![]() ![]() "Repetition is integral to game design," said Thiennot. Just like life, but you don’t have to do it, which makes it somehow more appealing." That’s sort of the point of games? Repetition. "All games kind of are grinds," he continued. It’s right there, but, instead, idle games settled into a pretty predictable RPG-lite + prestige pattern. A game without gameplay! An automatic game. "But I also sort of wish they went further? The idea of a game that nobody plays. "I find them super interesting," said Bogost, when asked if he genuinely enjoyed the clicker genre. To Bogost's surprise, people honestly enjoyed clicking cows. The clicks didn't add up to anything, but again like FarmVille, you could spend actual money to skip the arbitrary time wait. Players could only click once every six hours, echoing the masochistic design of FarmVille, and each click added to the pile of clicks. It is, like Cookie Clicker, just as described: you click on a cow. In 2010, right around the launch of FarmVille and the beginning of gaming's social games culture clash, designer and academic Ian Bogost created Cow Clicker. Of course most idle games are less idle than Progress Quest." I think I referred to it as a 'fire-and-forget' game, initially. ![]() "I know I didn't coin the term 'idle game,' so I probably started calling it that whenever everybody else did. Pointed satire accidentally becoming that which it despised is a hallmark of this genre. But you can see the irony and the non-gameness of it at the same time." ![]() Playing Cookie Clicker feels like you definitely are playing a game, to me. It still feels a little like I'm playing a game when I run Progress Quest. "It's kind of a game and a bot wrapped up in one. "Does a game need a player to be a game?" said Fredricksen. It's around this time that it became clear these games were now becoming a genre, resulting in a variety of labels: incremental games, clicker games, tap games, idle games.įredricksen has also played Cookie Clicker to the end "more than once," and both making Progress Quest and playing games like Cookie Clicker have shifted their own relationship with playing games, especially when it comes to viewing the way games implement grind. "The idea that we made Cookie Clicker to brazenly expose the hypocrisy of repetitive modern gaming is very fun but ultimately it was accidental."Ģ013 also saw the release of Candy Box, itself very similar to Cookie Clicker, and A Dark Room, which took some of the same concepts and wrapped more narrative elements around it. "I and many other idle devs put a lot of effort into designing more sophisticated systems than just a basic Skinner box we're not that cynical," said Thiennot. ![]() The response to social games across established gaming culture was gross and harsh, which, of course, made it infinitely funnier and ironic that so many of those same people suddenly became obsessed with games like Cookie Clicker in the years that followed.Ĭookie Clicker was, on some level, an emotional response to that culture clash. "The genie is not going to go back into the bottle," said Koster at the time. An archived transcript reveals, in retrospect, a pretty harmless speech. ![]()
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