Final Production - Idle Games
Idle Games
Idle video games, or incremental games, represent a seeming paradox in a sea of far more technologically advanced games available today - games which are vastly superior in graphics, movement possibility, mechanics, options for engagement, character development, sophistication, and storyline. By contrast, idle games have generally basic graphics and simplistic interfaces, and severely constrain what the player can do. Yet, somehow these games have generated massive following and maintain this strange allure.
In an idle game, the player clicks to gain some type of currency, and soon uses their accumulated currency to purchase automation. Since clicking requires physical and attentional effort for relatively less reward, the player is better suited to aim at automation, where the game essentially plays itself. The accumulation tally can get astronomical - you can get up to the tretrigintillions (10102) and beyond. The object of these games then, is to accumulate astronomical numbers by finding faster and more efficient ways of accumulating these numbers.
There are two always-increasing numbers, total accumulation and rate of accumulation. Because numbers can always be increased, players don’t “win” by accumulating a certain amount, but instead have a number of achievements that may represent levels of currency accumulation and rewards for purchasing upgrades with the currency. The win condition is usually to attain all the achievements and unlocks. However, at some point the rate of currency production does not make it conceivable to meet the next upgrade within a timeframe the player would find reasonable. At this point, the player is invited to “ascend” or “rank up” which involves losing everything they have accumulated, but allowing them to keep the achievements they have attained - essentially multipliers on the rate of accumulation. When a player forfeits everything to ascend they find themselves back where they were and beyond in much less time. Essentially the compounding of multipliers from ascending triggers exponential growth, so multiple ascensions allow for astronomical accumulation. At higher levels, however, upgrades become much harder to attain, so the player must grind through levels of ascension which also become a currency. This makes these games extremely hard to win, while also requiring, despite the game playing itself, the player’s ongoing input to ensure that rates of production are optimized. The game play is to watch the numbers go by and click when upgrades are offered.
My partner took a look at one of these games and likened it to a Fisher Price busy board for babies. “Ding, Beep, Crinkle Crinkle.” was her comment, bewildered at why anyone would spend the hours and hours and days and days (and weeks and weeks) required by these games. One Youtuber streamed playing the game for ten hours straight. In comments section of that video, one viewer said they “slept to this and woke up and u were still on this, lmfaoooooo”, the irony seemingly lost. In fact, there are thousands of youtube videos and thousands of pages of threads in message boards full of strategies, speedruns, and people claiming to have beat the games - and people invested in calling them out as cheats. Idle games not only have higher retention rates than most mobile games (Pecorella), but, astoundingly, are highly monetizable. People will pay money to buy more upgrades faster - with some packages offered at $139 in real money.
Idle Games as Ideology
One such game, Adventure Capitalist, makes overt idle games’ capitalist undertones, namely more and more wealth accumulated faster and faster. Starting from a lemonade stand, the player clicks on the lemon until they have enough money to buy more stands and soon a “manager’, who will automate the clicking process. From there, you can use your accumulated currency to buy more stands or diversify your assets by buying other more lucrative businesses, progressing from car washes to shrimp boats to pizza chains, then hockey teams, all the way to owning banks and oil companies. The graphic design emulates the space-agey cartoons of American post war boom-era optimism, and you are a smiling white male in a top hat. At the top of the screen numbers whiz ever upward. At some point, the most important currency of the game is the number of angel investors, because each is a permanent compound multiplier. The game is essentially about constant profit scaling. One reviewer, Geek Dad, summarizes the most efficient actions:
...to use angels you have to sell all of your shares in all of your businesses and start again. This is a very hard thing to do even when the app itself tells you it is totally worth it. You have to raze all that you have done and start from scratch. At the beginning that was relatively hard work. How do you push that button for a do-over? The economic calculation here is a no-brainer. When you have angels, things accumulate so quickly that, while you start from scratch, you are back with most of what you had at an increasingly fast rate. So if you were serious about “winning” this game, you could cash out quite often because angels don’t die following resets (unless you spend them along the way). This is a big opportunity to teach kids about investing and compounding. My son started playing a day before me. However, I realized this issue and razed my businesses to the ground a couple of times more than him and now I am richer and pulling ahead very quickly. Even doing this just a small number of times at short intervals gave me that advantage. Once I explained what I had done, he had learned his lesson. Mathematics plus economics all in one. (Gans)
While Geek Dad, who discloses he is an economist, feels he is providing his son with valuable instruction in “investing and compounding,” he is also teaching him the efficacy of “[razing] his businesses to the ground.” as a means of rapid expansion. This seemingly-benign comment highlights just one of the many ways Adventure Capitalist, and idle games in general, inculcate the player with highly-questionable forms of capitalist actions, which are presented as fundamental to not only “winning” but define the entire rules of engagement.
