Bogost Aggressively Expands Cowclickification Platform

Building upon his popular social game satire Cow Clicker, Ian Bogost has launched a Cow Clicker platform offering a programmable API, a new Facebook game, an iPhone app, a Moogle search engine, and more. Initially designed as a parody of shallow social games and launched last July, Cow Clicker "challenges" users to click a virtual cow every six hours to earn clicks and publish their accomplishment onto their Facebook feed. Players can then spend those clicks to buy custom premium cows and in-game items. The game has since taken off and convinced more than 50,000 people to click over 50 breeds of cows at least 5 million times. Game designer, professor, and author Bogost says he's realized through this success that people want "as many opportunities as possible to click a cow every six hours." Thus he's expanding the Cow Clicker Platform to include a Cow Clicker Connect web-widget that allows content publishers to "cowclickify" their properties by integrating clickable bovines into their sites, and a programmable Cow Clicker API allowing developers to build their own cow clicker applications. "It's called cowclickification -- the application of cow clicking mechanics to non-cow clicking applications," Bogost explains. "Now everyone can graze on the sweet grasses and step in the pungent pies of Cow Clicker's pasture. Businesses can employ new cow clicking mechanics such as clicking a cow to distract customers from the vapid pointlessness of their products and services." To show the Cow Clicker API in action, the developer announced a new Cow Clicker Blitz puzzle game on Facebook, a Cow Clicker Moobile iPhone app (Mac App Store edition forthcoming), and a Moogle search engine enabling users to search the web by clicking on their own virtual cow. He announced that companies will be able to "moonetize" their cowclickified application with an upcoming app store called The Stockyard, which will provide a hub "where developers and businesses can publish their cowclickified applications, and where eager cow clickers can find new opportunities to click." Bogost adds, "Moove over gamification, it's time for gamoofication. The Cow Clicker platform is here to turn your marketing and branding initiatives into a thunderous stampede of clicks!"