Idle Games: An Analysis

Game Soup analyzes idle/clicker games, arguing they are compelling experiences rather than traditional games, driven by ever-escalating progression and rising costs rather than skill or challenge.

Key Takeaways

Idle games are compelling because of rapid, satisfying progression rather than skill or challenge.
The genre challenges conventional definitions of what counts as a game.
Escalating costs and exponential numbers are central to the clicker experience.
Idle games offer low-attention, low-barrier engagement that fits around other activities.

What the video covers

The video introduces idle games (also called clickers or incremental games) as a genre built on a simple core loop that converts mouse clicks into currency.
Idle games treat accumulating power or wealth as the goal itself rather than a means to an end.
The creator argues idle games are less fun per minute than traditional titles but far more compelling per minute, due to fast-tracked progression.
Clickers require minimal player skill or attention, making them a distillation of basic gameplay loops.
Using flow theory, the video explains that clickers don't fit the skill-versus-challenge model because they lack meaningful skill requirements and challenge restrictions.
The creator suggests clickers are better defined as compelling experiences rather than games, since they often lack rules, failure states, and varied player input.
Cookie Clicker and Clicker Heroes are used as examples of how hidden depth and slow-burn mechanics emerge over time.
Costs of upgrades grow exponentially, so player actions become progressively less efficient, and numbers quickly reach scientific-notation scale.
Idle games have low barriers to entry, are satisfying through arbitrary progression, and let players engage at their own schedule.
The video includes a disclaimer that it was not sponsored by Clicker Heroes, and the creator promotes the Game Soup Patreon.

Chapters

What defines an idle game according to this video?

The video describes idle games as titles built around a single, relatively simple core gameplay loop that converts mouse clicks into currency. The goal is to accumulate power or wealth as the end itself rather than as a means to an end.

Why doesn't flow theory fit idle games well?

Flow theory relies on balancing player skill and challenge, but idle games have no specific skill players learn and no challenge that restricts progress. Because neither axis can be assessed, the creator argues clickers fall outside the model.

Why does the video say idle games are less efficient over time?

Each upgrade increases the cost of the next one, often exponentially, so the time needed to make purchases keeps growing. Player actions therefore become progressively less efficient, and numbers can reach scientific-notation scale.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

Speaker A

[Music] [Applause] [Music] we live in a time where technology changes rapidly and as a result of increasingly powerful Hardware as well as an explosive growth in the games industry itself new video game genres arise all the time 5 years ago there was no such thing as a soulslike now very

Speaker A

broadly used to mean an action game with difficult and punishing combat Heavy Rain is just one of the many interactive fiction action dramas with a heavy Reliance on cinematography and storytelling visual novel has only recently begun its rise in popularity in America thanks to games like Ace

Speaker A

Attorney and the Zero Escape series and with people spending more and more of their time on computers for work socializing and entertainment it's no surprise that games like Cookie Clicker and clicker Heroes caught on and paved the way for a whole new kind of game this genre of games is sometimes called

Speaker A

clickers incremental games or idle games typically they involve a single relatively simple core gaml Loop that converts your mouse clicks to currency the general goal of an idol game is to accumulate power or wealth not as the means to an end but as the end itself and while this might not

Speaker A

sound so compelling you really should try one out if you never have before it's enlightening to experience progression for progression sake in an age where many genres that previously issued character stats and other RPG elements are now incorporating them with surprising frequency and Nuance you

Speaker A

could probably enjoy Mass Effect without the party leveling mechanics or the passive skill trees but what about an inverted version of that with no missions no storyline and where those RPG elements are the only things on offer clicker games are simultaneously some of the simplest games and some of

Speaker A

the most addicting games I've ever played I'd hesitate to call Idol games fun because their mechanical structure necessarily foros the traditional player to game interactions that allow for an emergent experience but just because something isn't insanely fun doesn't mean that it can't be insanely

Speaker A

compelling for example frog fractions prevent the fruit from being eaten as you eat the bugs they emit [Music] fractions my first job my first day on the space space [Music] force I'm not cooperating though honest oh jeez it's a beloved genre deconstruction SL subversion SL other TV Tropes

Speaker A

terminology but you're not so much in it for the gameplay as you are for the twists and turns of the experience itself and in general idle games are less fun per minute than regular titles but are much more compelling per minute

Speaker A

but how clickers FastTrack player progression at an efficiency that a game with a story or characters can't quite match at the same time they require minimal investment in player skill or attention so in many cases they're a distillation of the basic gameplay Loop that dangling

Speaker A

carrot on the industry's game design stick idle games are a minimalist's dream and a thrill seeker's bane of course they aren't for everyone but if you're a certain kind of person that enjoys what Idol games have to offer you

