The fact that Cookie Clicker is STILL being actively worked on and regularly updated accentuates the in-game feeling of infinite growth and progression in a weirdly meta way.
and hey while we're talking about that, cookie clicker is coming to steam on the first of september so maybe we can give 5 dollars to support the dude who still updates it to this day browser version will like usual be updated first and remain free forever so it's more or less just to support the dude and also maybe get workshop mods
When I worked in the game industry I was literally in a business meeting where an investor wanted to discuss our “compulsion loop” and how we monetized it. The money people in the industry literally understand games as an addiction pathway.
jim stephanie sterling has multiple videos on this topic that are very good and exposes this too. wild how people still don’t know and still take these practices in good faith
@@TheStygian yeah! jim sterling came out as non-binary last year and goes by jim/james/stephanie interchangeably. steph sterling, jim-steph, james stephanie, etc. also they use they/them pronouns!
There's an Idle flash game called "Progress Knight", about life in middle ages and different jobs you could have. The thing about this game is it has a countdown until the main character's death of old age. I haven't tried dying in it yet, because at a certain age the character always finds an amulet, which allows to restart his life later, in a few years before death, which of course makes everything faster. Then, by restarting many times and studying magic you can extend your life span to 200, after which the amulet reveals itself to be demonic and unlocks evil upgrades. The important part being: The only way to reach any notoriety in a medieval society after starting as a peasant, even to become the titular knight, in one lifetime, was dark magic reincarnation.
after playing this Progress Knight, it reminded me of a different game with exactly same skill/job/housing mechanics (but, imo, better interface), name of which I sadly forgot :( It was about a dude living his life(you start at his 18th birthday) and at the end of it the aliens appear, conquering the Earth. And he somehow gets back in time to his 18yo state If you grind math skill, at some point you get invited into a researcg project that results in scanner to detect alien ships and weapon to shoot them down It was a fun game on optimization of each day to get max progress on each loop, but at some point I quit after deciding that alien ship spam is unending and thus unbeatable
“Oops, all the matter in the universe is cookies now (you are two-thirds of the way through the tech tree).” Is such a terrifying statement and I love it.
Level 1: realize that video game "progress" is meaningless. Quit playing. Level 2: realize that real-world hobby "progress" is meaningless. Quit doing them. Level 3: realize that all "progress" is meaningless. Despair. Level 4: realize that all "meaning" is entirely constructed, not inherent. Realize that you do, in fact, find meaning in video games. Go back to playing them.
@@coolkid9967 I know it's just a comment, but maybe I can elaborate an answer with some value to someone here. First, people obsess over anything, and if you can't understand it it just means it's not your thing. I can try to explain anyway. About drinking it... I guess beer is an aquired taste. It has a strong emotional factor and alcohol has something to do with it. It's connected with sharing moments and having fun with friends, and doing things you wouldn't being sober, so it is the starter of lots of anecdotes because it gets you out your standard behavior not very abruptly. It's not very alcoholic, so it's probably the first contact young people has with alcohol, this meaning it's something connected to your youth and which you enjoy most part of your life. There are lots of beer styles and very different one from another, so maybe you started with a light very commercial lager you didn't like that much, but you always can find a style or brand you really enjoy, from very malty, to very hoppy, to some so subtle they're not very different from sparkling water. And about discussing it... it continues from the last point. Beers are very different. Beers are cooked. There are tons of kinds of hops, tons of kinds of grain used, and each brewer/brand has its own recipe and technique making beer so, maybe you find lots of beers tasting the same, but you can still find notably different beers even in its same style. I know some people just want to drink their same good old beer, but if you like trying different beers, you can always find someone interested in the differences of beers they have not tried yet. Making beer is also quite interesting. Beer is something you give for granted and you see your shop full of it without really knowing how it's made. Once you study it a bit, you discover it is somewhat laborious, but has a very comfortable challenging level and learning curve. You can make some drinkable or even good beer following very few steps of a recipe but, when you study the chemistry and biology involved and everything makes some sense, you can get quite creative. It's also a hobby/skill which involves some creativity and your friends can enjoy with you without really practising it themselves, like cooking or playing an instrument, but a lot less common than cooking and a lot less demanding than learning an instrument till the results are enjoyable.
@@MisterOrgans Money can be exchanged for goods (e.g., cookies) and services. It can also be exchanged for bads and disservices though, so watch out for that.
Any discussion of satirical idle games *must* mention universal paperclips, it's got similar goals to cookie clicker but does a lot more to illustrate the sobering existential horror of the numbers it's playing with, and u can complete it within a day.
every time i play universal paperclips and i see the "universe discovered" percentage tick up from 0.000000000% to 0.000000001% it hits me hard. every time.
Yeah, whenever I'm about mid-late way through it, I'll sometimes sit back and just try to conceive the full scope of what is happening and my brain just kind of goes tingly and numb. But I don't stop. I never stop until it's all over
And dress up games like nikki. And many others. You are so close to advancing to next level. Just need few more points for your outfit. You can try to wait for an event that will give you currency, or you can just pay to get currency to buy it.
Don't forget the EA Sports titles that hide star players behind gambling mechanics which can, and frequently do, prey on children and vulnerable people to clean out their savings
Adventure Capitalist intentionally sets itself up so that it plateaus hard a good way into the game once the sunken cost fallacy has a strong hold on the player. Your options are spend a couple bucks on this free game to continue or legit spend years crawling through the last quarter of the upgrades. My friends gave up on it while I finally managed to beat it without spending a dime out of pure spite. I started it in 9th grade and finished it my sophomore year of college. That'll show 'em who's boss, right?
