- I've been playing
for, like, 6 1/2 years probably? Started playing at the end of 2013. - Almost 6 years. - From October 2013 - I come back every
maybe like, year or 2 years something like that. I start
again from scratch every time. (gentle music) - [Host] Cookie Clicker, at first glance, appears to be an absurdly simple game. Played in your web browser,
it'll begin like this, with a mostly empty screen,
and one giant glowing cookie. If you click it, you will
receive a cookie in return. Click it 15 times... (clicking) And you'll be able to pay for
a cursor that starts to do some of the clicking for you. That, really is the chocolatey
core of the experience; you click and you get cookies
and then you use those cookies to get even more cookies. After you've invested in
a few cursors for example, you'll probably wanna
step on up to Grandmas, who will bake a new cookie
every single second, God bless them. Then it's cookie farms and
mines, factories and banks, anything to earn more cookies. The game is designed to
play itself to some extent, as you leave it ticking away
in the background while you get on with your day,
or at least pretend to before eventually returning
to cash in on whatever accumulated cookies have
been collected, clicklessly. Because of this, Cookie Clicker
is sometimes referred to as being one of the forerunners in what we now call the idle game genre. Games that can just keep on going with, or without your
input. To some of you, that's not gonna sound
like a whole lot of fun and I get where you're coming
from, but at the same time there is something in
my brain that lights up at the idea of it all,
that instinctively craves the next milestone, whatever that is. It's a grandma in this case, thank you. But, do I enjoy playing it? I don't know... Maybe? Regardless, like a lot of people I played this thing to death
for about a week, maybe two, when it first hit the internet,
in 2013 before eventually, tearing myself away to focus
on more productive things like getting more followers on Twitter. This is worth the anxiety. But almost seven
years later, to my surprise, there remains a community
of players who never left, who never stopped playing Cookie Clicker. In fact, of the four people I've spoken to, each of which have been playing around
the time it first launched, all of them, all four told me, they could imagine playing
this game in some capacity for the rest of their lives. Wow, okay, I feel like I
am missing something here What makes Cookie Clicker
worthy of such...devotion? - I would describe it as a really slow motion strategy game. - To most people, it
is probably really boring but, the way I see it,
it's about optimising. - If you make progress
in the game, it feels like you are doing something
productive with your time. - Obviously this game
doesn't have the end, but this feeling of accomplishing
something is pretty big. - It's kind of like
a really, elaborate joke on what makes us feel
like we're contributing. - [Host] Right, so, a few
different thoughts here. (cookie crunching) There seem to be two distinct things that are important to players. First, is Cookie Clicker's sense
of near endless progression. You can't beat this game,
there is no final objective no finish line. Some players will aim to unlock all of
the game's achievements, of which there are many, and I am told that even if
you know the game inside out you're looking at about a year's play time, before you finally manage that. But even if you do, the
game is still being updated not frequently, but
about once a year or so, Cookie Clicker's end game is extended, with a new building being introduced, or maybe a new mini game and
with both of those things, there are more achievements to unlock. Every time you get close
to those goal posts, they just shift a bit further away. Today's Cookie Clicker, might look similar to
the one I played in 2013, but things have evolved. Even narratively, the game goes some places
you might not expect as your thirst for the cookie production, has you eventually
triggering an event known as the Grandmapocalypse,
in which your overworked labour force of kind, elderly women, begins to mutate, as you push
their bodies and their minds beyond anything that can
still be described as human. This sounds bad, and it is, but like absolutely everything in Cookie
Clicker, even an apocalypse, if used correctly, will
actually lead to more cookies being created. Progress is inevitable. Eventually, you'll ascend, which lets you start the game from scratch but each time you do this,
you'll be adding more and more permanent upgrades to your bakery, which sees your cookie
production grow exponentially. What might have taken you
days in your first run will now just take minutes as
your CPS, or cookies per second, flies up into the millions,
billions and beyond. And all the while, the game
is steadily introducing more and more systems to tinker with. You'll gain access to a
grimoire of spells to cast, decide which Gods to
worship in your Pantheon, hatch a Dragon and
sacrifice buildings to it, control the seasons, tend a garden, birth your own Santa Claus, carefully manage your milk
and sugar lump supplies, and if you're playing Cookie
Clicker pretty actively, you'll wanna be clicking on as
many of these Golden Cookies that show up as possible, as
they'll lead to huge combos in which your production
is multiplied in such a way that weeks, maybe
months worth of cookies are being produced in
just a few short minutes. There is a lot to keep track of. Cookie Clicker then, is a
playground of optimization, a triumphant dance of
interlocking systems and modifiers that when, manipulated correctly can all work in unison
towards just one single goal; and I think there is some
beauty to be found in there somewhere. I get it, I do, sort of, but we're not talking about
players diving into this for just a couple of
hours, days or even weeks; this is a community that's talking about maybe playing this game forever. That is the bit that I am
still struggling with, and so I got in touch with the
game's original creator, Julien Thiennot, better
known as Orteil, to see if he knew what was going
on with his video game. - [Host] So you didn't
expect people to have fun when they played it, to begin with? - I asked Orteil why he thought players still stuck around with Cookie
Clicker after 6, 7 years and he told me that's a question, he doesn't always know
how to answer either. - Orteil offered that maybe
there's a comparison to be made with games like Animal Crossing, in which, a lot of the time,