Geek Dad presents the decision to raze his businesses (selling everything and keeping nothing but his investors) as a difficult decision, but does so from a quite insular perspective. The loss incurred would be what the player has built up though purchases and their accumulated money. Entirely absent from consideration are the people who must make up the business, whose livelihoods would depend on the business. In fact, the game’s only people, besides you, are the functionalized managers whose sole purpose is automation, freeing you from clicking on the particular asset they “manage” so you can profit effortlessly. There is no affinity or connection to these people nor to anyone else. This makes the buying of selling of businesses, downsizing, and “restructures” completely strategic - and only carried out from a profitteering standpoint, such as when corporations move their production to a country with laxer, “business-friendly” labour and environmental laws. Like Katherine Cross’s observation of Gamergate, where gamified targeting of women became “pure tactics” disassociated from moral concerns, Adventure Capitalist portrays a world of business conduct where “tactical expediency relative to win conditions” (Cross 28) trumps anything else. (As a side note, just this very morning, my partner received an email that her company was laying off another 7000 employees - on top of the 12000 last year - as a “series of portfolio and efficiency measures to strengthen [their] core businesses”. )
Adventure Capitalist, by not representing any stakeholders other than the profiteers, gamifies the neoliberal dream. In this dream, all transaction and appropriation is permitted and instantly accessible if you have the capital; labour is freely available, undemanding, and complacent; and business is unfettered by considerations of environmental or social impact. Regulations, viewed by neoliberals as “business-killing” red-tape, are repealed. In this dream, business is as easy as any action in the game - as simple as the click of a button - if you have the means. In a perversion of Gee’s “Empathy for Complex Systems” (Gee 2), Adventure Capitalist actually serves to reduce the complexities involved in real business management (including the negotiation of tensions between a large variety of stakeholders, adherence to laws and regulations, and business-building practices such as marketing and investor-attracting) to an absurdity. At the highest level, you can buy upgrades which reduce the purchasing price of additional businesses by 99.9999%. In effect, this game promotes “Utter Ignorance of Complex Systems.”
The “clicking” on assets to buy more assets and upgrades in Adventure Capitalist (and most other idle games), is not only the means by which you “win” the game, but the only way you can start the game it at all. The player input is at first constrained to one action - adding money by manual clicking. This then leads into a second possible action, clicking to buy automation.. Through this limitation of player option, making profit is made both “natural and inevitable”, and a “capitalist realism, [a] sense of inevitability, the impossibility of difference or contingency” (Benjamin 76), is further reinforced through the actions performed by the program, which automate your clicks and do the money-making calculations. It‘s a perpetual motion machine, which keeps running, accumulating money even while you are offline. Neoliberal capitalism is a similar perpetual motion machine, where no one is at the wheel and no one has any power to override the prime directive of endless profits. All business decisions are framed and bounded by what will raise the stock price, and return the most money to the investors before any other consideration. If a business fails to do this, investors will pull out and the company will fold. This determinism is what Benjamin Abraham refers to in his observation that “a space of possibility to be otherwise...is foreclosed by the modern developments of neoliberal capitalism, and capitalist realism’s claim that the way things are now is simply how things must always be“ (Benjamin 76).