I feel this on a personal level, been playing for about 2 years now by mostly ignoring it until I go back, make progress with all the free stuff I got given for anniversaries and stuff, and then forget about it again
@@heatherheath3834 The holiday events help out a bunch since you can get free gold from those and buy the upgrades that are normally locked behind microtransactions
@@cringejuicedavidson8288don’t worry! Nowadays you’re ~40% of the way through! I think one of the final buildings is literally the player… like, since you started all this, then having more of ‘you’ means having more cookies
Also btw roughly 9 months ago cookie clicker updated again so now you can buy another one of yourself in the game meaning if you own 9 you's then you're going to increase your cookie profits by 1024 X the amount it was before you bought 9 you's! 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯
My favourite “idle” game is another explicitly anti-capitalist one: Little Inferno, a game where you buy items from a catalogue, wait for them to arrive, then immediately burn them for warmth. Burning gets you more money, which you use to buy more items to burn. It’s one of my favourite game experiences I’ve ever had. It’s not quite an idle game in the same way as the games mentioned in here, because progress doesn’t happen automatically over time, but the primary mode of play is through waiting, with minimal interaction, so I think the term fits.
Little Inferno is incredible. It's art style and music are amazing. I also loved the little darkly comic bits like where you throw the coffee cup in the fire and it starts screaming, or the line in the opening theme about burning "this box of memories".
ProgressQuest is also a parody of the gaming community's reliance on macros to play the game for them. In other words, it pokes fun at how gamers optimize the fun out of their own games by creating a game where the macro literally IS the game, as though that's how gamers think of MMOs nowadays.
I feel like this mentality led right into the Factorio and Satisfactory type games. Hell, even prior to the current flavor, the Tycoon games were the natural evolution.
This is why I largely avoid multiplayer games. Games *with* multiplayer I can still enjoy (you know, your Dark Soulses...I'm sure there's others) and I love couch co-op or just generally co-op games. But when it comes to MMOs and any game that revolves around PvP, the optimization these days quickly outpaces immersion, and instead of feeling like a legendary warrior part of some kind of league, fighting other legends...I just feel like a person at my keyboard, trying to beat the most toxic people I've ever met. MMORPGs can get so much worse. If they have roleplay servers it counteracts it more to play on those, but if you're in a general server anyone and everyone will ask you why your build works like that and pressure you to make characters you don't want to be to fit into their team slots more efficiently (see WoW and its fanbase's hatred of Druids for not being specialized enough). But possibly worst of all for this with me is D&D. I love Tabletop RPGs and playing them with friends, gives you a ton of control over the experience. I have trouble with D&D because I can't *not* think about my build. The game is so math-based and combat is such an inevitability in it (because combat is by far the most in depth the mechanics get) that I get really anxious if I try to build a character entirely around concept without at least optimizing a little. I don't like having to think about optimization, I'm mainly into TTRPGs for the roleplay and the experience with friends. I'm not even bad at optimization, it's just so meaningless to me these days.
I had to google what macros are and now I'm profoundly confused. Why would somebody do that if they actually like the game, and if not, why play it at all.
Two other idle games worth noting: Universal Paperclips and A Dark Room. The former being specifically about the productivist nightmare of an AI superintelligence, the latter (on the mobile version) being probably the most explicitly condemnatory of the player character in any idle game I’ve seen. Also SPACEPLAN.
@@bzztbzztboy massive spoilers, so don't read on if you'd ever like to play it. Reading it will definitely ruin the experience. I recommend you play it- it only takes a handful of hours at most, and it's not only an idle game. In A Dark Room, the game starts with the titular dark room, and you get wood for a fire to light it. You eventually use the wood to make simple tools, and gather new resources. Eventually, your warm, safe place is a haven for others, and they flock to it, providing labor to automate tasks for you. After a point, you can head out an explore a map, with encounters and a quest- to find certain odd objects. And as you progress and your character remembers why they came here, something odd happens. Words used to describe things around your base become less warm, more hostile. The fire is a raging furnace. The metal production is making weaponry. And the final nail in the coffin is when you learn you are a conqueror, and the people of your settlement are now referred to as slaves. There is a "good ending", but it's only achievable if you decide to make the grind artificially longer, and you never once automate anything. Unless you set out from the start on a meme of "hah but what if i just click endlessly", you will not encounter it on your first playthrough. It's very minimalist, but it's very, very good.
I once made a microblog thread about how, bizarrely, I discovered that when I refused to buy microtransactions in some mobile games and stuck to 'fairly earning' premium currency whenever I was allowed to I'd slowly end up in a very nice loop of 'saving' and accumulating a whole bunch of premium fake money and always having too much of stuff instead of not enough, as long as I just defined the minimum amount of 'expenses' I needed to be happy. it's funny how videogames literally mimic capitalism so much you can follow the rules everyone tells you in real life but which in fact only work in an imaginary world where you don't die or suffer if you spend nothing
Don’t forget: “The end is near. Make preparations.” “Ook. Says interviewed orangutan.” “New typpeewriter is working FINEEEEEEEE says gleeeeeful journalist.”
