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Cookie Clicker

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It's one of life's great mysteries that I've never gotten addicted to WoW or Diablo or any other video game, but Cookie Clicker has its hooks through me. It is as if I only respond to addictive game mechanics when I'm playing them directly.

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Is there anything funny after buying a few grandmas? I stopped after a minute.

 

You don't want to know how deep this rabbithole goes. Turn back, young adventurer.

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Wow, I was under the impression that this was basically the archetypical fad and everybody in the whole world stopped playing it after those few weeks last year.

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This isn't even a real game. WoW was a ton of fun the few years I played it. This is like turning on a timer on a mobile then looking at it every so often to see it going up. 

 

The cookie farm wasn't even funny.

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Sure, WoW was super fun, but I never got as into it as I am with Cookie Clicker. Not sure if it's a game, or if it's funny? I don't think everything is supposed to be hilarious.

 

It was definitely a fad at the time, and I'm sure not as many people are playing it today as when the whole candy box thing was going on, but it's still being actively maintained and developed by Orteil, so I guess he's getting at least something out of it.

 

Oh, by the way, he's also the guy who made Nested.

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Cookie clicker sucks because people like it and I don't waaaaaa.

It's rad. Yeehaw.

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When you say cookie clicker isn't a game, what you really mean is it's not dressed up in a set of narratives, visuals and mechanics that are common in games and make it feel familiar to you. The literal mechanics of what you do in Cookie Clicker and WoW are extremely similar. (strategic planning of limited resources to maximise your effectiveness at a goal, whether it's cookie production or dps)

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Cookie Clicker is awesome. I spend far too long doing cost : production value analyses before I choose each upgrade. Everything has to be the most cost efficient for me to purchase it.

 

If that's not a game, I don't know what is. Also, why does it have to be funny to be good? It's basically an addictive exercise in math.

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See, I've lost days to Cookie Clicker and games like it that I never lose to MMOs, so I'm deeply suspicious of these kind of games. The thing that worries me is that Cookie Clicker has no goal, but it does have an endless series of subgoals that provide progress towards the next subgoal. Because every single sub-goal increases your cookie output, just appreciating reaching a sub-goal is enough to set you on the path of the next. It's as if the reward for turning in a quest in WoW was automatically teleporting you in front of a dead boar with a quest item on its corpse and a new quest in your tracker to find 8 more.

 

It doesn't help that all these games are balanced so that they take ever-increasing amounts of time between each upgrade, even if you're playing them optimally. At least the Particle Clicker one unlocked neat (way too technical) descriptions of the various particles that colliders have found, and also ended in about 40 minutes.

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Sorry, I didn't mean "not a game" all that seriously.

 

I wouldn't compare this with MMOs. Noone starts playing WoW or whatever because they want to max out their DPS. I thought Cookie Clicker was meant to be a joke like Cow Clicker since it just straight up shows you what it's all about. I thought it was suppose to be absurd.

 

I've played it a bit more and I'm at 182 per second. The Big Number clicking up looks very alluring. It's got just about enough moving parts around the cookie to make you want to look at it.

 

Taking WoW as an example, you started that and you were in this nice looking snowy valley as a dwarf with a huge beard. You've just started so you read the quest text and it tells you a poor story about kobolds infesting the countryside. You look at the region map then see you can zoom it out. The world is huge! Later you find some area/dungeon that you can't do alone so you find people to do it with. At some point you run out of quests/areas to explore, you still want to play though. You join raids and get to min maxing your DPS. Honestly, that's where the original charm of WoW went to die, at least after a few runs.

 

 

Here, the goal is to get more stuff. Before every purchase you make you can analyze it and, if you took the time, see exactly the cost, production per cost, time to repay itself for everything. But that's just busywork, it's not a math puzzle or even a math problem.

 

Lots (most) games are about optimization of something. But there's no interesting choice to make here, no mechanical difficulty to do anything and no "content" beyond 7 or whatever items to buy and some number of upgrades. It also doesn't hide this, so I guess that's a plus.

 

I bought a space ship and I'm done.

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Taking WoW as an example, you started that and you were in this nice looking snowy valley as a dwarf with a huge beard...

 

 

Lots (most) games are about optimization of something. But there's no interesting choice to make here, no mechanical difficulty to do anything and no "content" beyond 7 or whatever items to buy and some number of upgrades. It also doesn't hide this, so I guess that's a plus.

 

I bought a space ship and I'm done.

 

 

Firstly: I'm not saying you have to like it. Just that your reasons aren't really applicable. For instance, while WoW starts as an epic adventure into a new world, it quickly progresses into how much dps/hps/tps (well the last one is pushing it) you can put out. Anything less than optimal isn't considered ok, it's considered useless. 

 

Also, you got to the space ships and have made the conclusion that there's no interesting choices or mechanical difficulty right? That's like starting up the first "kill 5 wolves" quest in WoW and saying that there's no reason to coordinate with 24 other people.

