"People are idiots."

August 3, 2024 2:13 AM

What does it mean that hundreds of thousands of players are clicking on a banana? Clicker games are the inevitable end-point of the rise of bots and microtransactions.
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs (23 comments total)

That Pavlov was right?
posted by GallonOfAlan at 2:49 AM on August 3 [1 favorite]

Less monetized, more challenging: banana or taco?
posted by chavenet at 3:16 AM on August 3 [2 favorites]

I wondered what had happened to Monkeyfilter.
posted by Phanx at 3:36 AM on August 3 [9 favorites]

Monetization of clicker games is what's inevitable, since the genre itself (as the article notes) started off as a joke, and spawned some truly inspired variants like Universal Paperclips. I mean, people are on the whole not geniuses, sure. But this bent of criticism is of a feather with the anti-Farmville screeds of yore.
posted by grumpybear69 at 4:26 AM on August 3 [5 favorites]

I like clicker games. On a few occasions I have been too sick to open my eyes for more than a few seconds, unable to sleep, almost to sick to move, and in too much distress from being sick to be able to tolerate doing nothing. When I hit the sweet spot of also being able to sit up, clicker games are ideal. I can sit there with my eyes closed, moving my forefinger rhythmically, and every few minutes open up my eyes for a few seconds to see what progress I have made and check if I have made enough progress to change move on to the next one in the series of icons I have to click.

I can't say they are fun, but clicker games do have their uses, and they have gotten me through some unpleasant days by turning off the idea that the hours are interminable and giving me a sense that steady progress is being accomplished.

I am happy to say that I have very seldom been so wretchedly sick that I have had to resort to playing them but I keep a couple in my Steam Games Library, just in case.
posted by Jane the Brown at 4:28 AM on August 3 [17 favorites]

"Siri, define capitalism."

Clicker games are the product of stripping a game down to nothing but the microtransactions and trading elements, which is likely why the developers of “Banana” don't care if it's bots or humans playing, so long as users are buying and trading content. They're earning about 10% of every sale between players, human or not.
posted by AlSweigart at 5:02 AM on August 3 [2 favorites]

Yeah the games are fine it's capitalism that sucks.

There's tons of entertaining completely free clicker games, and I'll not judge anyone who enjoys them on occasion. The good ones manage to give you a feel of how deal with problems of constrained optimization of interlinked nonlinear dynamic processes too. This kind of stuff is super hard to do well rigorously and formally, but if you give it the right UI people think it's fun and start to learn how to approach it intuitively.
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:15 AM on August 3 [2 favorites]

I made a fairly pointless lo-fi parody of clickers last year for some reason: CLICK
posted by dng at 6:21 AM on August 3 [3 favorites]

You all are underestimating my need to disassociate from life

A world of pure numbers devoid of context has the appeal of being cheaper than booze

It s the joy of differential calculus without the work
posted by eustatic at 6:35 AM on August 3 [13 favorites]

Metafilter: the joy of differential calculus without the work
posted by FallibleHuman at 7:29 AM on August 3 [7 favorites]

Raph Koster's Theory of Fun, which posited that games are fun because they allow the player to enter flow state, in which learning and task are tightly and interactively linked, is challenged by clicker games. Because most of the time you're not learning, and the challenge doesn't really scale with your experience.

Raph actually addressed this in passing in his GDC keynote last March, Revisiting Fun, and I hunted down the reference. In 2022, Sebastian Deterding (et. al) published Mastering uncertainty: A predictive processing account of enjoying uncertain success in video game play, which posits that some games are fun because of the "dynamic process of reducing uncertainty," and that, when seen through this lens, they align quite well with Raph's model.

I'll just quote the relevant paragraphs here:

Now one may argue that over time, players will learn to expect not just a steady speed of cookie production, but also regular accelerations with every purchase. This is where the kind of upgrades Cookie Clicker offers comes in: while some upgrades are incremental, producing linear accelerations, many upgrades produce compound effects or step changes in the order of magnitude of cookie production speed, accelerating on an exponential curve (Pecorella, 2017). This reliably exceeds expectations—our learned human global expectations for life are linear increases over time (Wagenaar and Timmers, 1979). This, we argue, makes up a basic appeal or sense of getting better in Idle games in addition to that of players improving their actual competencies at the economic meta-game of optimising resource investment choices in Idle games.

One further upshot of the reliable progress structure of Idle games is that one might expect these games to be particularly attractive to players whose life circumstances are highly volatile or frustrating. Such life circumstances set global expectations for error reduction with respect to one’s goals low (Kiverstein et al., 2020). Relative to this irreducible uncertainty in everyday life, Idle games can give players the reliable experience of doing better than expected, thus providing a lift in mood. This aligns with recent arguments and meta-analyses on the recovery potential of ‘easy’ videogames for treating low mood, stress, anxiety, or depression (Pine et al., 2020; Reinecke and Rieger, 2021).

...

Idle games similarly afford reliable experiences of faster-than-expected progress via upgrades that accelerate the speed of their core resource generation. Specifically, they feature upgrades which repeatedly increase progress on an exponential rather than linear scale—which is the human baseline expectation.

There's a bit more in there if you're interested in the cognitive psychology of it.
posted by graphweaver at 7:31 AM on August 3 [9 favorites]

The interaction between exponential progress and diminishing returns is what separates a well designed clicker game from a poor one. Every upgrade eventually plateaus, and that's the driving force behind figuring out where the next upgrade is. You figure out how to get the next one online, and it brings a fresh pulse of exponential acceleration. Then it plateaus again, and you have to line up your next fix.
posted by notoriety public at 8:56 AM on August 3 [3 favorites]

I love incremental games. You don't need any skill, just patience and a little bit of strategy, and I love the rush of unlocking an automation feature—what other games reward you with less gameplay?

