Top all-time · #1265
Ian Bogost
Personal blog · bogost.com/writinggamesculturewriting
Ian Bogost's personal blog at bogost.com covers games, culture and writing. Since 2009, 55 different Hacker News readers have linked it 81 times, most often “Cow Clicker”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 2 of 32 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
Linked for Ian Bogost's writing on video games and computing, especially Cow Clicker and its aftermath, CRT and Atari emulation, procedural literacy and infographics. Often cited as a reference in threads on games and computing.
- Recommended for · 2 comments
- Calls The Future Was Here 'an excellent book'; likes his point that pretty infographics are not necessarily informative.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 32 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Writer, designer, and professor exploring media, technology, and culture.
Most-linked posts?
- Cow Clicker5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2010-07-21
- A Television Simulator3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-03-06
- Students to modify the Atari 2600 to reflect CRT-level graphics3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2009-05-01
- /games/cow_clicker/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-06-15
- OAuth of Fealty - Resignation beyond sorrow on the Facebook Platform and beyond3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-08-01
- Cascading Failure (on Google's Malware Detection)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-06-13
- Shit Crayons2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-11-08
What Hacker News says?
That's only to a certain extent. You can imagine a set of all the pieces of art you can make and all the interesting pieces of art in that set. If they're are few interesting pieces, then the constraints do more harm than good. A good medium for expression will allow you to both express many ideas and restrict you from expressing the uninteresting ones. To make this concrete, in programming, type checking eliminates…
Comment linking /writing/shit_crayons/
on “Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else?”Submitted Gamification is bullshit as a story · 189 points
HN discussionOne could draw a few lines at right angles on this map as well http://bogost.com/middle-earth.jpg
Comment linking /middle-earth.jpg
on “Crafting Plausible Maps (2015)”Submitted OAuth of Fealty: Resignation beyond sorrow on the Facebook Platform and beyond as a story · 181 points
HN discussionCRTs in general are complex pieces of machinery which do odd, hard-to-emulate things to graphics. Here's an interesting post on the topic: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3786 And one with more detail: http://bogost.com/games/a_television_simulator/
Comment linking /games/a_television_simulator/
on “Wolfenstein's original rendering engine as 450 line shader with no external data”Submitted A Facebook Game about Facebook Games as a story · 25 points
HN discussionSome people[1][2][3] have been doing long-form video game journalism for a while, mostly in the form of reviews that go in-depth into questions of video game design. As for long-form investigative game journalism I would recommend reading http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/22/who-killed-videogames-a-g... and its companion piece http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=1076 for an example. [1] http://insertcredit.com/ [2] http://…
Comment linking /writing/
on “Halo Creator Unveils Its Next Masterpiece, a Persistent Online World ”Submitted You-can-program-too encouragement in early home-computer ads as a story · 25 points
HN discussionHe has a moderately positive review of her book: http://www.bogost.com/blog/reality_is_broken.shtml He disagrees with its approach in the end, but credits it with being much better than what he categorizes as gamification: One can only hope that McGonigal's book scores an epic win against the trite, simplistic trends in "gamification" that her smart, sophisticated ideas overshadow.
Comment linking /blog/reality_is_broken.shtml
on “Gamification is bullshit”Submitted Two billionaires on the university as a story · 21 points
HN discussionIt was Cow Clicker and it was a weird, terrible experiment. http://www.bogost.com/blog/cow_clicker_1.shtml http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/12/ff_cowclicker/all/
Comment linking /blog/cow_clicker_1.shtml
on “Elance Flappy Bird jobs”Submitted What Gripes about Apple tell us about Computational Literacy as a story · 20 points
HN discussionThe OAuth bit in the title of this post reminds me that that change broke one of the author's previous projects on Twitter: http://www.bogost.com/blog/it_soared_a_bird.shtml Twitter's responsibility does seem somewhat less, anyway, in that they've never been as platformy as Facebook: Facebook actively claimed that this was a place to deploy your games and other apps, but then broke stuff constantly.