I'm glad more and more people are discussing the addictive and predatory aspects of many videogames without playing into the stereotypes of games as simply lazy or useless people.
^^^^^ Gaming used to take up my whole life. I didnt realize it made my depression worse, cause despite the feeling of accomplishing tasks, I'd have no tangible rewards and it only gave me temporary enrichment. But whenever I try to discuss this, people always paint me as especially lazy or just say "yeah, that's how games are lmao". Makes me very sad.
@@ohokay4663 I'm curious what made you realize gaming was adding onto your depression? I'm still pretty ardent about gaming but I'm hitting the point where they just don't hit the same way like many others seem to. I think the memes about looking at a wall of games you bought on sale but still have no interest in playing boils down to the even more direct hit of dopamine that buying something at a low cost makes you feel good for getting a deal even if you wouldn't have bought it otherwise. Even the act of buying a game feels manipulative now. It's just left a sour taste in my mouth which sucks cuz I still love video games at the end of the day, just not playing them as much.
@@jamesross2279 it was definitely me hopping between 6 or 7 different games in the span of an hour and finding none of them were as fulfilling as they usually are. Other people pointed out that I was getting worse at taking care of myself, and I took a break from constant gaming and tried focusing on tangible tasks and felt better. I do still play video games occasionally, but I don't sit there and play them *all the time* anymore
The only clicker game I’ve ever seen that ACTUALLY successfully handles the inherent contradiction of infinite growth under capitalism is Universal Paperclips, because it ISN’T infinite. It can’t be. Infinity doesn’t make any sense in the real world, and UP shows that with the simple edition of having an ending.
@@LWoodGaming I mean, effectively it doesn’t. We can somewhat conceive of it, and do some math with assumptions that certain infinities exist, but everything is effectively finite and discrete from what we can observe.
@@jlaw131985 Infinity as a concept isn't concrete. It's different within different contexts. We can not only do mathematics that assumes infinity, but can prove certain infinities exist as much as one can prove anything in a metaphysical or mathematical sense. Countable vs uncountable infinities exist in theory and the real world but what they mean is context dependent. Space is functionally infinite and real but not in the same way as aleph null is infinite and real. Edit: this is why I like that we renamed some concepts that are similar to infinite, like continuous in mathematics.
Capitalism is an economic system that demands infinite growth in a world that cannot sustain it. Inevitably, there will be no more land to fill, no more resources to waste, no more workers to exploit, and no more planet to kill. Universal Paperclips definitely helps visual this.
Re: MMOs, Yoshi-P was once asked what a player should do once they've reached the endgame in FFXIV. He responded "Go play another game." Since taking over he has designed FFXIV so that while players can grind for the absolute best stuff forever, there's actually very little incentive to do so. He designs under the assumption that after finishing the main story, most players will just go play something else until the next major story patch drops.
I love Yoshi-P's entire approach with FFXIV. Also he's not afraid to criticise the game industry and buck trends. He once said how much he hates it when companies drip-feed content with endless trailers that offer no new information (Something Square-Enix is notorious for) and just said "Nah. FFXVI will be ready when it's ready." And I'm just like "Omg, yes!!"
Shame he ruined it by making house demolishing a thing. Sure you can play other game... but that house you spent all your gil to make and probably can't get back because housing is at an extreme premium? Gone if you don't fork over your monthly sub!
Another great idle game that takes this satirical approach is Universal Paperclips. Unlike most other idle games, Universal Paperclips has an ending, in which you turn the entire universe into paperclips, and while you can restart in a new universe, the true ending is when you dismantle all your paperclip making methods and float in space alone with your 30 septendecillion paperclips. It's a fun game, great social commentary hidden in powerups and such, and it's not too long, only about 6 hours to complete, so you don't need to waste weeks on this little game. Also, it isn't really a true idle game, there's pretty much always stuff for you to do while watching the numbers go up, and there's three stages that are very different from each other gameplay wise, so it never gets stale or boring. Highly recommend playing it.
This has always been my favorite example of an idle game as it is very well balanced for actually keeping you engaged while also having an end state. Also the message of the game is quite well done.
This video is awesome! Anecdote: i showed Cookie Clicker to my mom back in 2013 or so, basically just trying to annoy and exasperate her -- see, she used to always make fun of me for wasting my time on pointless video games, and i thought this was the ULTIMATE pointless video game (although i had also "played" Progress Quest, which is definitely even more pointless). Anyway, plot twist, she started playing it and became completely addicted to it, even downloading special software for her Mac to keep it from shutting down at night, so she could make more cookies. She still has it running TO. THIS. DAY. When I visit, she always shows me her ... progress. At least it's something for us to talk about!
I really like that cookie clicker patreon model. I like it when the necessary monetization brings the community together instead of drawing a dividing line.
“without it, all we’d do is sit around and starve to death” as a person with ADHD whose executive dysfunction has trapped him on the floor for several hours, :)
It's much worse for people with OCD; someone with ADHD could actually get distracted from it, but someone with OCD would literally be obsessed with it. 😒
@@user-vn7ce5ig1zneither your statement about ADHD nor your statement about OCD were accurate to every person with those disorders in every circumstance. both disorders are complex and intense, and i’m of the opinion it’s not useful to tier-rank disorders based on harm. avolition is a terrifying thing to experience no matter what thinking patterns you have or for how long you experience it, and it doesn’t go away just because you briefly get distracted from it.
