I have the opposite perspective actually. He accidentally made something fun that a lot of people enjoyed, and instead of letting them run with it he closed it down out of, essentially, pique because he thought those people were having fun wrong.

I was his student around the time of release.

It was always an absurdist demonstrative to prove a point about the hazards that the game industry would soon be forced to confront.

It is now so apparent how shamelessly game developers will exploit human psychology instead of pursuing actual fun.. so it's not as useful of a warning.

Was anyone actually having fun -- in any meaningful sense of the word -- or were they just indulging compulsion. I think for a lot of (even very predatory) games, there's a blend between the two, but here's it seems to be nakedly the latter.

I take the view that if someone says they're having fun you should probably believe them. I've known people who talked about games like addicts, that they'd spend hours "playing" and the best they'd ever get out of it was feeling numb, but those were always "deeper" or at least bigger games (mostly LoL and WoW), not Cow Clicker or any of the similar games that emerged later.

It usually starts with it being "fun", because you so release endorphins from playing/winning. The stage where they're only feeling numb is extremely late when they're already hopelessly addicted.

Not all fun things are equal however, otherwise you'd have to classify taking drugs and directly supplementing "fun" hormones as the best entertainment in existence.

At the time I thought Cow Clicker would be an eye opening moment for the Game Design Gatekeeperati, but they doubled down. This turned the whole thing into performance art, with the unwilling professors of fun as part of the show.

Yeah because there’s a real vacuum of pretty looking but content free addictive micropayment games. A real big loss to society that has not been replicated that one.