Dear Jason Tanz,
Your article made me think about my old roommate who used to
constantly, endlessly, play mindless games like the cow clicker. I would often
spend time watching him play the games, silently judging him, and secretly
being fascinated at how one could find these sorts of asinine activities
entertaining. Then the unthinkable happened. While writing a college paper, I
opened up one of these games and started playing myself. Seconds, minutes, and
maybe not hours, but a single hour, passed before I realized I too had been
sucked into the never ending abyss of clicking games.
What
made these games so appealing however was something that was touched upon in
your article; Finding strategy, and even meaning, in a game that clearly was
created without the intention of there ever being one. How else could you
explain why certain users were consistently ranked at the top, while others
were left floundering in the bottom? On a personal level, this became the
driving force behind the mindless clicking games I played; a competitive spirit
to be better at something than most. While this competitive spirit could (and
thankfully has) been put to better uses, I think it’s an interesting idea to
consider nonetheless.
What I
found most interesting about your article however, was the introspective look
into the psychology of clicker games. Users found all sorts of meaning in the
cow clicker game, anything that ranged from psychological to existential to
social. The idea that meaning is imbued by humans into something that appears
to be utterly meaningless is a notion that can be endlessly explored, which was
why perhaps the cow clicker was something that went from being a joke to an
intriguing case study that we are still talking about.
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