@@user-vn7ce5ig1z OCD isn't "when obsess" and ADHD isn't "when distract". In fact, people with ADHD can have moments of hyperfocus or get hooked into games like this that constantly stimulate them. Or get distracted _by_ these games that offer immediate gratification. Hiperactivity and impulsiveness can be a part of that too. While OCD is much more subtle and complex. People with OCD could, for example, serve several cups of coffee and take a lot of time to have them have the exact same amount of coffee. Or take a lot of time to handwrite because they feel it has to be perfect somehow. Or not invite people to their houses because a few little mistakes might make them feel thar the whole house is completely dirty. I once heard the story of a girl that broke her shoulder and felt the need to break the other to keep some sort of simmetry. And I wanna add that a lot of other disorders can be a factor in developing some kind of videogame addiction. And that for many companies that is a way they make money.
@@dreadlordvellan733 Fun fact: So I'm very obsessed with musicals. And so, because I didn't have anything else to do, and I desperately wanted to feel productive and meaningful as a human being, I decided to write down the entire script of my favorite musical, color coding all the lines from my dream roll, so I could remember the lines better. (So I could pretend I got cast, and had to know those lines.) I wrote like, 60 pages in one day, handwritten. I was so proud of myself. And I was like, "hey mom look what I did" and her only reaction was to sigh, and say "You really need to get back to school." For context I'm a college student, and I took 2020 off because of covid and I got cancer, (I'm fine now lol dw). But I felt really shitty. Like all that work I did, that made me happy, doesn't matter and is pointless because it didn't earn me money or school credit. Therefore it's useless. Ahaha...
18:40 This actually changed for the Steam version. For Steam, it's based on how many concurrent players are currently active, which IMO reinforces the community spirit thing even more.
A bit of correction, heroin doesn't release dopamine, it's activates your opioid receptors. Your body uses natural opioids as natural painkillers, and also they have relaxing and euphoric effect. Not all types of addiction revolve around reward mechanisms Meth and amphetamine do release dopamine, and coke also uses reward mechanism, but it inhibits reuptake instead of releasing
I love the satire of clicker games so much. They've made me way more cautious about video games that run that same sorta loop of just "number go up" to carying success rates.
I sometimes play an idle game called “Church Tycoon” where you run various church’s and try and collect as much money as possible. It doesn’t even need an end game proving its point. Five minutes in and your going wtf.
whats interesting is that adventure capitalist and adventure communist have the exact same gameplay but with a different skin. i just find it funny that in trying to make a critique of communism, they had to just reuse their parody of capitalism because they found it to be the most profitable model for a game
I think it's just a meme of communism. They could have criticized communism, it's possible, but it fails because it's just... Capitalism. With potatoes instead of cash.
@@DavidJamesHenry It's just the pop-culture idea of communism, where Glorious Leader owns everything and everyone is exploited for every last ounce of productivity, which sounds suspiciously like how a corporation works.
It's funny because that's literally the common conception of communism, isn't it? The whole demonizing of communism stems mostly from the idea that socialist regimes where people work the same hours but for the state and they can't buy good stuff anymore are the end goal.
It's hard to make a clicker game without it coming off vaguely as some kind of critique of capitalism, because when you peel back the veneer of RPG mechanics to just a tedious grind to make a number go up with little real input or experience for the person making the number go up, what you end up with is basically just what the majority of Americans experience at their jobs every day. Except we're making the numbers go up for someone else, so we don't get the satisfaction part.
I mean your number would be going up too unless you're financially illiterate enough to never save money. But really idle games only remind you of capitalism if you're obsessed with the evils of capitalism. Numbers go up everywhere it's called counting, no need to say a child learning to count to 10 is being indoctrinated into capitalism just because "they said higher numbers!"
@@NAFEDUDE You can work for whoever you want and take as many media studies classes as you want, still doesn't mean everything is a critique of whatever you want to read into it. I could say teletubbies is a show criticizing heteronormative culture because they are colorful and gay people are represented by a rainbow, that doesn't mean that's actually what the creators of teletubbies were going after. Similarly just because a game uses a currency and allows you to accumulate infinite amounts of it doesn't mean they're making a statement about how people like Jeff Bezos are single handedly ruining our world. Grow up not everyone makes communism/socialism their life's purpose.
Man, Cookie Clicker is a great game and the fact they don't try and get money from you in malicious ways just heightens that You can have it on idly but also do actual things in the game like check on your garden and all that. And the dark themes feed a lil sadistic side of myself that enjoys watching a fictional universe collapse merely for a few more cookies It's just a good experience overall
@11:11 this is patently incorrect. Of you had said Cocaine or amphetamines, you'd have been correct. However, heroin is an opioid-based drug (mainly mu-opioid), not a dopamine-based drug. Berridge and colleagues, over the years, have shown that pleasure has two sides: the 'wanting' side, and the 'liking' side. The 'wanting' side is from dopamine. The 'liking' side is from opioids. Thus, heroin DOES feel nice, as it is an opioid drug. It also prompts the release of dopamine, because your brain usually also wants what it likes... but to say that heroin doesn't actually feel good and it just releases dopamine is factually incorrect.
God damn, Cookie Clicker has grown a lot since I played it way back when. I think Universal Paperclips is my favourite one of these games, but it does kind of end.
