Tom Tyler is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Culture at Oxford Brookes University. He has published widely on animals and anthropocentrism within philosophy, critical theory, and the history of ideas. He is the author of CIFERAE: A Bestiary in Five Fingers, Posthumanities Series (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), co-editor of Animal Encounters (Leiden: Brill, 2009), and editor of Animal Beings (Parallax #38, 12.1, 2006).
The social network game Farmville, which allows players to grow crops, raise animals, and produce a variety of goods, proved enormously successful within a year of its launch in 2009, attracting 110 million Facebook users. However, the game has been criticised for its mindless mechanics, which require little more than repeated clicking on its colourful icons. By way of parody, Ian Bogost’s Cow Clicker permits its players to simply click on a picture of a cow once every six hours. In this essay I extend Bogost’s critique and suggest that Cow Clicker highlights not just the soulless inanity of Farmville gameplay but also the paucity of that game’s portrayal of the painful reality of a dairy cow’s punishing daily existence and untimely end.
