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Cookie clicker game google chrome9/18/2023 My failed attempt at making a gameĪt some point, several months into my Cookie Clicker journey (and having also become a connoisseur of several other incremental games along the way), I finally started to feel the creative itch. I plotted a graph of the phenomenon and presented my research to the reddit community, adding to the growing body of knowledge about this game (and my own growing body of knowledge about programming for the browser).īy playing, I inadvertently learned a lot about how programming for the browser works. It turns out that Google Chrome throttles JavaScript timers in background tabs, meaning that in order for my add-on to auto-click as fast as it was supposed to, the tab needed to be visible in the foreground. I was even able to track down the root cause of an issue where I wasn’t generating cookies as quickly as my calculations anticipated. The game was in written in the web programming language JavaScript, and so were these add-ons.īy playing with and tweaking these add-ons I inadvertently learned a lot about how programming for the browser works. A cottage industry of browser add-ons emerged that allowed you to automate certain aspects of gameplay as well as track cookie production statistics and compute in-game decision formulas. I visited the Cookie Clicker subreddit everyday, where people would discuss strategy, post tips, and results of experiments. I had it running on my computer 24×7 for months, tending to it every few hours. Calculating the best way to allocate your limited resources before leaving the game to run overnight becomes a complex mathematical puzzle with many moving parts. However, the game is clever it provides multiple potential pathways towards your next goal, and small decisions you make can compound, making the difference between an overnight wait or a wait of several days. One of the interesting aspects of this game is that it rewards you for not playing it. Often, the next cookie purchase requires several orders of magnitude more cookies than you are currently producing, so you have no option but to leave the game alone, sometimes for days, before your cookie factories churn out enough cookies for you to unlock the next level of progress. One of the peculiar and interesting aspects of this game is that it rewards you for not playing it. The genre eventually came to be known as ‘incremental’ or ‘idle’ games, centred around an active Reddit community, and even inspiring dozens of research papers. Within weeks, the Internet was awash with hundreds of ‘clicker’ games ranging from simple re-skins of Cookie Clicker to inventive new interpretations of the genre that pushed its boundaries and articulated the core elements that made it fun. While it was not the first game in this genre, it is perhaps the most influential. Despite its apparent simplicity, there was something incredibly fun and moreish about its core gameplay loop. Don’t look too closely you may not be able to look away.Ī lot of ink was spilled at the time on cookie clicker’s addictive nature. Over time, you gain access to cookie farms, factories, and a seemingly endless series of increasingly absurd and productive cookie generation devices. Instead, you can spend some of your cookies to hire grandmas to bake cookies for you. You can click a giant cookie to generate a cookie, but this method doesn’t scale particularly well. The objective of the game is simple: get as many cookies as you can. Simultaneously, a French programmer known only as Orteil (meaning ‘toe’) releases a game that takes the online gaming world by storm for its absurdity, simplicity and addictiveness. The slow burning Disney super hit Frozen is picking up steam, and soon parents the world over will be terrorised by toddlers in Olaf and Elsa costumes tunelessly belting ‘Let it Go’. To celebrate/commiserate, I’m sharing an unusual (if I may say so myself) grad school war story, the story of how sinking hundreds of hours into pointless online games unexpectedly sped up my ability to do research by a factor of 10, perhaps more. It’s been 5 years since I finished my Ph.D. Or, how I cookie-clicked my way to a doctorate in interaction design.
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