Hints to me that the Great Filter could well be addictive and selfish behaviour transfixing the instinctive and basic aspects of our minds.
I posed this question once when I was copying and pasting a pixel to fill a line. Given a time cost of selecting & copying vs pasting, what is the optimal number of pastes before I should select and copy? What if the cost of selecting & copying is a function of the current size of the line? That is what Cookie Clicker raises, but with more kinds of "boosts" and whose costs also increase based on how many you've purchased.
Or perhaps you can also pose it in higher dimensions later (copying and pasting to make 2d squares, or even more complicated shapes).
I wonder if algorithms can be written to compete in Cookie Clicker-type games.
http://puzzlersworld.com/interview-questions/google-code-jam...
But also, it can be even more addictive if the game would go back to zero after a period of inactivity (like a tamagachi pet "dying" without attention, or a Flappy Bird). Maybe not going back to zero but to some lower "saved" level like Mario.
This is the kind of stuff that makes people see how high a score they can get, for no reason other than the score!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z26yrpi2nokp78f/Screenshot%202015-...
Just to see what it would look like
I also looked at the source and sped up the game by running the game loop much faster with an extra setTimeout :)