I've Been Obsessed With A Game About Clicking A Big Cookie For Years But I'm Not Sure I Need Help
This should not be news to anyone who's met me, but damn do I love Cookie Clicker. I play it all the time. I think about it somehow even more. And at pretty much all times I have it open in a browser window on some computer, somewhere.
See, Cookie Clicker is an incremental game. Also called idle games, this genre of entertainment creates enjoyment out of repetitive, simple actions. In Cookie Clicker, it's clicking on a giant cartoon cookie, and collecting smaller ones for yourself along the way. As you progress through the game, you earn means of producing cookies without tiring out your finger. That's it. That's the game. I must reiterate: I play this literally all the time.
The drawbacks are several. For one, my computer sure does function quite a bit slower when Chrome has to process numbers like 389.064 quintillion (and climbing! Always climbing, baby!) every second. The game also takes up a fair amount of mental bandwidth. I often vacillate between passively leaving the game open in a corner window and actively attempting to execute the most effective cookie strategies I've read about online. And even if I'm always doing the latter, anywhere between those two states tends to take up a lot of real estate in my head.
And, of course, when I am actively playing, I can be a bit of a disruption. See, there's this one strategy where you try to line up a handful of what are called "Golden Cookies" in a row and that can get kind of noisy because if all goes according to plan you sort of have to mash the mouse button for as long as 26 seconds straight which has turned heads in the Digg offices on more than one occasion and that can be kind of embarra–
Wait. No, the thing is, I'm not embarrassed. There are indeed negatives to being hooked on this admittedly silly but also wholesome and harmless game but the positives…
Well, what are the positives? I understand why I like playing this game: I sort of have an addictive personality (see: coffee, Juul,) and Cookie Clicker is marginally healthier than my other compulsions (ibid.)
Still, is it good that I spend so much time playing this silly game that I love?
In search of an answer that I was hoping to God wouldn't be "no," I reached out to the Creator himself.
When I talked to Orteil, a developer based in the Netherlands and half of the team that brings you the product known as Cookie Clicker on orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker, it was just before the game celebrated its fifth birthday. It was also a scorcher in Orteil's Netherlands, which fittingly mirrored the game's creation.
"There was a scorching August night where I couldn't sleep and so decided to just endure it by coding the most pointless game I could think of," he told me over Tumblr chat. "Four hours later I had what is now the first version of the game, and put it online for others to see what a dumb wacky joke I just made."
Within a week, the game was a viral success, raking in about two million daily visits. Five years later, the game makes enough money through just a handful of banner ads to sustain Orteil and his business partner.
Hearing the game I've grown to care so much about is lucrative for its creator gave me a nice feeling. But when asked why the game has found success, Orteil had a less satisfying answer.
"The core reasons behind what makes it tick are the same as most other idle games. A very basic, very addictive constant progression with little to no failure states, and a game that doesn't try to be too self-important."
I had never considered the fact that you can't really lose at Cookie Clicker. I briefly considered whether or not I actually thought I had ever considered myself good at a game that plays itself. (I had.)
Is that why I liked this game? Because it tricked me into thinking I was good at something while setting up the internet's largest safety net right below me?
Probably in part. A fantastic business model, if I'm being honest. But I needed more. I hit Orteil with one more question: Besides when you're debugging the game do you ever just sit down and click some cookies?
"Sadly not very much," he said. "The appeal of these games is seeing what comes next and I'm afraid Cookie Clicker holds no secrets for me."
It makes sense. Orteil has diligently updated his creation for five years, but he does it to improve and iterate on a product. He has an aim: the create more aimlessness for people like me.
If I wanted the answer I was looking for, I needed to find people like me. Which is why I reached out to known Cookie Clicker enthusiast Adrianne Jeffries. A freelance journalist based in New York, Jeffries got hooked on the game the same way I did: a bunch of old coworkers got really into the game and she gave it a try as a semi-social activity. Years later, she still goes back to it every so often.
She contrasted playing the game with other Sisyphean tasks, like hitting inbox zero or trying to complete the massive amount of assigned reading one is dealt in college. Almost as soon as those achievements are reached, there is another email or chapter to read. Not so with Cookie Clicker, because its numbers, however meaningless, only ever go up.
"All games are about meaningless points but some games are more upfront about it," she said, adding that to her, Cookie Clicker at least feels productive.
Jeffries also mentioned that the most recent time she got swept up in clicking cookies was around the time Ashley Vance's biography of Elon Musk hit shelves, which was notable because he gives the game a brief and extremely negative shout out in the book.
"It was like 'Oh man, we just got burned by Elon,'" she said.
If someone as smart and successful as Elon Musk has something to say about Cookie Clicker, maybe that was worth exploring? Let's look at the excerpt and–
Oh.
"You literally tap a fucking cookie. It's like a Psych 101 experiment. I made [my kids] delete the cookie game," said the CEO and founder of both Tesla and SpaceX. Pretty damning words.
For some reason, that crystalized things for me. Mashing this stupid cookie is great. I like the game. If I want to actually be productive, I'll go do that and start a weird company or start a Twitter fight or something. But I do "productive" stuff all day long, and sometimes even the most well-intentioned and earnest work amounts to simple wheel-spinning. And I don't like that.
Of course, I can't give up the rest of my life, the part where items pile up on the wrong side of my to-do list if I don't accomplish them fast enough and sometimes things don't work out at all. It would be nice if I didn't, but I do have to be the real kind of productive sometimes. I can't just close my laptop forever.
But as long as it's still open, why not open up Cookie Clicker in a corner window and see if I can string together a Golden Cookie or two? Because I like doing that, and I think that's fine.
