justinday:

Cow Clicker is a Facebook game about Facebook games. It’s partly a satire, and partly a playable theory of today’s social games, and partly an earnest example of that genre.

You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom “premium” cows through micropayments (the Cow Clicker currency is called “mooney”), and you can buy your way out of the time delay by spending it. You can publish feed stories about clicking your cow, and you can click friends’ cow clicks in their feed stories. Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence.

Click on for the how and why. Great read.

“It’s one thing to express a distaste for social games, to consider them bad art and to opt out of them. But one also cannot ignore their popularity entirely, nor leave it to the mere whims of personal taste. In addition to being bad art, social games are also troubling specimens of human tragedy. For one part, they threaten us with the negative future of games. But for another part, they also act as a talisman that might help us see our future perceptions of the present. What will we have thought of ourselves?”