Why Idle games make good satire, and how it was ruined. By Thought Slime

I play a lot of video games but I often struggle with them. Games that are too easy bore me, and the hard games that I like are too hard for me and I get frustrated and stop. Naturally, the only solution is a game that plays itself for me. A game where I don’t have to do anything but occasionally click. The mildest possible strategy elements, do I do this now, or do I wait and do it later? All the while I can get that sweet dopamine rush of watching numbers go up and up and up forever. That’s why I love idle games.

I was reminded of this fact when watching Sophie Curio’s video about the Pokemon moba, and how it essentially becomes an idle game as though that were a bad thing, and to be clear it kind of is in context go watch the video #getCurioto100k An idle game, or an incremental game, or a “clicker game” is a game that requires next to no interaction. At most you may have to click on some stuff, but it’s not really a “game” in the strict sense of the word. It’s a series of video game mechanics that you can play with, but divorced from the… game part. There is no win condition, there is no lose condition, there is no goal (aside from growth) and they never end. If that sounds like silly nonsense, it is! The genre developed initially as a parody of video games and the way they incentivize certain behaviours, and have become popular games themselves almost in spite of that.

They’ve proven their point far beyond their intent. The first idle game I can remember playing was Progress Quest, an RPG that plays itself without any interaction from the player. It’s just a series of progress bars which gradually fill out over time, while describing what is happening in a video game that the player, if you can even call yourself that, doesn’t see. The game was developed as a parody of the grind in RPGs, particularly MMOs like the contemporarily popular Maple Story, or Everquest. Those games, in fact all games really, are designed around making you feel like you’re accomplishing something.

You make your way through the barriers the game put in your way, and feel like you’re making progress while in actuality you’re engaged in a highly complicated skinner box. There’s no reason to start you at level one and have you fight monsters until you get to level 30 or whatever, that’s all there to trick your brain into feeling like you’re doing something meaningful. You’re advancing. All of the interaction demanded of you is a kind of window dressing. After all, game-developers WANT you to progress, so even the difficulty in a video game is designed to keep you playing it.

And in a genre like MMOs, since there is no end state, they have to continue to find new incentives FOREVER. Progress Quest is a gentle satire of the futility of playing video games, and the inherent silliness of imposing arbitrary challenges on players simply to give them a feeling of satisfaction for completing them. It clearly comes from a place of love, but at its core it has this biting commentary about the medium. That we all kind of waste our time with it, and that it might as well just be a screen with a loading bar that counts down on its own. And here’s the thing, the devs were way more right than they ever realized.

This game was a sensation back in the day, I had friends that left the game running for their entire university careers. The truly weird part about it is, it is totally compelling. It doesn’t showcase the emptiness of video game grinding, it activates the same neuro-chemical chain reaction that gets people to go through the grind to begin with. But in my eyes, the genre didn’t truly come into its own until 2013, when the best idle game to date like… still, was released. If you’re familiar with any game I’m gonna talk about today, it’s gonna be this one.

Cookie Clicker. Let me tell you, I have spent a lot of time playing cookie clicker. A lot. This is my browser save game, I have a lot of cookies. Quattuordecillion by the way means 1 followed by 45 zeros.

I also have the mobile version which I’ve been playing for a few years. I have clicked the cookie 64,000 times on this save… Which is my third savefile. I like to click cookies. Cookie Clicker is compellingly simple, but fiendishly complex. You start the game with a big cookie, click it to make a cookie.

Then you unlock units which produce cookies for you, which grow increasingly absurd. It starts off simple enough, you unlock a cursor which clicks for you, which gives you a cookie a second. Then you can hire a grandma to bake you cookies, how cute. Then a farm where you can grow cookies, or a mine where you can mine out cookies. Then a cookie factory, you’re a cookie mogul now! Then… a bank… you buy the banks which let you make more… cookies.

Then ancient temples full of cookies, and wizard towards to magically make cookies… And then a rocket ship to go to the cookie planet to get cookies… Do we still need cookies now? Then uh… then you develop alchemy to make gold into cookies, you own insidious portals to the cookie dimension and… then… time machines to retrieve cookies from the past, and then… oops, all the matter in the universe is cookies now. You’re 2/3rds of the way through the tech tree. You build an antimatter condenser to turn antimatter into cookies. Prisms to turn light into cookies. WIll it ever be enough? Why could you possibly need so many cookies? Everything will be cookies! Chancemakers let you generate cookies from pure chance, from the raw, probabilistic forces of the universe! Fractal engines bend reality to your will, your cookies now become MORE COOKIES! THEN THE VIDEO GAME UNLOCKS IT’S OWN JAVASCRIPT CONSOLE FOR YOU TO HACK ITSELF TO PRODUCE MORE COOKIES.

THEN THE VIDEO GAME REACHES OUT TO OTHER INSTANCES OF THE VIDEO GAME RUNNING TO TAKE COOKIES FROM THEM. You go from clicking to making cookies, to passively generating cookies, to making the whole universe into cookies… to breaking the fourth wall and breaking the rules of the game itself to produce cookies... Along the way, something odd is gonna happen. The grandmas, remember them? They’ll open up a little bingo hall where you can run some… experiments. You can increase their cookie production greatly, getting them to work in, and with other units… you can give them incredible post-human abilities, until you have the option to research a technology which lets the grandmothers think as one.

