What Algorithms Want by Ed Finn

Author:Ed Finn
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: culture; new media; coding; hybrid authorship; Apple; Netflix; Bitcoin; search bars; apps
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2017-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Cow Clicker was deliberately designed to be absurd, a meaningless game that would reveal the hypocrisy and manipulation of gamification. But it became popular, first as an ironic protest from others who shared Bogost’s views, then as a game in its own right. Players either didn’t realize that this was a satire, or played in spite of that knowledge, like the stay-at-home father who told Tanz, “instead of stupid games that have no point, we might as well play a stupid game that has a point.”13 At its apogee, over 50,000 people were clicking on digital cows and Bogost found himself enmeshed in his own Skinner box of feedback, getting rewarded by the player community when he added new features to the game. Bogost has described this process as a kind of “method design” like method acting, putting himself into the creative space of a social game designer and ultimately suffering the same kind of systemic, dehumanizing entanglement with the software that he sees it inflicting on players: “It’s hard for me to express the compulsion and self-loathing that have accompanied the apparently trivial creation of this little theory-cum-parody game.”14

Figure 4.1 Cow Clicker screenshot.

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