Word.ws English Dictionary

cow-clicker

cow-clicker noun: a video game that requires the player to perform repetitive tasks at certain intervals.

Noun

cow-clicker (plural cow-clickers)

  1. (derogatory) A video game that requires the player to perform repetitive tasks at certain intervals.
    • The plan was to offer a much deeper experience than what Farmville and rest of the cow-clickers ever could.2015, Juho Kuorikoski, Finnish Video Games: A History and Catalog, page 235

Forms of cow-clicker

pluralcow-clickers

Origin of cow-clicker

Coined by Ian Bogost in response to FarmVille winning an award for "Best New Social/Online Game" at the 2010 Game Developers Choice Awards. The win caused Bogost, a critic of the freemium model used by Zynga, to be struck with the thought: "Games like FarmVille are cow clickers. You click on a cow, and that's all you do." He subsequently developed Cow Clicker, an intentionally simplistic parody game, which itself became a surprise viral hit.

Questions about cow-clicker

What does cow-clicker mean?
Cow-clicker means a video game that requires the player to perform repetitive tasks at certain intervals.
What part of speech is cow-clicker?
Cow-clicker is a noun.
What is the plural of cow-clicker?
The plural of cow-clicker is cow-clickers.

Words near cow-clicker in the dictionary

  1. cow's lungwort
  2. cow's milk
  3. cow's milks
  4. cow-chip
  5. cow-chips
  6. cow-clicker
  7. cow-clickers
  8. cow-creamer
  9. cow-creamers
  10. cow-dung
  11. cow-eyed

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cow-clicker (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-cow-clicker.wav.

Cite this entry: “cow-clicker.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cow-clicker. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.