The game warns you, this will have side effects. The tone changes. The background becomes destroyed, with demonic grandmothers filling the screen. The occasionally spawning golden cookies which give you fun bonuses turn into blood cookies, which can steal cookies from you, or halve your cookie production for a short time... They understand their exploitation.

They understand that you have used them, and they are angry. In desperation, you research some way to stop them, some way to undo what you have done. You develop something called a communal brainsweep, to remove their memories and turn them back into your loyal cookie making pawns… but it doesn’t remove their memories, instead it removes what remains of their humanity... They congeal into one giant mass of flesh, THE GRAND MATRIARCH, they send their minions, wrinklers, to attack your production and consume your cookies. For a price you can buy peace with them, or let them attack because it turns out that wrinklers actually produce more cookies than they consume when you kill them.

It’s up to you! Eventually though, the game slows down, you find yourself not able to buy the next upgrade, it gets frustratingly slow… But at some point, you started gathering a new currency. Heavenly chips. You have the option to restart your game, from scratch… but the heavenly chips add to your total CPS (cookies per second). So when you come back, it’s faster. Much faster.

And this cycle continues, on and on. You unlock a few more upgrades each time, making each subsequent run even faster and faster and faster and faster. You make all of the same mistakes again, more quickly. You destroy the world, and destroy all other potential worlds again and again. You enslave grandmothers, and they get revenge over and over and over.

And for what? All to just eek out a few more cookies. So. Like. I know I’m gonna sound like I’m doing the thing I do. I know I’m gonna sound like this is just me being me… but this is anti-capitalist satire.

Progress quest is a little bit, but a little less directly. It’s more a satire of the manipulative ways video game companies keep you playing their products to extract more monthly subscriptions from you. Cookie Clicker lays it bare: Growth for its own sake is absurd and destructive. The game frames itself as your bakery, you little business. You start off making your own cookies, then you get employees, then farms, then mines, factories… And then you buy the banks.

All of that is just straight up a critique of capitalism as it exists today. From the grandmas being revealed to be slaves that you can experiment on, to the fact that you can buy the banks to produce more profits for yourself. The fact that what sets you off on this path of needless destruction and greed is owning the means of producing cookies. The game is about infinite growth, and the absurd lengths that you have to go through to achieve that. A major game mechanic is repeatedly destroying the universe for your own profit.

The news scroll at the top of the page which gives info about how the game world is progressing gradually gets more and more bleak. It starts off a bright and goofy game about making cookies, and gradually becomes more of a nightmare as your production grows. The message could not be clearer: The logical endpoint of capitalism’s extractive tendencies is oblivion. If your goal is to extract as much as you can from your environment, eventually you have to go to more and more extreme lengths to do that. And it’s very difficult to make one of these games without sending that message.

Because the whole fun of them is to watch numbers go up and up and up, so if the game has any sort of lore or framing device, eventually you’re gonna have to confront the fact that maybe you don’t need that much of that thing. Like how many cookies do you really need to make? At the point I am at in the game, I am making trillions of trillions of trillions of cookies for each and every person on earth… And every animal on earth. But the game incentivizes me to keep going. At this point I think it’s worth talking about the way that video games accomplish that feeling. The way that they become addicting in the first place.

Our brains are designed such that when we accomplish a task, we get a little bit of dopamine, Some people more than others, obviously. Dopamine is the brain’s way of rewarding us. It’s what makes us feel pleasure or satisfaction, and it’s also the reason that like… drugs are addictive. Heroin isn’t addictive because heroin feels nice, it’s addictive because it releases a shitload of dopamine, which feels nice. In fact, nothing else feels nice, the only reason you are capable of feeling the feeling of “nice” is because your brain gives you that sweet sweet dopamine.

It’s obviously slightly more complicated than that, but I’m not a fuckin’ doctor I am a youtube doofus. Our brain naturally conditions us to do certain behaviours by releasing little hits of dopamine. Without it, we’d just sit around and starve to death. But your neuro-transmitters don’t know what a video game is, all they know is that you did a thing, so they’re like “Oh shit, well have a little dopamine buddy!” Video games are designed to hack the brain in this way. Not necessarily with malicious intent but because that is literally what fun is.

If you wanna make something fun, you gotta make a thing which gives you some dopamine. And since you naturally want a game to be fun, there ya go, right? What’s more, video games are really good at this in particular because they can provide instant gratification. If I go to the GYM, I don’t get stronger right away. I have to do a bunch of boring and difficult shit, and then I get tired and my arms hurt, only to know that at some point in future I will be stronger. But in a video game, when I jump on the goomba it gets satisfyingly squished right away.