I've been playing Fundamental for nearly two months now, and it really boosts my will to live.
posted by Faint of Butt at 9:16 AM on August 3 [2 favorites]

Somewhere in the not too distant past on MetaFilter - and I think it might have been in one of the Kittens Game threads - I snarkily proposed that the logical endgame of clicker games was something with a single button that you clicked and then held for as long as possible. And that was basically it.

And by as long as possible I don't just mean days of clicking and holding a single button, but "gameplay" designed for weeks and months or even years of it.

Maybe with some timed or random modifiers or bonuses like after a certain amount of time holding the button you'd get time/score multiplier bonuses, or the ability to take a timed break from holding the button. Maybe with some sort of anti-bot gameplay that kept people from just putting a touchscreen stylus on the screen and just walking away. And, of course, with some kind of dopamine triggering happy progress noises and graphics that would happen.

And I wish I saved the link for this, but a few months ago I saw a link or briefly saw an article that apparently some tuber or influencer did something like this that was the mobile/app game equivalent of having people touch a car and the last person standing wins the car or prize kind of a trope but decentralized via a phone app.

Sorry for the vagaries, but my takeway is I should probably be more careful about posting snarky dark pattern UI crap like that.
posted by loquacious at 10:00 AM on August 3 [1 favorite]

Why Is A Free BANANA Breaking The Steam Market?
posted by lock robster at 10:02 AM on August 3 [1 favorite]

I wonder if this is a money laundering scheme. Make a game, get a whole lot of bot steam accounts, give them each $100, get them to buy your game's stuff on steam.
posted by scose at 10:04 AM on August 3 [1 favorite]

Clicker games can be useful to calm your mind when you're wound up, but also have no energy, as Jane the Brown notes. It can be just slightly pleasant to feel like you did the smallest of somethings.
posted by theora55 at 10:39 AM on August 3

Let us not forget the late, great Cow Clicker!
posted by mr vino at 10:41 AM on August 3 [3 favorites]

dammit Faint of Butt
posted by cortex at 2:39 PM on August 3 [3 favorites]

BANANA (not the Famicom BANANA) is a game where people can earn real money buying and selling skins, but the game itself is incredibly basic and most players are bots?

Presumably the bots aren't buying, only selling, since those "players" are only in it for the cash. Which seems to mean, the one-third-or-less of human players are carrying this whole system on their backs. I'd guess probably a few whales are spending most of the money, that is then being distributed piecemeal to the bots and what human players there are selling skins.

Either that, or money laundering? Maybe?
posted by JHarris at 5:11 PM on August 3

Raph Koster's Theory of Fun, which posited that games are fun because they allow the player to enter flow state, in which learning and task are tightly and interactively linked, is challenged by clicker games.

Oh, it's challenged by lots of things. I have never yet found a theory of fun that fits all cases, that doesn't ultimately boil down to novelty is fun, and even that sometimes has its faults.

I love incremental games. You don't need any skill, just patience and a little bit of strategy, and I love the rush of unlocking an automation feature—what other games reward you with less gameplay?

Lots of them. The engine behind incremental games is ultimately the same one behind RPGs: you do a lot of one thing, you get rewarded by making that thing easier/faster, and that lets you set your sights on bigger versions of that thing. It's also what makes the expansion phase of 4X games work.

The thing about clicker games is they reduce the thing you do to nearly the simplest possible version. (The very simplest is probably Progress Quest, where advancement is entirely time spent running the game.) Which is itself barely playing it: I'm sure someone will somehow argue with this, but I'll say it: mindless clicking is not fun. All of the fun from this kind of game comes from seeing what gets unlocked next and in what ways it'll take the weight off of clicking. And most of them take a lot of the weight off pretty early, by giving you a way to advance that's time-dependent instead of action-dependent. It seems like there's relatively few clicker games where click rewards meaningfully compete with time rewards. Meaning, we're back to Progress Quest again, although a version with actual decisions to make sometimes.

One thing I'm suspicious of about clicker games is whether they're somehow secretly funded by Logitech, because their left mouse buttons simply cannot stand up to Cookie Clicker.
posted by JHarris at 5:29 PM on August 3 [5 favorites]

zomg (from the article):

The Steam Community Market became so complicated that within a year they had to hire former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis to run it. It’s also had a number of economic crises, usually because of glitches. But last year Valve made an estimated $1 billion from just one kind of loot box in “Counter-Strike.”

posted by spamandkimchi at 2:05 AM on August 4

Relatedly, I recently saw a modern slot machine in action for the first time. I immediately saw it for what it was: a video game with a single input button. (You could pull the lever or push the button but they both did the same thing and the button was faster. I saw no one using the lever.)

A friend showed me how it works: you put in a money card, push the button, watch the columns of symbols roll and flash hypnotically, and then it tells you how much you won or lost (and also how much you maaaybe could have almost won, and vaguely how much more you could win in the middle-distant future if you just keep playing). Then you decide whether or not to push the button again.
That's it. That's the whole gameplay loop.

TL;DR: Slot machines are just clicker games designed by psyops professionals.
posted by Leeway at 9:28 AM on August 4 [7 favorites]