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There are a few discrete phases to Cookie Clicker, I think, and at each phase transition it's understandable that people quit playing. In the beginning you're a bit skeptical, but amused that such a banal concept has so much visual polish and UI. You click a couple of times, maybe you buy some buildings and upgrades, and you get the joke and you're done. If not, the next phase is that you at least want to see how far they've taken it; how many buildings there are and how deep this joke rabbit hole goes. This is the phase during which you'll get hooked, if you're disposed to it. If it's not for you, you'll quickly get frustrated that progress is slowing down and you don't want to do actual boring work just to see more stupid joke stuff. If cookie clicking is in your cards, however, it's like a constant journey of exploration and revelation. More mechanics start appearing, and they start interacting, and you start paying attention to the numbers on the screen. You don't necessarily just buy every upgrade right away, but save up for a new antimatter condenser instead, since that boosts your CPS in a more cost effective way. Or you start thinking about how to handle wrinklers – are they just a pain, or can they help you in the long run? What's up with the milk? Suddenly you can change the seasons, and each one has its own set of things you can do – but in which order do you explore them? I don't know anything, but I expect a lot of players give up somewhere around here, tired of consistently diminishing returns on each investment, longer downtime between purchases, and those last achievements seem very hard to reach. This is where you have the chance to transition into your ultimate form, accepting that you're in this for the long haul. Not for a few hours, or even days, but for the foreseeable future. You begin the long haul, the slow churn, the long game. You realized that everything you've accomplished so far – the buildings you've built, the upgrades, all the golden cookies, the easter bunnies, the valentine's hearts, the kittens – all that stuff wasn't the game. That was just the first time around. The first link of the chain. The first step of a long journey.

 

Resetting your game at this point converts all your cookies to "heavenly chips" which provide a small bonus to your future CPS on subsequent playthroughs.

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Warning: toblix is LITERALLY INSANE when it comes to Cookie Clicker.

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if you're going to do that, then why not use frozen cookies

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Frozen cookie takes out the math, which is the bit I find most interesting. It also only clicks once every 1/250th of a second, as opposed to once ever 1/1000th of a second with this autoclicker.

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There are a few discrete phases to Cookie Clicker, I think, and at each phase transition it's understandable that people quit playing. In the beginning you're a bit skeptical, but amused that such a banal concept has so much visual polish and UI. You click a couple of times, maybe you buy some buildings and upgrades, and you get the joke and you're done. If not, the next phase is that you at least want to see how far they've taken it; how many buildings there are and how deep this joke rabbit hole goes. This is the phase during which you'll get hooked, if you're disposed to it. If it's not for you, you'll quickly get frustrated that progress is slowing down and you don't want to do actual boring work just to see more stupid joke stuff. If cookie clicking is in your cards, however, it's like a constant journey of exploration and revelation. More mechanics start appearing, and they start interacting, and you start paying attention to the numbers on the screen. You don't necessarily just buy every upgrade right away, but save up for a new antimatter condenser instead, since that boosts your CPS in a more cost effective way. Or you start thinking about how to handle wrinklers – are they just a pain, or can they help you in the long run? What's up with the milk? Suddenly you can change the seasons, and each one has its own set of things you can do – but in which order do you explore them? I don't know anything, but I expect a lot of players give up somewhere around here, tired of consistently diminishing returns on each investment, longer downtime between purchases, and those last achievements seem very hard to reach. This is where you have the chance to transition into your ultimate form, accepting that you're in this for the long haul. Not for a few hours, or even days, but for the foreseeable future. You begin the long haul, the slow churn, the long game. You realized that everything you've accomplished so far – the buildings you've built, the upgrades, all the golden cookies, the easter bunnies, the valentine's hearts, the kittens – all that stuff wasn't the game. That was just the first time around. The first link of the chain. The first step of a long journey.

 

Resetting your game at this point converts all your cookies to "heavenly chips" which provide a small bonus to your future CPS on subsequent playthroughs.

 

Thank you for the explanation, I stand corrected. 

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This thread managed to get me to start a new game of Cookie Clicker over the weekend to see if much had changed since I "played" it back when it was the hot thing.  Let it run a good chunk of the weekend, set up an auto-click AutoHotKey script, clicked things myself now and again.  It was a super busy 3-day-weekend, so I just popped my head into my office once in awhile when I was at the house to see how it was going.

 

This morning I caught myself starting it up and watching it in a small window out of the corner of my eye while I was working.  Fuck that noise, deleted the save and added it to my banned website list.  That's the reason I quit screwing around with it in the first place, way to hard for me to not just let something like that run while I'm working and be a constant source of low grade distraction. 

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Other than the Monday morning build-up, I can no longer actually remember interacting with the game through the week, even though the numbers say I pretty consistently click almost every golden cookie that appears throughout the day. I don't know what that means.

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