[T]he Cowpocalypse finally arrives at 7:20 pm on September 7. At that moment, all the cows disappear. They have been raptured—replaced with an image of an empty patch of grass. Players can still click on the grass, still generate points for doing so, but there are no new cows to buy, no mooing to celebrate their action. In some sense, this is the truest version of Cow Clicker—the pure, cold game mechanic without any ornamentation. Bogost says that he expects most people will ‘see this as an invitation to end their relationship with Cow Clicker.’
But months after the rapture, Adam Scriver, the enthusiastic player from British Columbia, hasn’t accepted that invitation. He is still clicking the space where his cow used to be. […] ‘It’s very interesting, clicking nothing,’ Scriven says. ‘But then, we were clicking nothing the whole time. It just looked like we were clicking cows.’