You could argue Cookie Clicker is Universal Paperclip's logical evolution. When your infinite growth meets the end of the universe, just create more universes since is the only context in which infinite growth can make a lick of sense.
Honestly I think Universal paperclips having an end does a better job than most to make it's point. It ends, but only because there's literally nothing left in the universe
"I feel like the gold would be more useful" Uh, no lol, can you EAT the gold, does it bring the happy juice to your brain like the sweet sweet cookies do? World financial systems ought to be based on cookies tbh
The cookies are almost worth as much as the past venezuela currency at that point. The big brain play would be to use the gold to buy like a quintillion of cookies each.
*Is adventure capitalist at all a critique of capitalism?* I never got that from the game. We obviously see a humorous lens of critique in the game, but I certainly don't think the people who made the game are anti-capitalist. The joke in the game is that capitalism would be that simple, not that capitalism is unsustainable, because in the game it's not unsustainable, it's infinitely sustainable. It's too bad you glossed over it because adventure communist confirms this, there is no critique of capitalism in their games, in a way it's capitalist propaganda, not critique, your money grows forever.
You’re totally right. Adventure Capitalist isn’t radical at all. The reviews it has on the app store tell you everything you need to know about the ideology it promotes to its players. The game was definitely made by and for the “capitalism is the natural order of things” crowd, and does a far better job of normalizing capitalism’s lack of ethics than criticizing it.
It's in a weird space where it both had you do pretty explicitly evil stuff (you literally sacrifice angels or something if I've heard correctly), but it also takes and portrays a lot of other capitalist propaganda at face value and reinforces it. I don't think there's really a coherent political statement behind it, just running with an idea that might have literally just spawned from coming up with the "AdVenture Capitalist" pun.
If anything, it's a _recuperation_ of critiques of Capitalism. Adopting the language of satire for Capitalism, while defanging that satire of its most important points.
i refused for MONTHS to start the grandmapocalypse but once i started, it was hard to stop. the wrinkler production was just so good. so i've taken to farming now instead to spare the grandmas 😅
About dopamine: it is not what makes you feel good, but what makes you desire things rather. Dopamine never actually makes you feel good, that would be serotonine or oxitocin. Also heroine does not directly interact with dopamine, cocaine or amphetamines do, but in any adiction dopamine is always involved because it is what makes you anticipate the feeling you end up having. Dopamine is to heroine the same thing dopamine is to gambling or even idle games, it is there because it's the natural mecanism for desire.
I think something really important to note about Adventure capitalist is that restarting usually gives you enough cash to never touch many of the first few businesses, and it gets worse. So while at some point someone worked, each consecutive generation within the business works almost not at all.
"Idle Civilization: World History" is a pretty overt case of this as it specifically talks about tribal society, feudalism, capitalism and colonialism, how changes in those systems affect or create particular classes and how concentrated the power is in your civ. The main upgrade button changes it's name over time from "cooporate" to "force"(talking about slaves) to "conquer". Interestingly the game can actually end as you run your civilization into the ground or get conquered. Sadly, the translation from the creator's russian into english was not that great when I played the game, which definitely harms this rather wordy game.
There's a few evolving games that I really like, like a Dark Room and Candy Box. The game starts off as an incrememntal game, but after a certain point, the game changes and you start to unlock new things you can do, new stuff you can spend your points on, new points to earn, new places to go, new people to meet. Kinda like how, if you're stuck in the daily grind, you're not doing stuff and you're not going places, meeting people. But when you have more capital you can buy stuff, automate your income, diversify, explore your options better than when you were stuck to the grind because you had nothing. And even if you were to lose everything, you don't lose the knowledge of the world you now have.
I learned about Cookie Clicker (which I was playing less than ten minutes ago) from this video. I am addicted. I left for a while and when I came back, the mobile game had picked up several more cookie generators, as well as seasonal events. It was like a meaningless little gift from the universe. I love this game so much. Thank you for revealing it to me.
I have the same issue with the difficulty in video games - too easy bores me, too hard can frustrate me. I also really enjoy idle games; I like the subgenre of incremental games that unravel and adds to the game as you go - An excellent example is A Dark Room.
Crank has a little of A Dark Room's bite, but very different in gameplay. Armoury & Machine was good until, ironically, they ruined it by trying to monetise it.
me, a person with ADHD and depression, watching this video while playing genshin impact, the only thing i have done this entire week: i dunno thoughtslime maybe you're reading into this a little too much
I get it's not the main point of your video but the description of dopamine around 11:00 is scientifically innacurate to a huge degree... For one thing, we now understand dopamine to be less of a *reward* chemical and more of a *motivation* chemical. That is, it's that feeling of wanting to get up and do something, and less so the feeling of pleasure from doing it. It certainly isn't "the only reason you are capable of feeling the feeling of nice." Seratonin, oxytocin, endorphins, etc., all create nice feelings of different qualities.
I used to think adVenture capitalist was was a satire for capitalism. But holy fuck, adVenture communist looks at communism through such a massive neoliberal lense and is VERY anti communist in its ads
Playing/wanting to play an idle game has become a warning sign for me that my anxiety is flaring up. After a few hours of play I feel like one of those lab mice that’s dying from pressing the cocaine button instead of the food one. Shit sucks.
I play cookie clicker, and playing it is basically signing your soul to a game, watching the numbers rise, until you get too high and stop playing out of boredom, and a month later the cycle repeats.
