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Cow Clicker

A satirical Facebook game released in July 2010 by Ian Bogost that highlighted the exploitative and mundane nature of many other popular games such as Farmville. The game is purposefully ultra-basic - the player is given a cow and is told that they can click on the cow once every six hours to increase their score by one. Players can spend money to change the appearance of their cow or to remove the time limit before they can click on their cow again.

These mechanics were intended to show that similar games lacked any real gameplay and were mostly psychological traps that encouraged users to spend money. Despite this, the game became very popular and had over 50,000 active users playing the game within a few months.

A year after the game launched it was unofficially ended with the 'cowpocalypse', where the game remained playable but all images of cows were removed.

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