“It Started as a Joke”: On the Design of Idle Games (2019)
dl.acm.org
dl.acm.org
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.
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...
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.
The first one shouldn't be more than several hours, while the second one should be around 2 and 5 days.
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.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/346900/AdVenture_Capitali...
eventually i just uninstalled the game so I would quit playing it. That game is crack.
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.
https://github.com/rr-/pq-cli/blob/bbe3842a2f0a11bf5bd639da3...
lev = level
level = lev * qty
if not is_definite:
result = indefinite(result, qty)
lev := level;
level := lev * qty;
if not definite then Result := Indefinite(Result, qty);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.
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. :)
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.
But more importantly, it will let you reach the end faster, so you spend less time playing it. Which, might be a good thing.
- 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).
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
I'd never describe that as me 'playing' those games, I'd describe that is 'downtime'.
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.
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Like, we all had Tamagotchi / Digimon / Pokemon Pikachu growing up, right? Those were idle games for sure, with some clicker-elements even.
That's too broad a perspective in my opinion. From a far enough distance, CounterStrike is also a management game, as is StarCraft and even Street Fighter II. Are they idle games?
But you'd be hard pressed to find any shared mechanic if you've actually tried all three. I guess you move your mouse to click on a button sometimes, but all three games obsolete actual physical clicking pretty quickly.
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The biggest thing about idle games is that the "state" of the game changes while you're not playing. But so does Animal Crossing and MMORPGs.
And "Universal Paperclips" is actually only going while you're sitting at the computer, no "away" element in that game at all. So even that rule isn't perfect.
I'm challenging the assertion that any game that has a "watch and see"/management component is an idle game; Factorio is definitely not one, for example. Neither is StarCraft, even though it has the "build resources" component, where you are not actively building those resources but waiting till they build themselves.
A management game is not necessarily an idle game; that's too broad a perspective to be useful.
In fact, the core gameplay loop is around mining (Factorio) or building wire (Universal Paperclips). Mines make ore, ore makes plates, plates make circuits, circuits make mining machines, mining machines make more ore.
Universal paperclips: wires make paperclips, paperclips are sold for money, money buys autoclippers + auto-wire. Auto-wire makes more wire, and autoclippers make more paperclips.
In both cases, you're building out your factory for explosive, super-linear growth. Good decisions and good management (including researching technology in both games) can lead to more and more inventions that allow for more efficient processing (Factorio), or faster autoclippers / megaclippers in Universal Paperclips.
Also, you mention above that Universal Paperclips is not really an idle game anyway. So are we focusing specifically on Paperclips or on idle games, especially if Paperclips is not the best exponent of the genre?
I still struggle to understand the conflation of management games with idle games. Not that Factorio is really a management game either, since it's actually a programming/automation game (where you have to do the actual programming, not click to tell someone to do it for you).
> Incremental games vary as to whether they have a victory condition: games like Cookie Clicker allow the players to play indefinitely, while games like Candy Box! or Universal Paperclips feature endings that can be reached after a certain amount of progress is made.[citation needed]
Universal Paperclips is absolutely considered by many players to be an idle game, and a rather good one.
Also, Wikipedia defines incremental games as a synonym for "clicker" games. Factorio is definitely not a "clicker" game, unless you define clicker broadly as "you use the mouse to click", which would make StarCraft and point and click adventures such as Day of the Tentacle also clicker games.
I find it harder and harder to understand your point. At this stage, wouldn't it be easier to just admit Factorio and Universal Paperclips have very little in common, and that Factorio isn't an idle game, instead of sticking to your guns?
Not really.
> In an incremental game, players perform simple actions – usually clicking a button – which rewards the player with currency. The player may spend the currency to purchase items or abilities that allow the player to earn the currency faster or automatically, without needing to perform the initial action.[3][4] A common theme is offering the player sources of income displayed as buildings such as factories or farms. These sources increase the currency production rate, but higher tier sources usually have an exponentially higher cost, so upgrading between tiers takes usually about the same time or even increasingly longer.
