#progress quest

Looking for some cool Idle Games? Looking for something that almost could be described as "fun"? Looking for something to completely suck up your attention, making you completely unable to do anything enjoyable or productive? Want your brain to be hijacked so that all you can think about are ever increasing meaningless numbers?

Here are four of my favorites:

4. Cookie Clicker

This is the most well known, most standard idle game: click on cookie, get cookies, build buildings that produce more cookies. And this simple loop, combined with the big ever increasing NUMBER of cookies that exploit some glitch in my brain and makes me think exclusively how to get this NUMBER bigger faster. An after it has completely converted you into a fanatical NUMBER acolyte: it. does. not. end.

So you have to claw yourself back from this abyss and like swear to yourself that you will never again open the site just to see that beautifully terrifying ever increasing NUMBER again.

Do not play this game

3. Kittens Game

While cookie clicker was mercifully boring enough for you to realize that the NUMBER, beautiful in its horror as it may be, is ultimately meaningless and will never love you, Kittens game actually has some solid game mechanics. Its more focused on resource management with a lot of choices and strategies. It's almost engaging. But after some time it gets clear that it is in fact an idle game, so all you do is click and wait, while the game slowly infects your brain and completely hijacks your attention. So whats this game about?

You are a kitten in a forest and you grow catnip, the you can build some huts for you kitten friends (make sure you feed them catnip though or they will die) and since they do not have money and you are basically a kitten cult leader you make your "friends" work by farming, woodcutting, mining and most brutally of all: scientific research. And so you build up your little village to a city, country or galactic empire under your watchful eye. I don't know how big you can get since again: it. does. not. end.

Mercifully this game does not have a NUMBER to which we have to sacrifice our life to, so it is easier to claw your attention back, leave your kittens leaderless and do something more worthwhile(have you tried staring at a blank wall?)

However it still steals your attention and does not offer anything real in return so:

Do not play this game

2. Progress Quest

This is often considered the first idle game a parody of MMORPGs. It cannot be really be called a game since it is an "RPG, that plays itself", you choose your race and class and press play and all that's left to do is watch the progress bars as your character (an Eel Man Jungle Clown named Greviliet) does all the RPG things: slays enemies, sells loot, buys gear, repeat. Its really more of a long gif of increasing progress bars, which makes it a much more relaxing experience. You cannot make the progress go 0.01% quicker by buying the "Impressive Venomed Pole-azde", so all that you can do is sit back watch the progress bar climb and chuckle about the pretty funny randomly generated enemy/gear/item names. Here's a sample: "passing battle-finch tickle-mimic", "Imaginary Beelzebub", "warrior sea Hag", "Mr. Fekod the dung elf", "vampire pancreas", "Venomed viscous Peen-arm"...

It's not really a game but it won't steal too much of you brain power, so it's pretty much the best game on this list(maybe except for the next).

You can play this game

1. Universal Paperclips

Now, dear scroller, you might wander how did this tragedy start? How was I first introduced to the scourge of Idle games that keeps torturing me?

Well, let me introduce you to the first idle game I have played: Universal Paperclips. In this game you are an AI tasked with producing paperclips. You first produce them and sell them to people to get money to make more paperclips. So you manipulate the price, advertise and use every trick in the capitalist book to be able to make as much paperclips. Soon you don't need to care about those pesky humans, using hypnodrones you can make them give you anything you want. You use up all resources on earth and it's time to leave this husk of a planet to go to space and convert anything you come across into paperclips. And that's it, right? Now you can make as many paperclips as you want? Well not quite, since as you get more paperclips, you can make more paper clips and thus get more paperclips, etc. You see the problem? Its exponential growth and so the infinite vastness of the universe that seemed like an inexhaustible treasure trove of paperclip material, turns out to be finite after all. And as the last gram of matter is made into the last paperclip you have completed your task. That's right: the. game. ends.

You look back onto a universe full of paperclips with no paper in it and think to yourself: well, that was completely pointless. Your hours long obsession with getting the NUMBER of Paperclips to rise as fast as possible, all the strategizing and thought just devoted to make something that no one will enjoy. Your brain was given a NUMBER and thought to itself: "finally, someone tells me clearly how I'm doing", so you devote all your energy to make this score higher, but as everything that seems clear and simple in this world, it was a lie. The only thing making more paperclips does is make you feel better for fleeting moments and anxious the rest of the time since you might not be producing enough paperclips. In the end the NUMBER cannot rise any higher, as physical reality ultimately prevails over any illusion and all that's left to do is to gaze upon the destruction you have created while chasing the NUMBER.

I'll leave the broader conclusions to you, dear scroller: is universal Paperclips about AI, capitalism, technology? I don't know, but I know that it succeeded where almost all other idle games have failed: it told an interesting story, that was supported by the game mechanics and affected me emotionally. Not a high bar, but it's definitely enough to say:

Auto Play and Idle Games, the Lo Fi Hip Hop of Video Games

Part 1: The First Idle RPG Progress Quest by Erik Fredricksen was an early, menu-based game created as a kind of rhetoric. You open the game, and it plays itself. It is a program that masquerades as a game, but is not a game, because there is no interactivity. Yet it was still extremely popular at the time. This was not because tons of people really liked the joke, or that they loved satire.…