Here there is another perversion of Gee’s theories. Gee believes that games can, through intelligent AI, “distribute intelligence between a real-world person and artificially intelligent virtual characters” (Gee 4). In Gee’s conception, the intelligence in a video game can enable a player to perform higher level actions, allowing for deeper and more nuanced situated practices, because the AI of the game supports the player by “[offloading] some of the cognitive burden from the learner to smart tools that can do more than the learner is currently capable of doing by himself or herself” (Gee 4). However, in idle games like Adventure Capitalist, the things a player is capable of doing are deeply constrained by the computer’s constrained role as click-automator and calculator, as well as enticer to buy more upgrades. In this way, the ‘distributed intelligence” supports (forces) the player to perform predetermined, low level actions - hardly Gee’s vision.
Idle Games as Criticism of Ideology
While most idle games tend to follow this formula of capitalistic determinism, one game in particular is held as a subversive remix on the theme. Cookie Clicker, made in 2013, is actually a predecessor to the explosion of the genre, being one of its first games. All the elements of Adventure Capitalist are present in Cookie Clicker, but the currency is cookies, and your production rate is in Cps or cookies per second. The automated clicks are purchasable after 15 manual clicks, and then you go on to buying more efficient cookie producers and upgrades which are multipliers on production rates. At some point, you have to ascend into cookie heaven to get the exponential multipliers that make affording higher upgrades plausible. In fact, this game can be said to be even more ruthlessly capitalistic because you can sell off your current assets (a thing you can’t do in Adventure Capitalist) to buy better ones. While you can sell banks, mines and factories, you can also sell grandmothers that you first hire to automate your cookie production. So what makes Cookie Clicker subversive?
Unlike Adventure Capitalist, cookie clicker does have a narrative. It runs through the flavour text of a news feed. It starts with “You feel like making cookies. But nobody wants to eat your cookies.” When you have made 5 cookies, the text reads, “Your first batch goes in the trash. The neighborhood raccoon barely touches it.” At 1000 cookies, your cookies “are talked about for miles around” After you make 10 billions cookies, the text reads “Strange creatures from neighboring planets wish to try your cookies.” and so on. While your cookies numbers are one trigger of flavour text, the means by which you get the cookies are another. The news text and items you buy often break the fourth wall, referring to the player’s actions and role in the game. A good example of this is the click automator named “Carpal Tunnel Relief Cream”.
As the game progresses, as you accumulate more and more cookies, and more means of making them faster and faster, the flavor text does become more political. Eventually, the news ticker will say “cookie factories linked to global warming!” when you buy your first factory, When you buy your first antimatter machine: “whole town seemingly swallowed by antimatter-induced black hole; more reliable sources affirm town "never really existed"! There’s also a particularly poignant jab at the Nestle formula milk travesta “Doctors warn mothers about the dangers of ‘home-made’ cookies.”
Video game critic Roisin Kiberd sees Cookie Clicker as a commentary on alienated capitalist labour. Certainly the practice of clicking on cookies and then watching numbers go up with no actual end point is one where “use, value, purpose, and meaning are abstracted from the making process...translated into incremental preparations for some (always) future practice or role, practices and roles which are indefinitely postponed” (Thumlert 708). Roisin believes that on some level, we hope that there is some meaning to the repetitive labour practices even professionals are forced to do. He describes clicking, the most basic action in idle games as the “fundamental unit of labor, the most rudimentary measure of what we’re doing” (Kiberd). He believes that we want to find meaning in our work, but it often just isn’t there - “We are clicking. Clicking away in hopes that our clicks are effective—that they will produce something, even if it’s just virtual cookies” (Kiberd). Cookie Clicker shows us that capitalist alienation reaches even ownership levels of the machine, because as “you shift from labor to capital, your involvement decreases until you’re left vacantly staring into the screen, watching the system grind out its cookies” (Kiberd). Some may argue that therein lies the appeal of idle games. If we are already primed for the meaninglessness of our efforts, maybe in choosing the game, and choosing to play it, and in choosing to pay real dollars for it, we exercise some sense of agency - a right to chosen frivolity.
