Inside Cookie Clicker and the Idle Game Movement

Alright, buckle up folks. Because this one is going to get a little bit weird.

Over the course of 2013 a new type of super addictive, super dumb (and I mean that in the most affectionate way possible) browser game emerged and rapidly took the internet by storm. The genre is so new that it doesn’t even really have name, but some have taken to called them Idle Games. This is the label I’ll be using.

Candy Box, A Dark Room, and Cookie Clicker have emerged as the biggest and more well-known Idle Games to date, with each becoming bigger and more popular than the last.

Like anything newly emerging, definitions and standards are shifting over time, but Idle Games, especially these three groundbreakers, all seem to have three key characteristics in common:

You Start With Literally Nothing

When you start up Candy Box, you’re presented with a plain white browser window. A line of ASCII text slowly counts up the number of candies you own - one per second. You have 1 candy! You have 2 candies!

After you have 60 candies (ie after one minute) a lollipop salesman (built out of more ASCII art) appears, offering to sell you a lollipop for 60 of your candies. So you can essentially trade for one lollipop per minute.

…and that’s it. At first. Just a slowly incrementing candy counter and a weird dude selling seemingly pointless lollipops. There’s no indication of what it’s all for, or if it’s even leading to anything. But here’s the thing -

...Things Escalate Rapidly

After this, the game’s math starts to get a little bit... nuts.

You can plant your purchased lollipops on a lollipop farm, which then lets you grow your own lollipops - no need to trade with the sketchy salesman. The more you plant, the faster they grow. One per day… one per hour… one per second.

After around an hour, if you keep buying and reinvesting lollipops you’ll be “harvesting” 100 lollipops per second from your farm, and you’ll look back and laugh when you only got one per minute and had to buy it by hand.

But it just keeps going. And going. You’ll eventually be producing 30,000 lollipops per second. A store will sell you items that cost hundreds of thousands of lollipops or even millions of lollipops. The numbers grow so big that they begin displaying in scientific notation, just a few days or a week in. Billions? Trillions? Quadrillions? You’ll be dealing with numbers this big and bigger in no-time, with no indication of when (or if) it stops.

Candy Box, Cookie Clicker and other Idle Games seem perfectly tuned to keep escalating exponentially, seemingly forever. This alone is enough to generate addictive feelings of mathematical progress. But Idle Games also appeal due to a not-so-hidden undercurrent of weirdness that pervades them. Just when you think you have them figured out...

...Everything Flies Off-the-Rails

Early on in Candy Box can buy a wooden sword with some of your candy. “That’s a little weird. I thought this was just a little browser-based economic game” you might ask yourself.

With the sword, a previously-hidden set of menus appear, letting you go on a quest through a forest (animated via more ASCII art), view your inventory, and more.

You’ll combine ingredients to brew potions and magic spells. You’ll enchant your sword and encrust it with gems. Eventually, you’ll (spoilers!) go on a quest to hack into the “Developer’s Computer” itself, unlocking the ability to “glitch” the game via the purchase of of cheat-like Bugs that cost (what else?) billions and trillions of candies.

A Dark Room has arguably an even better slow reveal than Candy Box. It begins as another simple browser game. You start with (of course) just a dark room. You harvest wood and use it to build huts and other simple village structures via a basic browser menu. But once you craft a rucksack and a waterskin, an innocuous new new menu tab opens up: “A Dusty Path.”

It turns out that that, well over an hour after you start playing, A Dark Room abruptly turns into a full-featured RPG. You’ll explore an overworld, finding new weapons and equipment along the way. You’ll clear out monster caves, abandoned military bases, and plenty more.

Then, when you find or loot your first Alien Alloy, things start to get really weird.

So Why Can’t I Stop Clicking Cookies?

Idle Games seem perfectly tuned to provide a never-ending sense of escalation. They’re intoxicating because upgrades or items that used to seem impossibly expensive or out of reach rapidly become achievable, and then trivial. It’s all in your rearview mirror before you know it, with a new set of crazy-expensive upgrades ahead. The games are tuned to make you feel both powerful and weak, all at once. They thrive on an addictive feeling of exponential progress.

But for just 15 cookies you can buy a cursor that will click the cookie automatically, generating a cookie every 10 seconds. For 100 cookies you can buy a grandma that bakes a cookie every 2 seconds.

So at first Cookie Clicker is a game of furiously clicking your mouse. But after a few upgrades the game is suddenly generating 5 or maybe even 10 cookies per second, all on its own. It feels great. It feels like compound interest. You don’t need to click anymore! You’ve made real progress. Candy Box and A Dark Room also understand how powerful it feels to let players begin automating what previously had to be done by hand. Candy Box lets you grow Lollipops instead of manually trading for them. A Dark Room lets you automatically chop wood instead of manually harvesting it with a button click.

Cookie Clicker's initial feeling of success and progress is short-lived. The Cookie Mine, the next big upgrade, costs 10,000 cookies. The Cookie Portal (pull in cookies from another dimension) costs 1.6 million. The Antimatter Condenser (condense raw matter itself into cookies) costs four billion cookies.

The game is balanced so that every step of the way you feel like you’re flying, generating cookies so much faster than you were before. But you still can’t wait until that next major milestone is finally within reach. You’ll quickly hit 100 cookies per second, and won’t believe how happy you were when you hit around 5 per second and stopped clicking by hand.

But that’s just the beginning. I’m generating 60 billion cookies per second, and upgrades cost quadrillions. I don’t know what’s next.

“It sounds so pointless”

Certainly some gamers will fire up Cookie Clicker, quickly see that everything is just a silly cookie-generating treadmill and close the window, never to return.

Many will claim to have never gotten sucked in by a Facebook game like Farmville, Cityville, or Mafia Wars. But given that at their peak 500 million+ people were playing social games, it’s probably safe to assume that at least one got its claws into all of us at some point over the last few years.

Once Japan found Cookie Clicker, the videos started...

And here’s the thing - Idle Games provide that same delightful Zynga-style sense of never-ending progress, that happens even when you’re at work or asleep, without all the gross money-making gimmicks and friend-pestering mechanics. It’s the progress treadmill without the accompanying nastiness.

And compelled many of us are. On some days more people are are searching for Cookie Clicker online than Call of Duty. Weird memes and other internet strangeness are being collected on Tumblrs. People stream Cookie Clicker on Twitch.TV. Ultimately, whether the rise of Idle Games represents a true video game movement or will instead be remembered as just a strange bit of 2013 behavior remains to be seen.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ve finally worked up enough nerve to reset and erase my Cookie Clicker progress and its quintillion cookies. If you start over and run through the game again it unlocks a Call of Duty-style Prestige system.

Of course.