Speaker A

can find yourself trapped by a highly addicting game that requires only the tiniest deler of your attention from moment to moment really try it go to clickerheroes.com and start a game kill a few monsters make your first upgrade

Speaker A

and stop playing when you either get bored or distracted I'll be here when you get back disclaimer this video was not sponsored endorsed or paid for by clickerheroes.com I have a pretty soft spot in my heart for clicker Heroes and

Speaker A

I've been playing it on and off for the last few years I mean it's easy to jump into easy to keep open in a Tab while you work on other stuff easy to forget about for a few days and it's always quick to make you feel rewarded we've

Speaker A

already talked at length about flow Theory and video games on this channel in the past the general idea being that as long as you're balancing player skill and game difficulty to stay within this special range here your game is probably

Speaker A

pretty enjoyable but if we try to plot out what a game like clicker Heroes might look like on this chart we run into a few major problems there's no specific skill that a player needs or will learn and there's no level of

Speaker A

challenge that can restrict your progress so we actually can't assess our flow through either axis so do skill and challenge really have nothing to do with it I mean you can certainly watch a film or listen to an album without any

Speaker A

prerequisite skill or challenge but what about a video game this is why I tend to believe that clickers are more accurately defined as compelling experiences rather than compelling games by definition games have rules failure States and challenge as well as varied input from players but many Idol games

Speaker A

do away with all of these instead opting for a certain dichotomy you're either actively clicking or you're waiting to click this doesn't mean that clickers can't be deep or mechanically complex or that they can't surprise you Cookie Clicker starts off innocuous enough but before you know it you're in an eldrich

Speaker A

hellscape clicker Heroes initially only lets you hire and level up Heroes before introducing ancients relics Outsiders and countless other slowburn mechanics that don't show themselves until your days or even weeks in but none of that requires manual dexterity or an analytical mind although both of those

Speaker A

things do help to to speed up your progress while playing and this really goes against the grain of what we come to understand games as today if any amount of skill is sufficient and the only challenge is whether you choose to

Speaker A

play the game or not we come back to the original question how are clickers enjoyable in the first place at first glance most clicker games revolve around pumping up a single Resource as big as it can possibly be

Speaker A

which you can then spend to increase the rate at which you gain that resource for example if you're buying buildings to produce cookies in cookie clicker each building will produce a static ount of cookies per second a cookie Farm gives

Speaker A

eight cookies per second a factory will give 260 per second and a prism gives 2.9 billion cookies per second each of these buildings can be upgraded eight times and each upgrade doubles your production so the higher the base

Speaker A

production rate the more effective the upgrade and it's extremely satisfying to watch your production rate Skyrocket after clicking your fingers off and it pulls you right back into the groove of things even if you're not necessarily within flow range and unlike a typical game where the mechanics get more and

Speaker A

more challenging as you progress clickers make your actions less and less efficient instead with each new upgrade taking longer than the last so let's try to flesh out our previously one-dimensional summary of clickers and instead say this the cost of new resources gradually but inevitably

Speaker A

outpaces your wealth accumulation that's clickers in a nutshell again looking at Cookie Clicker buying a cookie Temple increases your production by a flat 7800 per second but also increases the cost of the next cookie Temple by 1.15 which might not sound like a lot

Speaker A

but it actually translates to a doubling of price every five upgrades so the more buildings you have and the more cookies per second you earn the longer it takes for you to be able to make your next purchase your actions are becoming less

Speaker A

and less efficient with respect to time and a common theme in most clickers is that numbers eventually devolve into quantitative Insanity it's not uncommon for the numbers and clickers to reach such ridiculous sizes that they can only be meaningfully expressed in scientific notation compared to more conventional

Speaker A

games with a discrete beginning middle and end point click your tend not to really undergo dramatic changes in tone Story gameplay or goals while the currency or gaining might change it almost always boils down to trading your time and your mouse clicks for higher on-screen numbers whether in the form of

Speaker A

experience bars gold stores or higher level zones and if all of this sounds incredibly simplistic remember that this is just a surface level description of a video game just like how Mega Man and Mario are superficially about jumping

Speaker A

and running it's their good level and game design that makes these games fun and idle games of build on their own foundations in all sorts of surprising ways without needing to tell a story or developing characters and while this can

Speaker A

make Idol games decidedly One Tone in gameplay style it also convers an important advantage to idle games that many modern AAA titles lack a subjective or qualitative success to give you an idea of what I mean by qualitative

