Ian Bogost - video game academic, designer and one-time Kotaku guest editor - has just released the Shaun of the Dead of Facebook games.
No, it's not about zombies. Or cricket bats. Instead, Cow Clicker is about...cows. But it does to Facebook games what Shaun did for zombie movies: as Bogost puts it, Cow Clicker is "partly a satire, and partly a playable theory of today's social games, and partly an earnest example of that genre."
You click cows. You invite your other friends to click cows. But you can only click so many cows in any given space of time! Every click earns you money, which you spend to let you click more things more often. Like Bogost intends, it's a wonderful parody of games like Farmville, but I suspect a lot of the people who sign up for a laugh will end up clicking long after the joke has worn off...
Cow Clicker [Ian Bogost]