonky, misshapen My First Cow, drawn by Bogost's daughter, and Stargrazer, a mirror image of your free, default cow. Stargrazer is literally facing the other way but you gotta pay for it if you want that kind of novelty.

The thing is, to Bogost's astonishment and dismay, Cow Clicker became a runaway success, with tens of thousands of subscribers eager to be exploited so transparently by clicking on a picture of a cow twice a day. Bogost, who ended up spending hours and hours per week maintaining the game he created as an experiment to expose the myriad dirty tricks perpetrated by companies like Zynga, lamented, "I've made all these people click on cows. I've wasted my own time and my family's time."

But if you really consider the concept - your excuse for taking a 15-second break from work is to visit a pasture full of innocuous cows with peculiar nostrils - it's nothing to sniff at. And if you achieve a higher score for doing it, all the better! Let me tell you, I don't waste hours and hours and hours playing Pokemon because I find the battles mentally stimulating. I do it because levelling up is one of the greatest feelings a gamer can have.

And it's all to do with dopamine, everyone's favourite chemical that triggers a sensation of pleasure when the brain is simulated by some kind of achievement. Its evolutionary advantage is that it keeps us focused and motivated to set goals and achieve them. The first evidence of video game-related dopamine release was published in Nature in 1998, and since then scientists have gone on to find that heavy gamers, particularly adolescents, develop larger reward centres in their brains as compared to non-gamers.

Humans are built to achieve things, even as idiotic and pointless as acquiring a virtual golden cowbell, which is why I don't really have a problem with the fact that our lives are getting more and more 'gamified' by the minute. Tanz reports that the U.S. edition of Google News allows people to 'level up' by reading articles online, and an ebook company called Kobo awards its readers every time they look a word up in the dictionary or highlight a passage. When you do certain things in Xbox and Playstation games, you'll 'unlock' certain 'achievements', which have no bearing whatsoever on your level in the game, but offer an extra little jolt of dopamine simply because you achieved something as basic as "Paused the game for the first time".

In 2010, professor of entertainment technology and game design at Carnegie Mellon University in the U.S. Jesse Schell did a TED talk about when "games invade real life". He creates this incredible picture of what the future undoubtedly holds - gamified cereal boxes and soft drink cans and television shows and bus rides and high school educations that reward us with 'bonuses' every time we achieve - okay, okay, do - something, and if we're lucky, we can cash these bonuses in for certain tax breaks or supermarket discounts. At the very least we'll get that hit of dopamine we can't help but enjoy.

Fortunately, as monetised and commercialised as this all sounds, I'm not too worried about it. As Schell says, "It's possible that they'll inspire us to be better people, if the game systems are designed right." Fingers crossed someone figures out how to turn my Skyrim hours into free, real cheese wheels and venison steaks.