“It Started as a Joke”: On the Design of Idle Games (2019)

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3311350.3347180

by shagie • 5 years ago

105 67 5 years ago

dl.acm.org

Natsu• 5 years ago

Man, this reminds me of "playing" ProgressQuest back in the day. You'd just sit there and watch the task bars fill.

shagie• 5 years ago

I recently found https://github.com/rr-/pq-cli which is a direct port of the pascal code https://bitbucket.org/grumdrig/pq/src/pq6/ . Even things like "that's weird code - that can't be idiomatic python"

https://github.com/rr-/pq-cli/blob/bbe3842a2f0a11bf5bd639da3...

    lev = level
    level = lev * qty
    if not is_definite:
        result = indefinite(result, qty)

matches the code from https://bitbucket.org/grumdrig/pq/src/d611931e37b45395e2fb69...

  lev := level;
  level := lev * qty;

  if not definite then Result := Indefinite(Result, qty);

nirui• 5 years ago

It seems there is a web page based version as well at https://bitbucket.org/grumdrig/pq-web.

I did not inspect the code, but I did played it for a little. The most challenging part for me so far is to remember to periodically poke the mouse so screenlocker won't kick in.

muzani• 5 years ago

I loved games like PQ and Godville back in the day. I hoped they'd be full games in themselves but sadly most remained comedy. It's telling how Melvor Idle really took off despite being so mediocre. There's a lot of demand for it.

rektide• 5 years ago

"Beyond Interactivity"

Wonderful wonderful idea. I mean, like, so much of the idea of computing that were exciting were about simulation. In many ways, we've let simulation run amock outside the human realms with the recent uprise in Machine Learning: let the computer play virtual games with itself to minimize loss, in deeply far off spaces humans can not even comprehend.

"Our interviewees further conceptualised the progress in idle games as a narrative that is intertwined with system changes (Theme 3) or “paradigm shifts”. Whenever the system changes and players encounter a new cycle of exploration, experimentation and optimisation, a new beat in the narrative unfolds."

Lovely lovely idea. I'm playing a semi-idle game Loop Odyssey now, where specific actions ("talk to this villager") take less action-points (mana) the more you loop around & talk to them. The game is about setting up loops within the current bounds of what you can do, and over time these paths become simpler & simpler for your character & your potential expands beyond this current sphere of the game. It's a wonderful dynamic. I love this paper's description of this.

Universal Paperclips is probably the most broadly known version of this expansion of gameplays, of shifting paradigms.

Shout in specific to Progress Quest. An irc #idlerpg style game:

Progress Quest removes any player input beyond character building as a critique to contemporary role-playing games.

Make a character, and let them free amid the virtual. Utterly free, unconstrained, ever adventuring (so long as the app is running). Been a long time since I ran this, but I probably still have a save. Will boot it soon. :)

shostack• 5 years ago

Kittens Game is another wonderful and quite deep incarnation. Some of the paradigm shifts are amazing as you enable certain things through scale

miobrien• 5 years ago

Interesting read. I recently came across idle games and started playing Melvor Idle on iOS.

zaps• 5 years ago

But did it start the whole world crying?

motoxpro2• 5 years ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/CookieClicker/ Is a great game

ufo• 5 years ago

The most fun I had with cookie clicker was after I learned that it's easy to write bots using the Javascript developer console.

speedgoose• 5 years ago

I did set my score to Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER, I got an achievement for cheating and the score went to infinity. I saved so much time doing that.

codetrotter• 5 years ago

But why link the subreddit instead of the game itself?

motoxpro2• 5 years ago

Didn't realize this was the website https://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/

1123581321• 5 years ago

Nice to see this analysis, though as someone who plays these games and appreciates the humor found in many of them, I still am on the balance displeased they've taken so much time and attention. I make up for it by recommending them to others, a wanton and destructive act. :)

Antimatter Dimensions is a funny exemplar of the genre that takes several months to complete, with bursts of attention to progress during transitions alternating with long periods of gradual improvement that require infrequent attention. http://ivark.github.io/

Antimatter Dimensions is a good example of idle game design because reading a game guide will actually increase the burden of the game by increasing the frequency and intensity of active play--knowing less will slow your progress by months but let you do your job and see your family.

tifadg12• 5 years ago

Idle games can have lots of addiction inducing dark patterns:

1) resources you can buy with real money;

2) massively increased rewards due to active gameplay;

3) daily gambling rewards;

4) reset-based system when you're grinding to reach some some level, only for everything to be reset for some incremental reward.

