Like the post-modern playwright who can’t help but break the fourth wall every chance she gets, Thiennot’s games are all about pointing gigantic flashing arrows at gaming conventions most people take for granted. Thiennot has been making games since childhood, though ‟game designer” in the traditional sense may not be quite the best way to describe what he does. To get a sense of how the game is played, check out at least a little bit of this speedrun where a fleet-fingered player makes it to 1 million cookies in just over 17 minutes:Ĭookie Clicker was created last fall by 24-year-old French game designer Julien Thiennot, who goes by the nickname Orteli.
There, budding developers show off their latest creations and debate the finer points of a budding new genre that’s already warranted its own BuzzFeed listicle entitled ‟The 18 Stages Of A Full-Blown ‛Cookie Clicker’ Addiction.” These ‟incremental games” have their own thriving community on social news site Reddit. Only a few months after it was first launched, the free, Web-based browser game-initially created as a joke by a lone French developer in a single evening-has racked up over 86 million hits and spawned scores of imitators. But the core of the gameplay is the simple, mind-numbing act of clicking a single button ad nauseam. There are other elements to the game too, namely an ability to use the cookies you’ve created to purchase items like cookie-baking grandmas and cookie dough mines that automatically produce more cookies for you. The game often seems more like an elaborate collection of psychological ploys aimed at tricking users into spending cash on in-app purchases, however.īut the premise behind Cookie Clicker is far more straightforward: See that picture of a cookie? Click on it. Just look at the countless hours people around the globe have sunk into playing Flappy Bird or Candy Crush Saga-the massively popular mobile game where players line up matching pieces of candy in increasingly difficult to solve puzzles. Simple, addicting games that appeal to casual gamers are nothing new. So when something hooks her so thoroughly that I become legitimately worried she’s going to break her mouse with her non-stop clicking, it’s got to be tapping into something elemental. Outside of the occasional nostalgia-fueled trip around a Mario Kart track, my wife isn’t much of a gamer.
‟Just a few more cookies!” she protested. ‟I’m not sure I really understand it myself.”Īround 2am that night, I had to physically drag her away from her computer. ‟So all you do in this game is click on a picture of a cookie over and over again?” On a Thursday evening in mid-January, around 6pm or so, I showed my wife a game called Cookie Clicker.
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