Cookie Clicker - A Retrospective

Earlier this year, a number of BFVG members were afflicted by a serious addiction.

Drugs, drink and gambling were not the vices that took hold of our collective attention. We were able to resist the allure of delicious Mephedrone, and the prospect of having a flutter on the 3:30 at Epsom left us feeling cold. It took a digital narcotic to bring a group of us down into the depths of compulsive behaviour, late-night binge gaming and accelerated RSI of the index finger.

That drug's name was Cookie Clicker.

Cookie Clicker is a web-based game that has previously been written about by BFVG-er Yoglaiiiii (click here to read his post). Yoglaiiiii provides an excellent run-down of the games mechanics, so I'm going to delve a bit more into what I believe is an important message that can be drawn from the experience of playing Cookie Clicker.

I believe that Cookie Clicker provides a subtle critique of capitalism through an illustration of class division and an exploration of the nature of greed.

In Soviet Russia, Cookie Clicks You!

At the beginning of the game, you click the titular cookie once or twice. You notice a number above the cookie increase, but otherwise you do not see how this is leading anywhere interesting. After a brief while spent clicking, humming to yourself, and wondering what the point of all this is, you notice an icon light up on the right side of the screen - you can now apparently afford to buy a 'Cursor'. For each Cursor, a cookie is automatically produced every 10 seconds. 

Buying a Cursor seems to make a small difference, but you carry on clicking the cookie. Eventually you can afford another Cursor, and then another one, and before long, you are automatically producing one whole cookie per second. You realise that the store contains even more items for purchasing, with the next item in the list being the 'Granny'. With the cookies you have generated from both your own clicks, and the automated Cursor clicks, you can afford to buy a number of Grannies. You are now generating 10 cookies every second, with no input from yourself.

In this example, the action of clicking the cookie yourself is you applying your own labour - you're doing the work off your own back. Each Cursor you buy represents a worker that you have 'hired'. Before long in Cookie Clicker, you have purchased so many Cursors and Grannies, and you are generating so many automatic cookies every second, that it becomes unnecessary to add your own clicks to the process. You have moved from being a member of the proletariat, applying your own labour to generate cookies, to being a member of the bourgeoisie, able to sit back and enjoy the profits your workers are generating. 

A crucial part here is that you are given every cookie being created by your workforce. You never even have the option of distributing cookies to your workforce in order to pay them for their labour. In no uncertain terms, the workers you are employing to produce your cookies are slaves - they are purchased for a one-off fee, and never again paid for their work. I'm going to focus on the only human 'item' you can buy in the store, the Grannies, because they play a crucial role in the 'plot arc' of Cookie Clicker, as well as explicitly addressing the moral issues in play here.

Early on in the game, after you have purchased your first Granny, a message pops up in the news ticker. 

'Indentured servitude.' - grandma. 

Indentured servitude is a term effectively synonymous with slavery - labourers in these work conditions have very few rights, are seldom paid for their work, and are considered as commodities to be bought or sold. The Grannies appear to be sending you a message. Once you have purchased more Grannies to labour on your behalf, more disturbing messages begin to pop up in the news ticker, including:

'You make me sick.' - grandma. 

'You disgust me.' - grandma. 

'It begins.' - grandma. 

The grannies are beginning to resist your exploitation, and consider rebelling against your tyrannical rule. The unsettling messages continue late in the game:

'News: processions of old ladies sighted around cookie facilities!'

'News: millions of old ladies reported missing!'

The grannies begin to strike, refusing to work for you as their work conditions gradually deteriorate. Meanwhile, you compulsively buy more and more cookie-producing facilities. You now have factories, mines, shipments, and alchemy labs, all producing millions of cookies for you. You upgrade your facilities to more efficiently produce cookies, and you have completely forgotten that fact that you were once clicking the cookie yourself. You haven't needed to click a cookie for hours, at this stage.

Production rates soar, and you're making more cookies than ever before. But one facility eludes you. It's a facility that costs many more cookies to purchase than any other facility before it. 

The Antimatter Condenser. 

What does it do? What's so special about it that it costs that much? You don't know the answers to this, but you know that you need to have this facility. You've waited so long, and there's no point in stopping now when there's still one more thing to buy.

......

Hours have passed. The Grannies are in full rebellion, which you are only just able to cope with. Despite that, you've now generated enough cookies to be able to afford your last remaining desire. The Antimatter Condenser is within your reach. You suppress the Grannies once again before you prepare yourself for whatever is to come next. 

You click on the 'purchase' button. The number next to 'Antimatter Condenser' ticks over from '0' to '1'. You now have your own Antimatter Condenser.

The game continues. Your Antimatter Condenser is producing so many cookies, you are soon able to afford another Antimatter Condenser. And another one. You now have over a hundred Antimatter Condensers, producing more cookies than you could ever use. The game has reached a point where the only reason to continue is to accumulate more - to see just how far you can go. And all this time the Grannies are constantly toiling away on your cookie farms, their rebellions being put down by your hand whenever they crop up, ultimately powerless against your rule.

Why do we want the Antimatter Condenser so much? What will make us desire it so badly that we would literally sell our own Grandmas into slavery to get one? The Antimatter Condenser can represent any real-life luxury good - any object of desire. What Cookie Clicker does here is represent some of the lengths we will go to in order to acquire these objects, and the unknowable qualities they must possess in order to be attractive to us. For example, Coca-Cola is 'The Real Thing (TM)' - it possesses a quality that you just can't describe - you've got to try it. Luxury sports cars are 'exotic', and give an experience that is impossible to recreate any other way. The Antimatter Condenser is the ultimate luxury, the final step on your path towards cookie-domination. And once you've bought one, they only thing left to do is to buy another one.

Cookie Clicker shines a light back on the player. It frequently makes you ask questions of yourself - the most common being 'Why am I doing this?' (a question often posed among our own suffering Cookie Clicker addicts). The absurdity of being a game about generating Cookies brings into stark reflection the nature of our behaviours. We often cannot believe that we are going to all these efforts, and spending so much of our time, to progress in a game that is, ultimately, about Cookies. But we did it anyway. Although a group of us were addicted to playing Cookie Clicker, the truth is that Cookie Clicker only made us aware of an existing addiction we all had: an addiction we've developed naturally as a result of living within a materialist society, where often the accumulation of 'things' is emphasised above all else. Plus it made you sell your grandma into slavery.

'You disgust me.' - Kingofallcosmos