While Kibard focuses on Cookie Clicker, his observations seem to apply to idle games in general, all of which are clearly not subversive. So is Cookie Clicker any different? Or does it simply (literally) capitalize on being one of the more engaging idle games? Cookie Clicker, as much as it may prod us to the meaningless of increasing numbers, has made a lot of those numbers itself, largely through ad revenue - which, fittingly, is based on clicks. Cookie Clicker’s page attracts huge sponsors, such as The ROM and Air Canada because it has a lot of people clicking away frivolously. It is apparently valued at over one million dollars, with a subreddit membership of over 50,000. Clearly, Cookie Clicker relies on the alienated clicking experience for its success. In many ways, Cookie Clicker simply echos the capitalism it is critiquing. Subversiveness is indistinguishable from the hegemonic here, and Cookie Clickers “persuasive powers...to offer [real] ideological critique is insufficient when faced with a more comprehensive understanding of ideology and its effects” (Abraham 81). If Cookie Clicker is subversive, it is a subversiveness which is “trivialized and sterilized”, and ultimately absorbed by market forces. Any criticism it may offer is simply recuperated, as in Debord's Spectacle. Cookie Clicker cannot be all that subversive, because it embodies and profits from the exact same mechanisms it criticizes. In this way, while it may be as clever and self-referential as Marvel’s “fourth-wall”-breaking Deadpool, it is equally ineffectual in terms of actual resistance.
Cow Clicker, by Ian Bogost, may be a better example of a subversive idle game. Designed as a response to Facebook games such as Farmville, Cow Clicker has you to click on a cow and then you have to wait a long time to do anything else. Nothing else happens. Under the cow, Bogost explains his game: “You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom premium cows and timer overrides through micropayments. Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence” (Bogost). By constraining what the player can do to such an extreme - and taking the entire enjoyment out of it, Bogost sucks the life blood out of any willingness to play the game. While Bogost’s focus seems rather narrow, what he is saying is applicable well beyond Farmville and other idle games. Idle games, though they exploit our cognitive defects and play with our dopamine levels, etc., are given permission to do so because we are already groomed to accept such complacency of experience and non-engagement in our lives. Idle games, in this way, simply hold a mirror to the passivity to being alive we have come to embody, well before such games even came on the scene.
Works Cited
Abraham, B. (2018). Video Game Visions of Climate Futures: ARMA 3 and Implications for Games and Persuasion, Games and Culture, Vol. 13(1) 71-91.
Bogost, Ian. “Cow Clicker.” Cow Clicker, www.cowclicker.com/.
Cross, K (2016) Press F to Revolt: On the Gamification of Online Activism. In Kafai, Tynes, & Richard (Eds.) (2016). Diversifying Barbie & Mortal Kombat: Intersectional Perspectives and Inclusive Designs in Gaming. Pittsburgh PA: ETC Press.
Gans, Joshua. “'AdVenture Capitalist': Teaching Kids a Tough Economics Lesson.” GeekDad, 13 Dec. 2017, geekdad.com/2015/03/adventure-capitalist/
.Gee, J.P. (2007). Are Video Games Good for Learning? In Worlds in Play: International Perspectives on Digital Game Research. New York.
Kelly, M. (2018). Papers Please The Game of Politics: Examining the Role of Work, Play, and Subjectivity Formation in Papers, Please. Games and Culture 2018, Vol. 13(5) 459-478
Kibold, Roisin. “Cookie Clicker, the Internet's Most Pointlessly Addictive Game, Is Also Its Most Subversive.” The Kernel, 31 Jan. 2016, kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/staff-editorials/15694/cookie-clicker-capitalist-dystopia/.
Pecorella, Anthony. “Idle Games: The Mechanics and Monetization of Self-Playing Games.” LinkedIn SlideShare, 7 Mar. 2015, www.slideshare.net/Kongregate/idle-games-gdc2015final.
Thumlert, K., de Castell, S., & Jenson, J. (2018). Learning through game design: A production pedagogy, The 2018 European Conference on Games Based Learning Book: ACPI Press.
