Cookie Clicker, my first time playing an Idle game, ended up being a pleasantly delightful experience. To be completely honest, for the first few minutes, I was directionless as to what to do. Fast forward to after a few hours of intermittent playing and I ended with a solid 253,780 cookies, with 24k+ cookies per second, an army of 46 grandmas, 66 cursors, 32 farms, 21 factories, and 17 mines.
Image 1: How it started: humble beginnings
Image 2: How it’s ended up going!
Although I wasn’t playing actively apart from the first 30 or so minutes, I found myself checking back to my Cookie Clicker tab every couple of minutes to see how many cookies I was at and what new upgrades I could purchase to enhance my growing army. Needless to say, I became quickly captivated by the resource accumulation aspect of this game. Although it is arbitrary, there is indeed something so fulfilling about the ability to create and grow something over time, a sentiment that aligns well with how the paper characterizes idle games: progress emerges not from constant action, but from periodic planning and automated growth.
Several aspects I enjoyed about this game is the level of lack of upfront direction that is purposefully embedded in this idle game. Upon opening Cookie Clicker for the first time, there was never a tutorial or written directions as to how to begin the game. The central and big position of the cookie invites the user to play around and click and slowly understand the mechanics of the game. I remember clicking, upgrading, and clicking continuously for the first ten minutes only to realize that this was the whole point of the cursor and all the other elements that could be added to the game, and that clicking was no longer necessary. This was a great turning point for players playing Cookie Clicker for the first time, or at least for me as someone who is playing an idle game for the first time. All of a sudden, the purpose of the game became clear: it was to build an arsenal of cookie-producing capability (be it grandmas or alchemy labs) and allow the game to churn out cookies.
At this realization, the game went from clicking to see cookies add to count to automating the process for you to accumulate cookie capital in the most efficient way possible. I found this shift from active input to background automation is central to not only this game but to the genre of Idle games. As the CHI paper ‘Playing to Wait’ outlines, Cookie Clicker is a textbook example of a single resource incremental game: one where you begin with clicking to generate resources and gradually transition to managing and optimizing automated production systems. These games are designed to support what the paper calls playful idling, where waiting is not a punishment but instead a crucial part of the gameplay loop.
All of these interactions and realizations I had when playing Cookie Clicker were solidified on a stronger level as I was reading through the paper, which emphasizes the repetition of a simple action to aid in the accumulation of resources serving as a core mechanic that is regularly performed in play. The paper also introduces the concept of ‘playing to plan’, which perfectly describes my evolving relationship with the game: after the first 30 minutes, I was no longer playing moment to moment, but rather planning future upgrades, optimizing my resource path, and making decisions based on longer term gains. The game subtly trains players to shift from the tactic micromanagement to strategic planning.
Finally, I appreciated how the game respects your time. It allows you to step away and rewards you when you return, a feature the paper calls temporal flexibility. Learning about this concept also shone light on why Idle games are growing in popularity: we as a civilization are becoming increasingly busier, and time feels like it is becoming a scarce resource. This temporal flexibility made it easy for me to return to the game while multitasking or taking breaks from other activities. Even when I wasn’t playing, the tools and mechanisms I added to the game allowed me to keep playing – a core insight from the paper that reframes idle games as ambient, background experiences that blend into daily life.
