Cookie Clicker has ‘click’ in its name, but I think that’s deceiving. While I was playing, early on I stopped clicking the cookie at all, since I was making over 10 million cookies a second and my clicks only produced around 400,000 cookies each. Still a lot, but given that clicking takes physical effort and letting the game run doesn’t, I tended to not click unless a golden cookie effect was in play.
In fact most of my playthrough of Cookie Clicker involved letting the game just run in the background as I worked on something else, or took notes in class while I sporadically checked in on how many cookies I had and if I could afford another building. I even let the game run overnight to see how many cookies that would add to my total. If anything, Cookie Clicker should be called Cookie Idle-r as I spent most of my time not even looking at the game. Idle games are typically require very little energy to play and usually involve the player making decisions on how to use the automatically generated resources and because of this, they’re usually considered sort of odd and there’s questions as to why people even play them in the first place when the resource collection is done mostly on its own. Are idle game players even really playing anything? Although the lack of interactivity that marks most idle games is usually seen as something that makes them pointless, I think this is a really great feature within a specific need–forcing people to lock in.
Phone addiction is a very relevant concern, especially since we usually always have our phone on us and social media apps like Instagram and Tiktok employ algorithms to keep us engaged and consuming more content. There’s a reason why ‘doomscrolling’ became such a popular term, nearly everyone I know has fallen into the endless stream of short form videos available on nearly every single social media app at this point. Usually it’s not even a conscious thing and time seems to slip away so fast, I’m in my bed at night, telling myself that I’ll watch just one more video and before I know it, it’s two am. Doomscrolling is like a clicker game in a sense, you’re just scrolling and scrolling like how you click one thing over and over again, however, doomscrolling doesn’t ever become an idle game because it requires your attention when each new video comes onto your screen. That’s why I like to force my entire phone to become an idle game when I need to break away from doom scrolling.
I have this game on my phone called focus friend where there’s a little bean [mine is named tai] that needs help focusing so it can knit socks, which can be used to purchase little items in the bean’s room. The player picks an amount of time that they want to focus for and if they want to turn off the timer, the bean will lose their stitches and be really sad. The bean is just idly making socks, but unlike cookie clicker, which will operate once the game is started, this game requires the player to always start the bean’s idle work. This works really well for me, once I set the timer for my bean to work, even when I habitually open my phone, it opens to the app and I see tai knitting and I remember that I’m also supposed to be working and I put my phone back down. It is kind of ironic to download an app so I can get off an app, but the combination of wanting to buy more furniture for the room and the guilt of ruining tai’s focus has made the game work really well for me.
Your point about how idle games let you step away while doomscrolling constantly demands attention was really sharp. I’ve had the same feeling of losing time to short-form videos, so the idea of using a focus app to introduce friction was super interesting. It turns the phone into something you have to consciously interrupt rather than something that pulls you in automatically.
This is an interesting comparison between idle games and the way we engage with our phones. Your point that Cookie Clicker becomes less about clicking and more about passive accumulation highlights how the game shifts agency away from the player. I like the parallel you draw between idle play and doomscrolling. They are both repetitive, but doomscrolling demands constant attention. Thanks for recommending Focus Friend, I will try it out!