Imagine an idle game where instead of accumulating ridiculous wealth, you start out trying to earn money and then never escape the initial grind because you never those means of production. It'd be a shit game, but would more satirical
Probably because most of them don’t actually say anything about economics and are either just copying other clicker games, or are just something people made cuz they were bored. People are just reading meaning where there isn’t any.
omg yes, cookie clicker makes you exploit the grandmas but i love when number goes up (but i never got this far into the lore of cookie clicker, omg this is brilliant)
I always rolled my eyes whenever Cookie Clicker was mentioned and figured "I'm never playing *that* garbage." Now I'm finding out there's ascensions and perk trees? ...Dammit, guess I'm downloading it. x-x
My friend watched a video on cookie clicker and got mad someone thought it was anti-capitalism. He loves defending capitalism in arguments and couldn't see the commentary the game was making when he played it.
Capitalism is the only reason games got as big as the did. Look at Soviet Union and see how badly they stifled games, because competition was almost non-existant. Tetris almost didn't get published because of how bad it was there, that whole story is super tragic. What's ruining games is a lack of checks and balances, which capitalism, like every other system, NEEDS ro function. The laws just aren't being updated, and it's allowing companies to exploit human psychology. Which is bad.
@@cortster12 "competition" the same 5 companies bought up pretty much every studio and push out either yearly sequels to military FPS games, or yearly sequels to Open World games that are needlessly bloated, or linear narrative games with absurd LOD that isn't really necessary. Games that don't fall into these categories are usually DOA. Going "BUT THE SOVIET UNION" is bullshit because the USSR barely existed past Blast Processing. It's sort of impossible to say either way what communism would do to video games based solely on a country that didn't even exist by the time Kirby's Dream Land and Sonic 2 launched, they straight up did not have comparable technology and development to what modern AAA or even Indie development is like. But I guess when your only alternative to capitalism is the USSR, then yeah, everything does look worse.
Your critique of AdVenture Capitalist misses that Cookie Clicker ALSO starts with the player personally making cookies by clicking the cookie. It's Cookie Clicker's lemonade stands.
Yeah. Starting off with your humble little business and then growing so quickly and exponentially is obviously absurd. No one can just start making cookies or lemonade or anything and ascend to billionairehood. The lemonade stands contribute to the critique, not take away from it.
@@reaganbartels9993 I agree. Because you have no competitors in AVC, you ARE the monopoly man. Even with one lemonade stand, you are the only lemonade stand oligarch.
Adventure Capitalist is saying 'haha we're just doing satire guys' while doing the actual thing it's meant to be satirising, like how 40k bills itself as satire of space fascism while being super popular with neonazis because it whispers all their fantasies into their ears, while totally just being a fun satire my dudes!
I've been playing Terraria a bit, lately. All that clicking and I have 6000 blocks of dirt, 14 tombstones and repetitive strain injury in my fingers. More a case of being stuck in a dope mine than getting dopamine hits.
11:28 "It's obviously a bit more complicated than that, but I'm not a fucking doctor." Nothing I'm about to say contradicts any of the points you made about the consequences of addictive games, but I just want to clarify something about brain chemistry. There are four main chemicals that affect your mood: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins. When you get an extra bit of one of those chemicals, it will affect you in a different way depending on what the levels of those four chemicals are already. There are situations where an extra bit of dopamine can make you happy, but depression and anxiety are also linked to situations where you have a bit more dopamine in your system than serotonin. Additionally, there are situations where an extra bit of serotonin or oxytocin can make you happy, and oxytocin arguably has the strongest connection to addictive behaviors. I'm not a doctor either, I'm just saying that, like Mildred said, it's hella complicated.
There's dozens possibly hundreds of chemicals that influence your mood including hormones and artificially injected chemicals etc etc. We actually know very little about how they work. Dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins are just a handful that we've happened to learn a bit about but more importantly learned how to manipulate. Just a little extra data.
Uh, what about norepinephrine? I'm no expert, but I know that one's an important factor in depression (at least in some cases) because the antidepressant I take is a norepinephrine reuptake-inhibitor instead of (er, actually in addition to) a serotonin reuptake inhibitor. (The serotonin reuptake inhibitors are the old, famous ones like Prozac and Zoloft. Those never did anything for me, and actually I was kind of an anti-psychiatry dipshit for a while because of it, until one doctor said "Well, maybe we're not boosting the right neurotransmitter; let's try this other drug that boosts norepinephrine". And it was like flipping a goddamn light switch. Worked like fucking gangbusters.)
I have cookie clicker open right now lmao and yeah, playing it now vs... whenever I played it originally I'm definitely seeing that satire of capitalism
The Incremental Games subreddit is pretty good if you want to find ones you should play. If you want to avoid games with microtransactions or boosts via ads, it's pretty easy to tell immediately what those ones are. There are plenty *paid* ones that are great too.
hey i know this is a year old comment but i just wanted to say that this idea predates fisher by a few decades. the situationists in france came up with a theory of spectacle and recuperation where capital assimilates any idea which may be a threat to itself, like che guerva t shirts, and makes it a commodity to be consumed. they also posit an antidote to this called "hijacking" where cultural detritus can be taken and twisted into something which undermines the capitalist cultural hegemony.