> This mechanism offers a low-pressure experience (one does not have to be constantly playing), no loss condition, and constant growth and feedback, which is ideal for social or mobile play patterns, and often result in a very high player retention.[5] It often relies on exponential growth (or perhaps high-degree polynomial growth), which is countered by diminishing returns.
This absolutely describes "Peaceful Mode" Factorio, 100%. Biters don't exist, no loss condition exists, and you have constant exponential growth as the "inventions" and "research" of the game cause your numbers to almost automatically go higher and higher.
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> The rapid growth of cost, power and rewards is what makes incremental games fun and satisfying.[5] They often incorporate very large numbers in their calculation of rewards/power, either using scientific notations (1x1034), shorthands (1M, 1T, etc.), shorthand (1a, 1b, 1aa, 1ab), or invented words (e.g. "duoquadragintillion"), which sometimes make recording high scores a problem for the server.[5]
Neither Starcraft nor Day of the Tentacle involve large numbers. Starcraft caps-off at 200 units, a rather small number. Day of the Tentacle has no growth at all.
Factorio is about pushing your numbers bigger and bigger. You need well over 1-million ore to launch the rocket, and many players opt to build Megabases that launch a rocket-per-minute.
Factorio absolutely starts on the small scale where you're counting your ore one at a time (yellow belts are very expensive in the early game, because you don't have much production yet). But it doesn't take long to grow your factory to the point where you're processing thousands-of-ore per minute.
You grow from thousands-to-10s of thousands, then hundreds of thousands as a prerequisite for launching the rocket.
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Its the fact that you start off by right-clicking on trees in Factorio that makes it a clicker / idle game. Factorio is horribly tedious unless you "do it correctly".
Same thing with clicker/idle games. You have a tedious start, to show how hard some representative action is (ie: make a cookie, make a paperclip, or in Factorio: mine an ore by right-clicking).
But very quickly, you build an automatic machine that does it for you, auto-clippers in Universal Paperclips, or an electric-mining machine in Factorio.
I guess if you think Universal Paperclips and Factorio are similar enough to be considered idle games, we will never see eye to eye.
I also don't think a lot of people are going to agree with you either, making your broader definition less useful -- i.e. useful only to you. But hey, whatever floats your boat. Or clicks your boat ;)
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?
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.
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.
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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).
Factorio, on the other hand, is always a little user interaction away from progress, and waiting both doesn't progress you and isn't necessary.
Sure, idling is an option, but it doesn't get you progress.
There's nothing to do but wait for your machination to launch the rocket.
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Now its a game to set all of that up. But its also a game to reach space exploration in Universal Paperclips to build your universe-wide paperclip factory. There's a lot of intricate steps you need to do to go from a humble "click this button to make paperclip" into conquering the universe.
Have you tried speed-running Universal Paperclips?
EDIT: The core loop is IMO, surprisingly close to Factorio. In Factorio, you mine iron to make plates, you use plates to make assembly machines. Assembly machines can then make new miners, and then you can place the miners to make more iron and accelerate yourself.
In universal paperclips, you click the "buy wire" button to get wires. You click the paperclip button to make a paperclip. You sell the paperclip to get money. The money can be used to buy more wires, and auto-cutters. The auto-cutters make more paperclips allowing you to buy more wire / auto-cutters / sell more paperclips.
In both cases, the game "closes the loop", your inputs become outputs, and the outputs feed back in to accelerate the speed at which you consume inputs.
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In theory, you can launch the rocket in Factorio by right-clicking on the mine and doing nearly everything manually. (There's a few exceptions: engines and oil can only be done by machines... but the point remains that you can do a significant portion of the game "dumbly")
Similarly, you can theoretically conquer the universe by clicking on enough wires in Universal paperclips. (Not really because the numbers are so big that you'd never get there. But it could happen).
But any decent "speedrunner" will optimize for the best route: which items to buy in which order to maximize the rate of return and accelerate towards the endgame.
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.