By Diya Sabharwal
I played cookie clicker for half a day and ended up with one cursor, four grandmas, 7 farms, 1 factory, two mines, three shipments, 3 alchemy labs, nine portals, three time machines, and 180 million cookies. I don’t know what I’m getting out of all these resources, but I lovEEE accumulating them.
I know some people go into games with some knowledge of what’s to come, but I went into Cookie Clicker completely cold turkey, expecting to learn the game as I go. All I saw was one cookie, and I started clicking it with all the speed my finger could muster.
Eventually, I started wondering why there was all that empty space in-between. Which brought my eye to the right panel, where I saw I could redeem my cookies for small upgrades. So with that, I bought a grandma, then a farm… and then once I bought a couple factories too, I saw how my work was being automated.
At that point, I realized it’s not useful for me to keep clicking, as the rate at which my automations are producing cookies far exceeds the output that I alone am able to make. So I kept the tab open and started Googling about the game.
That’s when I understood the concept of “idle games” — and it felt so interesting. So much about Cookie Clicker then started to click for me (pun not intended…)
Overall, I found the pacing of the game to be honestly perfect, how it became progressively so much easier to make more and more cookies. This feeling of looking at the counter and thinking, “oh, I produced so many cookies, my automations are working so efficiently…” made me feel very proud of myself for what I’d created.
It reminded me a lot of what everyone says it feels like to be a startup founder. I started with a single cookie, that I made completely by myself with my bare hands (finger clicks)… I made cookies one by one until I had made enough that I could start automating some of my processes by hiring people, buying machinery, etc.
In the initial stages of buying the machinery, I still felt like I could add value by clicking and making cookies on my own. But as I earned more wealth (cookies) and could buy more and more complex machinery to produce even more cookies… my manual work started to feel redundant pretty quickly. Then I switched to just managing the high-level resource allocation (should we save? spend? buy more itme machines or more upgrades for grandma?)
This trajectory then felt like I went from a startup founder to a CEO of a smooth-sailing generational business. In no time, I became the capitalist overlord, using my money (cookies) to make more money (cookies) by exploiting others’ work while I did anything but.
The little news quips on the top panel were the cherry on top for me. All the news about the environmental damage my cookie production is causing, coupled with news of all the success and world-domination I am achieving through my business… and then especially, the realisation that despite all the negative damages, I’m not expected to decrease my production at all. Feels quite like a parable of our times, to me.
Side note: In the time it took me to finish writing this post, I was at almost 3 billion Cookies!!! I feel like a millionaire industrialist. 
Thank you! <3