Worst offenders I tried are NGU idle (overwhelmingly positive steam rating), Trimps, the perfect tower, which aren't actually idle, but rather incremental.

A good rule of thumb is - if having a bot for a game would put you in a massive advantage then it's not an idle game, but rather an incremental game - a genre that is designed to be played for 'idle' amounts of time (forever basically) but actively, so will likely feature as many dark patterns as possible to keep you glued (and paying).

On the other hand, here's a game like Melvor idle - true idle in spirit with little differentiation between online and offline, no resets, no gambling, yet still with plenty of depth around optimization. Relaxing, yet engaging.

Groxx2• 5 years ago

I'll toss in one I learned about recently as another that avoids a lot of this: Bitburner. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1812820/Bitburner/

When you have a full programming environment for automating the game... and taking advantage of that is the point of the game... you get to avoid some of the nastier dark patterns and treat it like a puzzle to solve at whatever pace you want, because every pace is rewarding.

Or you could just use it to look at cats, that's an option too apparently. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=26836...

ineedasername• 5 years ago

I think the first review on Bitburner says it all: They year is 2077 and they still use JavaScript. That's one hell of a dystopia.

jmcgough• 5 years ago

I got horribly addicted to NGU for a while and had to purge my game file to get myself to stop wasting time on it. Ugh. Idle games just feel like a dopamine fix, compared to truly good games that give the satisfaction of mastering game mechanics or seeing character/story development.

tifadg12• 5 years ago

Yeah incremental games are like crack to some people. I had major addiction with NGU as well, but then I gave myself unlimited resources and saw firsthand that the grind never ends. That made me loose interest.

prisout642• 5 years ago

What you describe us what put me off most idle games, or rather incremental games. Especially the reset mechanics just seem like laziness to create an "infinite" progress when its just the same loop over and over. Going to check out Melvor sounds exactly what I have been looking for! Thanks for sharing.

masklinn• 5 years ago

Personally, I think resets are fine, they provide a feeling of scaling / progress in games which have little (and match the idea of “ascensions” in roguelikes).

However lots of incrementals require way too many such resets, and the activity after a reset is frenetic, neither of which is something I’, interested in.

That’s not even a monetisation thing, I recall a web-based one with no ads (and very, very sparse graphics) which had this exact issue, you had to reset the entire thing all the time in order to progress, it was very frustrating.

james-skemp2• 5 years ago

Another vote for Melvor Idle, given what you're describing.

I've only been playing for almost 35 days, but it's hit a really nice spot.

Feels like a good idle-ish game, like Clickpocalypse II and Dungeon Village.

smegger001• 5 years ago

reminds me of the time i wasted playing AdVenture Capitalist

https://store.steampowered.com/app/346900/AdVenture_Capitali...

eventually i just uninstalled the game so I would quit playing it. That game is crack.

MrMember• 5 years ago

I spent the $10 on Melvor and it's far and away the best idle game I've ever played. The upfront cost and no microtransactions at all means the game can be balanced around actually being fun.

makach3• 5 years ago

https://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/ - you can thank me later

psyc• 5 years ago

I was working at a big serious game company when this debuted. One day I looked around and every dev on our serious game engine team was alt-tabbing to it while they worked. They were pretending to play it ironically, and I thought it was the dumbest thing I’d ever seen, until I tried it.

wruza• 5 years ago

I remember “clicker heroes” one. People calculated charts of most effective and fastest upgrades to grow the number. Without that the game seemed pointless to me, you click or wait, so what.

That’s partly why I like games like Borderlands or Fallout series. I spend most of the time searching for and testing guns and gear, because it gives you control over situations and alerts when you’re not ready for it.

marvin• 5 years ago

I remember I heard Elon Musk criticize this game in an interview once, ~"my kids aren't allowed to play computer games anymore; they play a game called cookies or something, you literally just click on a cookie, it's the dumbest thing ever" and thought it was hilarious. I obviously had to try it, and got hooked straight away.

animal531• 5 years ago

Oh, thanks for nothing!

dijit• 5 years ago

it's ok, the fun wears off when you realise you can cheat easily by opening the javascript console.

dspillett• 5 years ago

Or the originator (IIRC) of that piss-take-but-not style of idle game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker

sokoloff• 5 years ago

I must never let my kids see this. I hope they find online porn before this.