Speaker A

success let's look at the counterpart quantitative success if you die to an enemy ambush in Dark Souls you invoke a fail state which involves the game explicitly telling you that you died and you get sent back to the last bonfire at the end of your journey you can count up all the

Speaker A

times you died and have a quantitative measure of all the times the game called your failures along the same lines when you defeat an opponent in Hearthstone this is an unqualified success a quantitative measure of your Victory the

Speaker A

other guy of course gets a quantitative failure State when he loses but Idol games by contrast have no Victory or failure conditions you can't reach a point where your reflexes or logic aren't sufficient enough to continue likewise there's no amount of reflexes or logic that will get you to the end

Speaker A

credits because they don't exist either so the barrier for entry is effectively zero but with all the Allure and satisfaction of sweet sweet arbitrary progression and since games do lack Victory or failure conditions then whether you're succeeding or failing is entirely up to your own mind regardless

Speaker A

of your actual efficiency your perception of progress in an idol game is unique to you and completely uninfluenced by those pesky quantitative measures that come from the game itself more often than not an idol game becomes more and more rewarding the more attention you're actively putting into

Speaker A

it it's just as easy to play clicker Heroes for an hour in a full screen window as it is to leave it running in a browser Tab and just check on it every few minutes and even after tens or hundreds of hours idle games can still

Speaker A

be compelling every upgrade feels like a success but you never feel that contrasting sting of failure you're encouraged by default to take things at your own pace whether it's 5 minutes a day or 5 hours there are no complex

Speaker A

controls that require your dexterity no complex puzzles that require your full attention and in general idle games will just keep on trucking until you've got some time to come back and manage them unlocks and new content can be

Speaker A

mathematically locked behind days weeks or even months of play so there's always a long-term goal for the player to shoot for and the fact that a game can still surprise you after months plays heavily into what gives Idol games such a long

Speaker A

tale I always look to a game called trimps here that exemplifies just how skillfully this can be done trims revolves around sending animals called trimps into battle ATT you start in zone one and every Zone has 100 Battles but

Speaker A

every battle is just a little bit more difficult than the last it's not uncommon to reach Zone 25 after a day or two of play but it can be weeks or even months before you reach Zone 230 which by the way unlocks a brand new game

Speaker A

mechanic called magma this drastically changes the core gameplay altering the numerical Power Balance that you've become so familiar with up to this point and giving you something new to contend with and even the most efficient autoc clicking program won't be able to reach Zone 230 in any meaningful amount of

Speaker A

time to test this out I've had a game going for about a week now using an auto progression program called Auto trims which makes the most efficient choices possible to progress I'm just now pushing into the lower 30 zones and it's

Speaker A

only becoming more and more difficult from here but luckily every single zone carries the promise of something new like stronger equipment new jobs for your trimps or a brand new mechanic that revitalizes your interest when it's begun to wne so in a nutshell clickers are

Speaker A

surprisingly satisfying because they Short Circuit the conventional gameplay Loop into something more immediately rewarding without the risk of a fail State then once you're hooked they provide numerical progression at a ridiculous rate while leaving breadcrumbs about what kind of rewards

Speaker A

you'll get next and while they can certainly be played with 100% of your attention they operate mostly on your schedule so you can play them as frequently or as rarely as you want without feeling like you're doing it

Speaker A

wrong and sure at the end of the day there's still manipulative little titles that take advantage of how games make us feel rewarded but that that just makes them all the more fascinating as an area of study and maybe you're like me where

Speaker A

even after you peek behind the curtain to see what really Lies Beneath you might still find yourself click click clicking away because why [Applause] not hey it's me again we want to give some love to all the patrons who made this video possible alchemic cyber dryad

Speaker A

John Hathaway Julian detris Austin jger seab bomber David Lopez Maria Sam Myers delicious IB Richard Flores Hector Manuel CIO Sebastian Becker useless torch Studios Mughal girl cat Prague arnno benice Brian Henson Atlas Jackson and Brian feral Pony feni thank you all so much for supporting gam soup and for

Speaker A

those of you who are not yet gam soup patrons you can check out our patreon page for free weekly updates and some other cool stuff check it out and lastly a big thank you to everyone for watching gam soup now now if you'll excuse me I

Speaker A

really need to go check my cookie [Applause] production

Topics:idle gamesclicker gamesincremental gamesCookie ClickerClicker Heroesgame designflow theoryvideo game analysisprogression systemsgame genres

Get More with the SozAI App

Transcribe recordings, audio files, and YouTube videos — with AI summaries and speaker detection. 30 minutes free.

App Store Google Play

Or transcribe another YouTube video here →

Free tools: TXT to SRT · SRT Validator · Merge SRT · Subtitle to Text · All tools