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.

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  • 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.

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Dennis G. Jerz

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