Instead of starring a busty young woman or a porn stud with rock-hard abs, the Flash-powered site features an actor in a chicken suit, dressed in lingerie. And unlike previous big-business attempts to cash in on an Internet trend, the Subservient Chicken site quickly became an Internet hit. —Chris Ulbrich
—Porno Hen Hawks for Burger King (Wired)
I noticed this story last week, but didn’t blog it because 1) it’s a Flash site, and 2) I hadn’t found a straightforward newsy-account of what the heck it was all about.
I confess I still haven’t visted the site, but now that I see it apparently uses some kind of text parser (or at least it looks for keywords) it should probably count as a kind of text game. While I study the classic interactive fiction works that don’t include any pictures at all, many games during the genre’s heyday mixed words with images; the hybrid genre hasn’t attracted much attention.
View Comments
Is blogshares back up and working? Neat. I tried it for a week but it was slow as a dead dog and never seemed to register my 'buys'. It's probably for the best...time is too valuable. Though it is kind of cool to see one's blog being bartered; hope there's no hostile takeovers.
Blogging is a kind of game, too... we use comments and inbound links to keep score. Blogshares -- the fantasy blog stock market game -- made this very clear. (In that game, as Mike knows, blogs are assigned value based on the number of inbound vs outbound links.)
I'm tempted to check out the site, just to make it do the 'chicken sandwich.' Hilarious! And you're right: it is a game. But in the context of this article, your point raises another issue: Is webcam porn a game, or sorts, too?
Yes, though the original founder folded, someone else brought it back. By that time, though, I think much of the energy that had gone into it was sapped over into P2P social networks like Orkut and other less corporate-looking activities. I hadn't checked my blog in months and was surprised to so see it's doing extremely well.