prisout642• 5 years ago

Idle or incremental games combine the best and worst of games in one. I used to play them an insane amount of time often 10 at once. Usually the dopamine rush of upgrading dropped very quickly when you hit a progression wall. I usually abandoned it and started the next, to keep the upgrading dopamine hits coming. It was a weird time and I was kinda addicted but at some point just got incredibly bored. Impressive how detailed and extensive some idle games are though!

dzdt• 5 years ago

Curiously missing from the abstract is their definition of "idle games". In the paper they define it as a games that "require players to leave the game and return to it at a later, unspeciﬁed point, where the game progresses on its own during that time and opens up different options for further play upon return."

yoz-y• 5 years ago

It seems to me that these supposedly idle games require some sort of input at any stage. When I hear idle game, I think about irc idle rpgs where you are actually penalized for doing anything.

mysterydip• 5 years ago

I feel like there's a parallel here with social media: make a post, it idly collects likes and comments for that dopamine fix, and the next day your progress is reset (hardly anyone looks at old posts).

lioeters• 5 years ago

One of the cited articles is called "Designing Smartphone Apps That Support Habit Formation". It's about intentionally developing positive habits, but I'm sure the same principles can be applied as a dark pattern, to subconsciously encourage addictive behavior, as in social media.

In the posted article, there's a final section titled "Beyond Games". It made me see the larger implications, how designers and developers of technology have an ethical responsibility not to abuse such psychological dynamics.

These design guidelines are potentially valuable for other ambient technologies. We turn our attention to pervasive technologies, such as smart homes and fitness trackers, whose functions in day-to-day lives bear a striking resemblance to idle games.
Our findings also have potential implications for the design of technologies around influencing and affecting the development of positive habits.

Kaze404• 5 years ago

I really enjoy Cookie Clicker. Not because it is a particularly fun game to play, but the way it uses the medium to tell a narrative without a single line of dialogue is nothing short of masterful.

The whole game's premise is an obvious critique and satire of unlimited, exponential growth under capitalism and it never has to invoke Marxist theory to make you think about that. Anyone who stops to question why they have an army of grannies producing more cookies than there are atoms on Earth and still want more can reach that conclusion on their own.

It's a shame the genre was appropriated into being exactly what the pioneer game criticized, but it just makes the point more valid from my perspective.

dragontamer8• 5 years ago

I've played a lot of idle games, and I think there's a spectrum from dumb to managerial.

For example, Factorio (especially in peaceful mode) almost certainly qualifies as an Idle Game. Your factory continues to produce even when you leave the computer on for hours. With a good enough setup, you can leave even when Biters are active (as long as you have enough bots to auto-regenerate your walls and rebuild your base as it is attacked).

But no one here will ever say Factorio is a "Bad" game.

--------------

On the other end, I've played Clicker Heroes, which is about as idle-game as you can get. Pay-real-money for minor benefits? Check. Reset based system? Check. Guilds + chat to encourage collaboration? Check. Etc. etc.

Ultimately, a good clicker-game / idle-game is a text-based management sim. People like it when numbers go up, and people like it even more when numbers go up dramatically. Ex: Factorio's "Rocket-per-minute" bases, or doing 500 quadrillion damage-per-second in Clicker Heroes. Its all just numbers going up.

--------

That being said: Universal Paperclips is probably the best clicker-game I've ever played and I highly recommend that one. https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

Minor spoilers: Universal Paperclips has an ending. I can speed run it in about 3 hours these days, expect maybe 10 to 15 hours if you've never played it before / are going guideless.

DizzyDoo• 5 years ago

I guess Factorio is an idle game as much as Age of Empires, Sim City or Roller Coaster Tycoon is? That is to say, not really very much at all. Sure, when I go and make a cup of tea the simulation keeps on churning, and some numbers continue to go up. But I'm not playing for those numbers, I'm playing to make my city/civ/themepark/automated factory.

I'd never describe that as me 'playing' those games, I'd describe that is 'downtime'.

dragontamer8• 5 years ago

I'm playing to make my city/civ/themepark/automated factory.

And I'm just playing to improve my team composition in Clicker Heroes.

They're all management games from my perspective. Some are better than others. I've personally have played a lot of older, text-based management games as well, and the idle game-loop has similarities to the text-based games IMO, where things are a bit more abstract.

--------

Like, we all had Tamagotchi / Digimon / Pokemon Pikachu growing up, right? Those were idle games for sure, with some clicker-elements even.

the_af6• 5 years ago

I think calling Factorio an idle game is really stretching the definition.