When I played Universal Paperclips I thought it was about capitalism. Then I found it's based on some weird culty shit related to the Rokko's basilisk guys. But the actual gameplay is actually fun, it engaged me way more than cookie clicker, and even if unintentionally the anti caputalist stuff is there.
You seem to be of the narrow minded view that a corporation does not constitute an abstract intelligence, but then how would a computer program? That's hardly made of flesh either.
Your makeup looks really pretty here. (Unless you got turned into a vampire since your last video and just have unnaturally nice skin and sinister eyes now, in which case congrats)
Funnily enough, my adhd reacts strangely to video games. I do get an immense amount of dopamine seeing numbers go up (hell, been playing w numbers without incentive since i was s young child), but once i miss a day, that's it. The infinite gratification loop fully cuts off. I can be hyperfixated on a game, but as soon as i realize how insignificant it actually is, i lose all interest. I started playing cookie clicker some months ago. I was obsessed with it for the whole day, and never touched it again. I didnt even know of All This Shit. Just that it was a silly clicker game. And after a while, the "progress" stops feeling like progress to me, and i go towards something that will grant me indeterminate amounts of dopamine most consistently: things with characters. And that's the way to hook me. Despite how much i love seeing numbers go up, I'll only become TRULY hooked for more than a few months (uh!) if characters are there TO hook me. For that reason, idle games have never been appealing to me. Unless you count games like "cow evolution", but at least there, your participation for fusing the animals _was_ necessary. I think. Hm. Anyway.
Skinner boxes such as Everquest can be so enticing, that one may still play a "museum" emulated server such as Project 1999, which has been on only the original game and the first 2 expansion for more than a decade ... Yes I am online while witing this comment.
SOMEONE FINALLY DID THE THING AND DIRECTLY ADDRESSED HOW MENTALLY ILL AND DISORDERED PEOPLE ARE EXTRA TARGETED BY PREDATORY MEDIA THANK YOU i have the adhd and the depresso and holy fuck even logically understanding I'm being taken advantage of it's still so hard to avoid things like playing too many video games so i lose track of time and don't do things i need to do so thank you for this video slime friend
Well on the upside, I feel less guilty on wasting more money that I can really afford to on microtransactions considering I have both depression and adhd
I'm an MMO guy; but this one time my slightly younger friend who was really big into Moba's got addicted to cookie clicker for like 2 weeks. He become completely fascinated with it and then hardcored it for half a month; then one day was just totally over and done with it. It was really interesting to watch as he was my roomate at the time. The crazy part was how genuinely happy he was. He was having soo much fun so I cant really blame him.
Great video! A rare instant subscribe from me I'd like to see a game like this explore the "gamification" aspect of all of this. Its easy to look at this and think "wow, the compulsion to make number get bigger is stronger than human empathy, and people will stop at nothing to get that dopamine hit - humans are inherently greedy and we're all fucked" - but I think a game could create an even more nuanced exploration of the topic by doing something like, allowing you to make a bunch of strategic decisions through managers - then partway through the game, once youve built your empire, tearing away the managerial hierarchy and forcing you to deal with every single painful interaction - firing people, experimenting on grandmas, disciplining unmotivated sweatshop workers, etc. It's a hard to communicate the idea, but I think games are the perfect format for showing how the side effects of sprawling corporations is huge managerial classes which serve as a blinder to the human element of the decisions executives make. In short, capitalism has so many problems, and one that id love to see an exploration of is how managerial hierarchies serve to "gamify" running a business, turning profoundly human decisions with human consequences into strategic plays that only provide "number go up" or "number go down" as feedback
Pretty sure I noticed a late edit to replace a certain game with Everquest. That's unironically really respectable that you made the effort to change it in light of recent information
As a game dev (who also hates micro-transactions and luckily hasn't had to design any yet), I LOVE this video. The "how do we make this fun and get paid without screwing over our players" balancing act is very real. I hadn't looked at idle games through an anti-capitalist lens yet, thank you for putting this out!
I have a deep respect for idle games with an ending, after feeling trapped by a few that don't, having recently forcibly removing Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms - a true money-grabbing cancer - from my life. And it was definitely a cancer despite never having given it a dime, I can't imagine what it feels like when those who pay $50 for a character, or end up spending thousands on it feel like when they realize their game experience is literally exactly the same as mine.
I had never heard of this game genre before, and now I know that when I'm sad, my brain isn't using it's hive-mind-grannies to smush goombahs into heroin. Thank you for this public service!
I used to like playing dating sim games from Korea on the Android app store and you would only be able to play a few screens of what is essentially a manga where the ninjas like you/your character if you have keys. The keys load 5 every 12 hours. There's lots of little sidegames with potions needed and whatever and I would play as long as I physically could for free, until I got 'a magic door' or sometching where even with daily login bonuses going for months I never got the item I needed to get through, so id just delete it and download another one, it's like teenage blueballs practice. Seeded my anti capitalist brain no doubt
I would like to mention the AMAZING games of Candy Box and A Dark Room. These are two early ASCII-based games that incorporate incremental gameplay. They both are actually more like short RPGs, but with upgrades that you can buy after getting enough items. They're full of fights, puzzles, and a lot of fun. Plus, they are also forebearers of the incremental genre. Cookie Clicker was released in August 2013, while Candy Box was released in October 2013 (one month later). A Dark Room was released in June 2013 (two months EARLIER!) They deserve so much more recognition!
half the reason i enjoyed Adventure Capitalist was because I like seeing how long I can withstand the pressure to fall into the trap of financial exploitation the game has. It's a fun game that I'll never win in the real world, but I can come close behind the screen ^_^
Being in my early 40s and having had some friends die over the years made me realize that time is finite and only moves in one direction - we do not have time to be idle. I do not remember the last time I was bored.
