Writing

I know what you’ve been thinking. Sure, I enjoy clicking cows, but what good is it doing? Is cow clicking just for fun, or can cow clicking make the world a better place? Molleindustria and Cow Clicker are pleased to announce Cow Clicktivism, a cooperative social game with real-world impact. Now you can turn your virtual cow into a real… read more

There’s a nice persuasive game making the rounds, called Spent. It was made by ad agency McKinney for the Urban Ministries of Durham. The game attempts to illustrate how easily financial hardship and low income work can devolve into homelessness. It does a pretty good job, too, taking the same basic method as did Tenure, the 1975 PLATO game about… read more

The Game Developers Conference takes place next week in San Francisco. Here’s my speaking schedule for the event. I guess it’s filled with general ire this year all around. Serious Games SummitMonday – Tuesday (all day)Ben Sawyer, Jane McGonigal, and I organize the summit, which takes place on Monday and Tuesday. Monday is devoted to games for health; Tuesday is… read more

By now, the virtues of cow clicking are well-known and understood. But there’s a problem: Cow Clicker is bound to Facebook, and to use Facebook one must be over the age of thirteen. Are our children meant to be cooped up indoors, never allowed to romp through pastures of their own? A startling truth reveals itself: despite the explosion in… read more

I’ve been thinking about software architecture lately, mostly as a result of continuing to suffer at the hands of Facebook’s horrific platform and API. For those who haven’t tried to use it, Facebook’s platform is notoriously atrocious. It’s badly documented and doesn’t always do what the documentation says. It breaks regularly. It rolls out changes without notice. The entire architecture… read more

Thanks to Glenn Essex for making me aware of this important Buddhist message about cows. Releasing the Cows (Told by Master Thich Nhat Hanh) One day the Buddha was sitting in the wood with thirty or forty monks. They had an excellent lunch and they were enjoying the company of each other. There was a farmer passing by and the… read more

Whether via the lamentable trend of gamification or through the very public release of Jane McGonigal’s new book, the topic of videogames’ impact on the real world has been front-and-center of late. Enter iCapitalism, an iOS game that critiques both capitalism and iOS games through a simple design. As in Godville, there’s no gameplay. But unlike that game (which actually… read more

Last year I learned about a rumor swirling around the comparative literature department at UCLA, where I did my PhD. Supposedly I had managed to get C++ to count as one of the three languages required for the degree. It’s not true, for the record, but it is a topic that comes up from time to time—substituting programming languages for… read more

Fitness expert Jack LaLanne died yesterday at age 96. He’s most notable for starting the first health clubs, but anyone who lived with television in the late twentieth century couldn’t have missed LaLanne’s many programs and endorsements. Despite his fame, and despite the recent popularity of home fitness videogames like Wii Fit and EA Sports Active, few know that LaLanne… read more

Last year, the social gaming phenomenon Cow Clicker captured the world’s imoogination, offering players the opportunity to click on a cow every six hours—or even more often. Since July 2010, more than 50,000 people have clicked over 50 breeds of cows over 5 million times, engorging their accownts with over 5 million mooney, Cow Clicker’s in-game currency. Cow Clicker distilled… read more