That’s why people who are chronically under-dopamined, people with stuff like depression or ADHD, can’t seem to focus on most stuff but can absolutely focus on video games. Because of the goomba. Now, you can kinda see how this could become a problem. Like, if we design video games to act on the same neural pathways that heroin does, how an unethical video game company might abuse that. They might, for example, design their game to encourage that kind of compulsive behaviour, or design their game to funnel players towards making purchases designed to appeal to the impulsive ways that people lacking dopamine are prone to behave.

And guess what? Guess what everybody? Pretty much all video game companies are unethical. Aside from like, a handful of small indie studios. They’ll all gladly fill their games with as many money-grubbing features and microtransactions and limited time offers and battle passes and whatever as they feel like they can get away with. They know they got your brain by the balls, and they’ll exploit all the chemicals flyin’ around in there to make you dance to their tune. The next game I’d like to discuss is in no way the worst of these practices, simply a deeply ironic use of them.

Adventure Capitalist is, on its face, the most overtly anti-capitalist of the games we’ve covered so far. The whole game is framed around the gee-golly shucks attitude of mid century american educational videos about the wonders of capitalism, while in reality what you’re doing is clearly corrupt and villainous. You literally employ satan as one of your middle managers to run banks for you. And the game is less shy about naming the issue. It’s called Adventure Capitalism, it isn’t simply implicitly condemning capitalism, it’s calling it out by name.... Or is it? The game does take some things about capitalism for granted that make its criticism kind of weird.

You start your business empire with a lemonade stand, as thought you’re building your way up from nothing. Life has given you lemons, you make lemonade. From there, through sheer gumption and hard work you become a billionaire tycoon. And that’s I think a pretty optimistic view of capitalism. Where the economy is a meritocracy and the to the hard working go the spoils.

You can build yourself up from nothing to the tippity top of the the social order… But like… Try it. If you’re telling me that anyone can become a billionaire, okay go do it and come back. Also, no matter how much shit you own… nothing bad happens. You can literally employ every human on earth, and there doesn’t seem to be any drawbacks from that. Nothing really changes, you don’t see any effects that has on regular people… So that gee whiz attitude is kind of… the only attitude the game takes towards capitalism.

They also made adventure communism, and that probably has a lot of anti-communist propaganda in it but every time I try to play it my eyes glaze over and I can’t. Beyond that though, Adventure Capitalist pioneered the practice of incorporating microtransactions into Idle Games. You can pay real life actual money to buy a second or third fake currency that lets you buy stuff like… An hour’s worth of progress. Or a little tophat that gives you more in game money per second. So just think about that for a second.

This genre that began life as a parody of the ways that video games incentivize you to do arbitrary pointless things… Starts using that same incentive structure to get you to fork over real cash. And the first game to popularize the practice… Presented itself like it was an explicit critique of capitalism. And hey dog, I get it, you gotta get paid. Anti-capitalist satire still costs money to make, and the people that make it need to feed their families too. In a lot of ways this is less predatory that we might expect from typical video games, they’re not selling you anything you can’t earn in the game… but come on though.

I think it’s very clearly predatory, it operates essentially like a slot machine except it’s a slot machine that doesn’t ever pay out with real money. You insert your real money, and it gives you fake money that lights up the same neuro-transmitters that’d be lit up from real money. And you could take that argument to extremes, “oh are you saying we can’t ever pay to have fun?”, no but doesn’t it strike you as a little fishy that anyone WOULD pay just to skip an hour of a video game? A video game they’re supposed to be enjoying? Doesn’t that imply some sort of compulsive behaviour? It’s kind of fucked up to manipulate people for your own economic… Oh, hey grumbletum. It’s grumbletum everybody, the folksy woodland critter who eats all of my likes, comments, subscriptions, and patreon donations. He’s very sick.

He needs to eat. He needs all the help he can get. He will die. Don’t you think opening that design space inherently affects the way the game behaves? Because if you want people to pay, you have to start putting boundaries in their way that make that transaction seem valuable to them. You have to waste their time with needless grinding, just to soak up their time and keep them playing.

The very thing Progress Quest was made to mock. But nobody set out to recuperate the radical messaging of idle games, it’s just that the predatory business practices already suffused into the medium made it inevitable. By not monetizing idle games to take advantage of the operant conditioning they’re leaving dopamine on the table. And again I have to point out that cookie clicker handled this problem way better. Cookie clicker doesn’t offer power-ups for cash, it doesn’t offer any way for you to pay to get a reward in game.

Instead, cookie clicker offers a reward to everyone based on the amount of patrons at the highest tier. If you buy the in game Heralds upgrade, you get +1% to your cps for every patron at the highest tier of the patreon, REGARDLESS of if you have donated. That means that they’re incentivizing the purchase based on a feeling of community spirit, rather than a compulsive need to wring a bit more brain juice outta the game. Freddy nickels once said ““Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. ” ― Friedrich Nietzsche Terrible advice for dealing with a dracula, but surprisingly relevant advice for dealing with life in late capitalism.

And hey, if we’re talking about monsters, abysses, and being stared at you know, I mean come on… Battle not with eyeballs, because they’ve obviously already won and you are hopelessly outmatched. HELLO AND WELCOME TO THE EYEBALL ZONE.

Source : Thought Slime