Thoughts on Cookie Clicker

So back in December, BoingBoing posted a list of a few browser games. I bookmarked it because my son is interested in the gaming industry (like all teenagers, I suppose, and to a certain extent like myself).  Then a couple of days ago we took a look at Cookie Clicker.

It's fun. It's essentially an investment game: you click on a cookie to bake cookies. You use cookies to buy various implements that can bake cookies automatically. You use cookies to buy upgrades, which can adjust all kinds of variables in the game. Achievements translate into additional upgrades, and so on. There are a lot of fiddly details, it's all written with a great sense of humor, and the jargon makes it even more fun ("I got a click frenzy last night that put me over the top to buy an antimatter condenser and that got my cookies-per-second up above ten million." And so on, with the Grandmapocalypse and the larval stages of Santa Claus and reindeer giving you three billion cookies and kitten engineers that work for milk, etc.)

It's really fun. And there is a community of people who play pretty seriously. It's written in JavaScript, so its guts are wide open for the enterprising hacker. (There are even specific achievement badges if the game detects you cheating!) There's a community Wiki that explain some of the math, explain back story, and suggest strategy.

And there's an add-on, Cookie Monster, that lets you work at a higher level. It shows you costs in terms of seconds until you'll have that many cookies, it works out BCI and ROI on various investments, and so on.  (The Github development branch is here; it looks like it might be based on Node, so it's pretty interesting in its own right.)

Which got me to thinking.

This is a perfect context in which to explore strategy. In other words, we can define strategies in terms of "if this condition holds, take this action" or "if this condition holds, prefer this bias" - and run them multiple times to compare them. We could look at specific events, draw graphs, I dunno - interesting things! But in general, this kind of approach could probably map well onto real-world business decisions (and of course the theory involved is already out there).

I started down this path once before, back when Tower Generator games in Flash roamed the earth, and wrote some interesting DSLs in Python to fire events on a schedule - but I couldn't easily work with strategy at an adaptive level because I couldn't read the numbers (open-source OCR is still a no-man's land, actually.) It would be really fulfilling to do it right now - in a JavaScript game, after all, nothing needs to be OCR'd because it's already all available in the processor state.

Then, too, analyzing the design of CC while also attempting to determine what players enjoy would be instructive. Split testing of games? Sometimes people want to play the same game again so they can improve their intuitive strategy, so split testing can't be universal. But you'd have to learn some interesting things, probably involving categories of player that could all be addressed (or simply target your games - or game play during the game - to the player type).

(You could see that as the strategy of the game writer...)

The notion of an open-ended strategy game of this sort is also attractive. All this is already based on upgrades and rule-changing things - why not make it truly open-ended with a little programming language and let people come up with them in a network or something?  Just a thought.

It would also be fun to explore the idea of games within games, as CC is already exploring (he has a beta dungeon game you can access through the factories). A whole Internet of games or something, I dunno. A metagame, perhaps?

A "game toolkit" is a fun idea, as always (and see another BoingBoing feature, Playfic, a toolkit/community/hosting ... thing for Zorkoidal text adventure games).  (See also the Tower Defense generator I ran into last year.)