the things you do in this game can be quite repetitive and
sometimes you'll need to wait and come back later to see
the fruits of your labour and I get that comparison,
I do, but it just isn't entirely satisfying to me. Cookie Clicker and idle
games more generally seem different somehow, they clearly share a number of traits with other types of video games
but also, look at it, look how different an
experience this appears to be and so I decided to make 1 more call, this time with Jessica
Hammer, an assistant professor at the Human-Computer
Interaction Institute. She's been involved in some of
the very first academic work on the topic of idle
and incremental games, and how they've evolved
over the last decade. - [Jessica] I am impressed
with the dedication of players who have stuck with Cookie
Clicker for 6 or 7 years but, um... it's not surprising to me. - [Host] Okay, so I asked
her how she and her team describe the appeal of
games like this one. - The phrase we use to talk about them is "playing by not playing"
or "playing at planning". So the pleasure of
anticipating and the pleasure of thinking about the next
move you're going to make is what carries you from one
in-game interaction to the next. - [Host] Jessica suggested
a really interesting link between the psychology of idle games and how we think about
vacations, or holidays. She pointed me towards a
study conducted in 2010 which found that the anticipation
of an upcoming trip may be more likely to
improve our happiness, than the trip itself. - Idle games draw on that same impulse, that you're not playing them all the time, but you get to think about
what you're going to do and plan for it, you even get to organise your schedule around it; so these are very much
games about manipulating your real life in order to
get the maximum pleasure that you're looking for out of the game. So if you've ever looked
forward to a vacation, you can understand why somebody
might enjoy an idle game. - Vacations were these
things that we used to do where we'd leave the
house to go somewhere else, maybe even another country, for fun! Obviously we don't do
that anymore, so instead I like to stand out on this little balcony to remember what it's like to be outside. It's nice! Alright, so do we have an
answer to that original question? Why does Cookie Clicker
attract such a dedicated player base? Well we've
heard a few different things: the pleasure of anticipation,
that's surely a big part of it, or the idea of playing by not playing, as Jessica might describe it. Then there's the sheer
amount of depth that this strange looking thing offers to players, even compared to other idle games, Cookie Clicker just seems to be on a whole different level with that stuff and that's partly down to that fact that it still continues to be updated 7 years down the line, Orteil
is still working on this game still adding to it. And I guess that brings players back and those players have formed a community where, together they work out
this game's many intricacies and how best to use them,
that is important to. To be honest, I think the thing
I've grappled with the most as I try to make sense
of all this, is that it started out as a joke. Cookie Clicker wasn't
meant to have a point, it wasn't even meant to be fun but somehow, and to begin with,
certainly unintentionally, it became irresistible to those
that truly clicked with it. You can even count Orteil
himself in that number. This was an evenings work, meant to poke fun at the
absurdity of acquiring something just for the sake of it and
yet, it's changed his life more than anyone else's. Perhaps in the end, I've
been overthinking some of this and maybe it is as simple as
the answer one player gave to me when I asked her why she'd stuck around for as long as she had. - The most rewarding part of games is usually seeing the progress and as long as I can see the
progress, in Cookie Clicker it never actually feels pointless to me. - Maybe, maybe that's
it. Progress is the point, whether that's levelling
up a witch doctor in Diablo, or collecting fossils in Animal Crossing, or clicking a giant
cookie in Cookie Clicker. It's the journey and not the
destination that matters and why do I need to ask how
long that journey should take or whether or not it will have a satisfying
enough ending for the players that choose to embark on it? Oh my god, am I talking about life? Should I be enjoying this
moment more than I am right now? Because, I tell you what, in all
honesty, I'm quite stressed. Am I focused on the wrong things? Is this... have I... been living my life wrong? (upbeat music fades out) - I'd like to thank Skillshare
for sponsoring this video and hopefully for teaching me how to bake. Skillshare is a website about
getting better at things that you're not very good at>
Like, for example, in my case, baking! I'm going to be following a class that tries to turn these
ingredients, like eggs. Eggs! Into actual cookies. Shout out to this class
from Ashley Grombol for walking me through how
to do it, step-by-step. - [Ashley] Next add your
white sugar, brown sugar and softened butter to the
bowl of a standup mixer. - Anni, do we have a stand up mixer? - [Anni] No - Anyway, if you hate baking, Skillshare also offers a
range of different classes on topics like,
productivity, video editing even game development. Loads of stuff! Does that butter looked creamed to you? I...I'm just, I'm not sure.
If you'd like to take a look at some of these classes yourself, a Skillshare membership
costs less than $10 per month but if you would like
to try before you buy, the first 1,000 of you to
use this link right here will receive 2 months free of charge. Right, so, if I have done this correctly, I should be able to put these small balls into the oven and then
they'll sort themselves out and become cookies. However, I've only really
got time to try this once so, for the sake of our continued
relationship with our sponsor, let's hope it works! The gloves are on! It's time,
to see how this has turned out I've had a quick glance through
the window, and to be honest they are chunky boys.
They're chunkier than perhaps they were meant to be, in the video but I think I might have
used a bit too much dough. That's more of a Chris Bratt problem than a Skillshare problem but ya know they look like cookies. Can you do better? Maybe that's the angle
we'll go with, if so check out Skillshare.com The link's in the video description. Make better cookies than we did. Mmmm (Gentle upbeat music)