There are some gray areas, of course, and no definition of videogames -- or anything, really -- has a clear-cut demarcation, but really... Factorio is an RTS/programming game. You could call it an automation/programming game disguised as an RTS. It requires thinking and adjusting, designing layouts, refactoring. It's really not what you think of when you think idle games.

Really, that's the best way of thinking about it: if someone says "hey, recommend me an idle game, I've finished Cow Clicker and I'm ready for the next step", would you feel comfortable recommending Factorio?

thomastjeffery2• 5 years ago

Factorio absolutely isn't an idle game.

What defines an idle game is that progression is achieved from time passing instead of from player action.

For example, cookie clicker is an idle game because you progress by waiting for your count to reach a certain number before you can progress. You can make that happen sooner by buying more buildings, which makes your production increase exponentially, but growth is given a hard limit by exponentially increasing building prices. Because growth and cost of growth over time follow the same order, we can simplify the equation to "progress = time".

Factorio, on the other hand, bases progression on growth instead of time. Each step along the tech tree requires a certain amount of production growth, which can be increased exponentially against linear time. Because of this, time can be minimized by putting more player action into growth.

The easiest way to see this difference is to note that Factorio can be speedrun in ~1:30, requiring players to be constantly acting to grow their factory.

Cookie clicker can essentially be run at it's minimum amount of time by sitting idle and picking the correct upgrades at the right time.

dragontamer8• 5 years ago

What defines an idle game is that progression is achieved from time passing instead of from player action.

Universal Paperclips makes it impossible to progress beyond any stage without player action, because the rules change so dramatically between stages.

Universal Paperclips is widely considered to be one of the "Best" idle games ever made, and for good reason IMO. Its a free Javascript game and I think you should try it. I estimate ~10 hours to 15 hours for a new player, but an advanced player can finish probably under 2-hours.

In any case, cookie-clicker is very mundane compared to the (better) idle-games / more critically-renowned idle games that are out there.

The easiest way to see this difference is to note that Factorio can be speedrun in ~1:30, requiring players to be constantly acting to grow their factory.

Indeed, and I can speed-run Universal Paperclips too.

-----

In any case, watch those speedruns at the tail-end, once the mines are set up and maximized, there's nothing to do but wait ~8-minutes for the rocket to get launched.

You'll see the speed runners start building dumb inventions (circular belts and running in circles), or playing with cars / tanks at this point, rather than working. That's the idle-component of Factorio.

Much like Universal Paperclips, Factorio has both elements of "waiting" for your factory to finish doing things, as well as a management-element where you need to manually perform a tedious task (ie: click on the "make paperclip" button in Universal Paperclips, or right click-and-hold to chop down a tree in Factorio before you can make an electric pole).

oneweekwonder• 5 years ago

Clickpocalypse 2[0] is a idle dungeon crawler i really like to watch with a Final Fantasy/Ultima kind of feel.

[0] http://minmaxia.com/c2/

james-skemp2• 5 years ago

Nice things about this:

- not pay to win

- has a set ending

- allows for replay if/when you want

- multiple party setups

- specific way to play if you want to speed through, but no need to read a wiki if you want to play to the end

- nice active and passive unlocks

However, not a lot of choices once the game gets going, which is fine for me. Still has interaction via the handful of spells you can cast, and what you choose to unlock.

I think I've 100% the game on Android twice (two different phones).

tobiasSoftware• 5 years ago

For anyone who likes the general format of Idle games but doesn't like the idling parts of them or the unbounded time they take, I recommend Forager.

You can complete the game in a week, so it won't take over your life forever. It mixes the addictive grinding of an Idle game with quests, puzzles, and small dungeons that you do while the grinding part idles. By doing this, it discourages actually idling while giving you the feel of an idle game.

I've tried Cookie Clicker, Clicker Heroes, and Leaf Blower Revolution, and all of them just take over my life while at the same time having no real end goal, and I always just have to delete it all before it consumes my life. It turns out I much prefer farming sims like Harvest Moon, Slime Rancher, and My Time at Portia, but I really like how Forager takes the farming sim format and gives it the feel of an idle game without the problems that affect my real life.

vikingerik• 5 years ago

Universal Paperclips is a fantastic answer to your concerns, as others have mentioned. It has an endpoint that takes 1-3 days to reach, and hardly makes for any idling, there are always significant upgrades to buy at intervals that are usually not more than a minute.

__MatrixMan__• 5 years ago

I tried it on your recommendation. Wow.

“It Started as a Joke”: On the Design of Idle Games (2019)

Related Stories