Ask Gaming [Designer, Professor, Gadfly] Ian Bogost

Ian Bogost is a professor of game theory at Georgia Tech, a game designer, a prolific writer, an entrepreneur, and a bit of a prankster. These roles which sometimes overlap, notably in his surprise success satirical Facebook game Cow Clicker, which you can think of as the Anti-Zynga. Wired has a fresh article up about Bogost (which cleverly embeds a sort of micro version of Cow Clicker). It also mentions another game — my favorite of his projects — that should be on the mind of every TSA employee, the 2009 release Jetset. Ask Ian about clicking cows, being an academic provocateur as well as a participant in the world of gaming, and breaking into the world of social gaming. (Please break unrelated questions into multiple comments.)

Re:Part of the problem

[spektre1]

I just want to point out that Cow Clicker was made as a response to the shitty flash games that you're talking about. And amazingly, sadly, and happily became rather successful, despite it being a simple, transparent version of everything that's "wrong" with shitty flash games. That should tell you something about how we judge game design.

Re:Object-Oriented Philosophy

[u38cg]

Could someone please tell me whether or not this is meant to be a piss-take?