Throughout the past few years, software engineers have been devising more ways for people to waste more time in cyber land. As if Facebook wasn’t already addicting enough.
Chances are you’ve already played some social game at one time or another. Board games like Monopoly and multiplayer video games like Modern Warfare 3 are two popular options.
Now, enter social network gaming.
After we lazily scroll through our infinitely long Facebook newsfeed and click through dozens of notifications for hours at a time, Facebook can lure us to stick around a little while (make that a very long while!) longer.
Social network gaming basically involves any form of online amusement connected to a social network like Facebook or Google, allowing you to compete for the top prize against your friends and/or random opponents, whichever you choose.
Common Facebook offerings include Words With Friends and Tetris Battle. Both are social network spins on traditional Scrabble and Tetris, respectively. They tend to require some effort on the part of the player.
But, FarmVille fanatics and Sims Social diehards, here’s some food for thought.
Last year, Ian Bogost, a professor at Georgia Tech who also researches and designs video games, created a game on Facebook called Cow Clicker, a kind of satire of social network games.
When you sign up for Cow Clicker, you get a cow. You click on the cow. Then you have to wait six hours to be able to click on it again. Clicking the cow earns you more clicks.
If you want to decrease the amount of time you have to wait before clicking again, you can use some of your “mooney” (Cow Clicker currency), which will allow you to click on your cow sooner.
If you’re tired of the boring old black and white cow, you can use more “mooney” to buy custom varieties.
When you’re done clicking, you can publish your Cow Clicker activity on your newsfeed.
It’s pretty ridiculous, right?
And if you think about it, most Facebook games, although they appear less silly at first glance, are almost identical.
What do you do in FarmVille? You click to water your crops, click to buy a pig or cow, click to plow more land, click to start harvesting…you get the idea. After you plant crops, you have to wait a certain number of hours until you can harvest them. When you’re done clicking, you post your farming activity on your newsfeed.
Other people in these games are turned into concepts, only important as potential means of benefit for you. You feel constantly compelled to play and keep playing. You are always waiting for the game timer to run out so you can log back in and repeat the playing process once again.
Hearing about Cow Clicker made me think about maybe avoiding another fall into one of these time-wasting virtually inescapable Facebook game black holes if I can.
What do you think? Let me know your thoughts by commenting below!
To get the day's news and headlines in your inbox each morning, sign up for our email newsletters.
