This was originally posted on the now-defunct Random Fury! videogame blog.
Hi there, RGFers!
This week, I am playing Cookie Clicker. Well, I’m participating in it, erm, I guess. I’m not really sure what I’m doing with this game to be honest. Am I watching? I do occasionally click, but I don’t feel particularly instrumental in the outcome. The aim of the game is to produce cookies. You do this (at first, at least), by clicking on the big cookie on the right-hand side of the screen. When you have so many cookies, you can trade them for an automated cursor that clicks once every ten seconds. Click some more and trade in more cookies for more automated clicking cursors. The automated cookie generators get more elaborate and abstract from this point out – Grannies that bake cookies and Anti-matter Condensers that condense anti-matter into cookies, Portals to the cookie Dimension and Time Machines that bring cookies from the past before the were eaten – utterly bizarre.
There are upgrades for the various cookie creation constructs, which can do things like increase their base Cps (Cookies per second, obviously), double their efficiency, or add multiples to their multipliers… The thing is – it is utterly pointless. The actual game boils down to you clicking something for no other reason than to click something. You could argue that it deconstructs the modern videogame grind, or is a pastiche on the pointlessness of our beloved hobby, or you could simply say it is a waste of time. The thing is though: What makes this videogame any more or less of a waste of time than any other? If you or anyone else has fun while clicking or upgrading, then so what? Can something so pointless be fun? I must say, it is quite addictive, if only because I want to see what the next upgrade is. And I do enjoy making numbers bigger. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this game – please feel free to leave a comment.
That link again – http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/ – but don’t play that, play this instead – http://progressquest.com/play/ – tonnes more humour with even less effort.