Comment linking /blog/it_soared_a_bird.shtml
on “OAuth of Fealty: Resignation beyond sorrow on the Facebook Platform and beyond”Submitted Cow Clicker as a story · 12 points
HN discussion> just core essential game mechanics Controversial; I'm reminded of how Ian Bogost made Cow Clicker as a satire of how reductive clickers were as a game mechanic, only to find people playing it unironically. https://www.wired.com/2011/12/ff-cowclicker/ http://bogost.com/games/cow_clicker/
Comment linking /games/cow_clicker/
on “Universal Paperclips”Submitted Meh and the Mundane Sublime as a story · 9 points
HN discussionThis struck me as an interesting take, due to your analogy: (some) viruses[1] can be inoculated against. Looking at this through a 'real world' lens, rather than a mimetic one, suggests something stronger. Your argument is that is, Facebook has an interest in providing inoculation against viruses to their users, while the viruses themselves (Zynga) have a vested interest in removing possible inoculating effects with…
Comment linking /blog/cow_clicker_1.shtml
on “Zynga: forget games, let’s just do viruses”Submitted Teaching Computing with... Computers? as a story · 9 points
HN discussionSomewhat related to those that would like to know more... Great efforts were made to extend the Atari 2600 emulator, Stella, to deal with the imperfections of CRT displays that games of yesteryear depended on. Ian Bogost, co-author of "Racing the Beam" ( https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam ), lead a team to make a code contribution to Stella that attempted to emulate the visual qualities that CRTs exhibited.…
Comment linking /games/a_television_simulator/
on “Transparency effects in SNES and Genesis games via composite video artifacts”Submitted In the Habit: A Review of Michael W. Clune's Gamelife (2015) as a story · 8 points
HN discussionOne proposal, which I'm somewhat sympathetic to, that a general cognitive skill of being able to think procedurally or computationally is important in the 21st century, even if the craft of being able to program is more specialized. Some papers on that: http://www.bogost.com/writing/procedural_literacy.shtml http://dm.lcc.gatech.edu/~mateas/publications/MateasOTH2005.... http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/wing/www/pub…
Comment linking /writing/procedural_literacy.shtml
on “Coding - the new Latin”Submitted OAuth of Fealty - Resignation beyond sorrow on the Facebook Platform and beyond as a story · 8 points
HN discussionHey, look, NFTs! http://bogost.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/cowclicker11....
Comment linking /wordpress/wp-content/uploads/cowclicker11.jpg
on “Cow Clicker (2010)”Submitted My daughter on Goldieblox: "FOR ADULTS WHO WANT TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT THEMSELVES" as a story · 7 points
HN discussionThere is an excellent book https://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Was-Here-Commodore-Platform-... http://bogost.com/writing/blog/the_future_was_here/
Comment linking /writing/blog/the_future_was_here/
on “Zombie Moore's Law shows hardware is eating software”Submitted OAUTH of Fealty as a story · 7 points
HN discussionCow Clicker is a somewhat similar example: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/12/ff_cowclicker/all/ It was created as a critique of FarmVille-style Facebook games. You could click a cow every 6 hours for free, or pay money to click more often. And people did! The Cow Clicker creator also implemented a Cube Clicker to beat Molyneux's game to market: http://www.bogost.com/blog/cube_clicker.shtml
Comment linking /blog/cube_clicker.shtml
on “Peter Molyneux may have just monetized trolling”Submitted Put Words Between Buns as a story · 4 points
HN discussion"Like the catcall of 'whore' or 'crook,' the Facebook Platform passes judgement before you even signed up for it. ... If you were innocent, why did you start using the Facebook Platform in the first place? ... Maybe it's me, maybe it's me, Facebook devs whisper quietly, alone, every Tuesday, before heaving the deep, lumbering sighs of resignation beyond sorrow." http://www.bogost.com/blog/oauth_of_fealty.shtml
Comment linking /blog/oauth_of_fealty.shtml
on “Facebook's Realtime Updates API has been down for 12 days”Submitted Gamification is Bullshit as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
