I’ve installed an automatic mouse clicker on my work
computer. I know it’s an irresponsible - and probably contract breaching - way to
utilise the company bandwidth, but desperate times and all that. This reckless
devotion is paying off though, and as of today I’ve baked over 25,000,000,000,000,000
(twenty-five quadrillion) cookies. Isn’t that lovely?
Cookie
Clicker, to back this up a little, is a browser game about baking
cookies. To begin with you do this by clicking a big cookie, which is equal
parts instantly rewarding, repetitive and entirely what you’d expect from something
called Cookie Clicker (CC henceforth). After a hundred clicks, however, the
game offers to click for you once every five seconds in exchange for all one
hundred of your cookies. You of course accept this offer, go and do something
else for ten minutes and come back to find a fresh pile of cookies sitting
inside your computer. That’s it really: this initial transaction is repeated
indefinitely with exponentially increasing investments.
CC is the embodiment of the old ‘speculate to accumulate’ pep
talk. All you do is (i) wait for cookies to be made; (ii) buy more upgrades to
produce cookies quicker; (iii) go back to (i). As your cookie baking capacity increases
nothing changes; you’re still not actually doing anything and simply watching a
number slowly increase as you stare at a screen. But, crucially, that number
keeps getting bigger (!). As our understanding of psychology proves: the only
thing better than a number slowly increasing automatically is a bigger number
slowly increasing automatically. Enjoyment, you see, is directly proportionate
to the number of simultaneously increasing digits the player interacts with. So
in CC’s case, the game becomes increasingly more fun the longer you dedicate
yourself to it.
It doesn’t, of course, because that would necessitate that
the experience was fun to begin with. It isn’t. What is happening within CC is
the rather compelling creation of utter compulsion. We’re driven to continue
interacting with the game because it constantly rewards us through its
implementation of interconnected and tangled counting systems. On the most
basic level, as described above, you amass cookies by spending them on upgrade
buildings that create more cookies at a faster rate, making their Cookies per Second
(CpS) threshold increase. Each of the ten categories of upgrade building can themselves
be upgraded, which further increase their CpS capacity. At certain milestones
(ten of a building, 1,000,000 cookies baked etc.), the player is awarded
achievements, which feed into another metric, milk (what else?). Milk is a
discrete and mysterious substance that buffs your combined CpS count, so the
more milk you have the more cookies you are able to bake. Of course, the only
way to increase any of these statistics is to spend your banked cookies. This
creates a powerful feedback loop, compelling the player to forever look to the
future of their cookie production abilities, carefully considering where their
edible currency would be best spent.
These agonising decisions don’t really matter; as you can’t
fail in CC, simply stop playing. The experience isn’t complicated or in any way
challenging. It is only about waiting for a while, clicking on a few boxes and
then waiting some more. It doesn’t even matter which boxes you click on,
because as long as you have enough patience to withstand the repetition, you’ll
eventually be able to click on the ones you missed later on.
It’s mindless in the way that micro transaction-filled
Facebook or Phone Games are, just without that insidious side. It’s Cow Clicker without the damning
statement to make. It’s something pointlessly engrossing to have running in the
background of your day because a big number rolling around on a computer screen
is fun to look at, especially when you can make that number get bigger with
increasing speed. It is, though, beautifully compelling and elegantly
simplistic all the same. It’s beautiful game design. If the cows told us that
our games were becoming hollow, the cookies simply point out how empty our
heads may also be becoming.
###
Rogue
Legacy, while being more identifiable as a (aherm) ‘proper game’
and certainly more mechanically robust, nonetheless implements many of the same
tactics as Cookie Clicker. Its premise is simple: you are an adventuring prince
or princess attempting to conquer a mysterious castle. You do this in a
two-dimensional fashion, slashing, jumping and magicing your way through the
rooms of the imposing structure. Your main aim is to amass a small fortune of
gold, which is gathered from your adversaries’ corpses, treasure chests and things
you smash up along the way. Simple really: it’s an oft-visited design well
that’s been drunk from many times during video game’s tortured history. Except
that it’s dead hard at the beginning and impossible to beat in a conventional
sense. And that’s where it becomes a bit like Cookie Clicker.
Instead of a linear progression of levels, the castle is
immediately open to the player in its entirety. The deeper into the castle you
travel, the more powerful and deadly the inhabitants become and the less chance
you have of surviving a fight with them. On my first attempt - because of this
absurd difficulty - I lasted a couple of rooms and then woofed it trying to
jump over some spikes. Dead.
Whereas most games would throw me back to the beginning of the level, because there are no levels-proper in RL, I was instead invited to choose a successor to my original adventurer. I was then asked to invest my plundered gold into a couple of upgrades that, I was assured by statistics, would improve my chances next time. Back into the castle I went, this time with a lady who could shoot axes at people. I made it about five rooms that time.
Whereas most games would throw me back to the beginning of the level, because there are no levels-proper in RL, I was instead invited to choose a successor to my original adventurer. I was then asked to invest my plundered gold into a couple of upgrades that, I was assured by statistics, would improve my chances next time. Back into the castle I went, this time with a lady who could shoot axes at people. I made it about five rooms that time.
RL continues like this, as far as I can tell, for the rest of
the game. Every time you enter the castle, whose layout changes every time
unless you pay gold to retain a pleasing one, your singular aim is to stay
alive as long as possible. Through longer runs you inevitably bag greater sums
of gold. You aren’t able to keep much of your unspent loot after you are dead,
so there is a constant drive to secure and then spend as much as possible. Each upgraded run usually sees you
getting a little further into the castle, a little more aware of enemy patterns
and a little bit wealthier upon your death.
After a while you’re killing early enemies with a single hit,
almost sprinting through challenges that were once taxing. While the layout of
the castle changes with each go around, the building blocks that it is created
out of don’t; they are simply shuffled around. This allows the game to be both labyrinthine
and familiar at all times. As you increase your abilities - both within the
game and your mastery of its mechanics - you gently outpace the difficulty of
early areas, trouncing all comers and finding it all a bit blasé at a point. You’ll
eventually run out of easy targets and have to travel to tougher parts of the
castle, where enemies are much stronger and your survival is once again a thing
of fragility and not certainty. You’ll essentially find yourself back at the beginning,
even though you’ve been progressing - very slowly - for hours. Victory is
transient in Rogue Legacy, only the slow grind is ever-present.
###
Both Cookie Clicker and Rogue Legacy depend heavily on their
ability to make repeated actions consistently rewarding. Each game does this
through systems that rest heavily on (our) widely held western ideals: those of
capitalism and individual effort being rewarded by financial success. They
excel in being compelling - arguably addictive - because they embody and distil
the economic ideology behind many of their players’ lives. Through their
harnessing of these engrained ideologies both of these games incubate and
foster the notion that dedication and personal investment breeds success.
Even though Rogue Legacy is in essence an action game, it is
more-so a testament to our changing desires in video game design. We are no
longer content with mastering a game’s controls, systems and enemies; we need
to - in a very western, capitalistic way - feel as if we ‘own’ our experience
and so dominate it. Both Cookie Clicker and Rogue Legacy highlight this; we
don’t want to win any longer; we want to invest, upgrade and eventually
overcome, not simply just beat a game in a fair fight.