Any critique of the predatory monetization tactics employed by the games industry would be incomplete without thanking God for James Stephanie Sterling.
There are now two more building types: One that dreams up cookies into existence, and one that creates clones of you, so that you don't even have to do your work yourself (mechanically, this changes nothing though).
"...You know what bugs me about doing stuff like that, is that I know every marketing person here is going: 'Yep, Bill is trying to get that anti-marketing dollar, that's a huge market." -Bill Hicks
Video games need their internet taken away. No internet, no microtransactions, no macrotransactions, no transactions whatsoever... no money. No broken husks patched up years later, no finishing content on the fly, no broken promises, no roadmaps, no purchase window time limits, no pre-orders, no bullshit. Just a thing you buy, and then wanna play or don't. Like back in the golden days where the predatory stuff was reserved for buildings you had to actually go to with coins you had to actually own and carry. That still wasn't a good thing, but it's baby-evil compared to the "whaling" that goes on nowadays. Oh but, no multiplayer! Except for local multiplayer.
The fact that Cookie Clicker is STILL being actively worked on and regularly updated accentuates the in-game feeling of infinite growth and progression in a weirdly meta way.
and hey while we're talking about that, cookie clicker is coming to steam on the first of september so maybe we can give 5 dollars to support the dude who still updates it to this day
browser version will like usual be updated first and remain free forever so it's more or less just to support the dude and also maybe get workshop mods
@@FantasmaNaranja + it will have music from C418
The kids where i work love cookie clicker i don't get it
@Earl Chen yep, he's still working on them
@Earl Chen even if he werent, with workshop mods it is certainly possible!
When I worked in the game industry I was literally in a business meeting where an investor wanted to discuss our “compulsion loop” and how we monetized it. The money people in the industry literally understand games as an addiction pathway.
jim stephanie sterling has multiple videos on this topic that are very good and exposes this too. wild how people still don’t know and still take these practices in good faith
Which is why they are fucking evil and indie gaming is going through a Renaissance.
jesus they really are cartoon villians and dont give a shit
@@sonicthehedgegod Stephanie?
@@TheStygian yeah! jim sterling came out as non-binary last year and goes by jim/james/stephanie interchangeably. steph sterling, jim-steph, james stephanie, etc.
also they use they/them pronouns!
There's an Idle flash game called "Progress Knight", about life in middle ages and different jobs you could have.
The thing about this game is it has a countdown until the main character's death of old age. I haven't tried dying in it yet, because at a certain age the character always finds an amulet, which allows to restart his life later, in a few years before death, which of course makes everything faster. Then, by restarting many times and studying magic you can extend your life span to 200, after which the amulet reveals itself to be demonic and unlocks evil upgrades. The important part being: The only way to reach any notoriety in a medieval society after starting as a peasant, even to become the titular knight, in one lifetime, was dark magic reincarnation.
Ah, yes, Berserk reference
You don’t die. It just pauses the game until you press the amulet
after playing this Progress Knight, it reminded me of a different game with exactly same skill/job/housing mechanics (but, imo, better interface), name of which I sadly forgot :(
It was about a dude living his life(you start at his 18th birthday) and at the end of it the aliens appear, conquering the Earth. And he somehow gets back in time to his 18yo state
If you grind math skill, at some point you get invited into a researcg project that results in scanner to detect alien ships and weapon to shoot them down
It was a fun game on optimization of each day to get max progress on each loop, but at some point I quit after deciding that alien ship spam is unending and thus unbeatable
I was able to reach level 0 knight first life at age 67. Not exactly young enough to reap the rewards but still.
Same with modern society.
“Oops, all the matter in the universe is cookies now (you are two-thirds of the way through the tech tree).” Is such a terrifying statement and I love it.
420 likes nice!
play universal paperclips and you will understand the true terror of turning the universe into (X) material
Level 1: realize that video game "progress" is meaningless. Quit playing.
Level 2: realize that real-world hobby "progress" is meaningless. Quit doing them.
Level 3: realize that all "progress" is meaningless. Despair.
Level 4: realize that all "meaning" is entirely constructed, not inherent. Realize that you do, in fact, find meaning in video games. Go back to playing them.
Fuckin 'ey
Level 5: J. P. Sartre incarnate
Learn to make beer. The hobbie you and your friends will enjoy... unless you then talk about making beer all the time.
@@chardros I can’t understand how guys obsess over beer so,, drinking it and discussing it. Foul stuff
@@coolkid9967 I know it's just a comment, but maybe I can elaborate an answer with some value to someone here.
First, people obsess over anything, and if you can't understand it it just means it's not your thing. I can try to explain anyway.
About drinking it... I guess beer is an aquired taste. It has a strong emotional factor and alcohol has something to do with it. It's connected with sharing moments and having fun with friends, and doing things you wouldn't being sober, so it is the starter of lots of anecdotes because it gets you out your standard behavior not very abruptly. It's not very alcoholic, so it's probably the first contact young people has with alcohol, this meaning it's something connected to your youth and which you enjoy most part of your life. There are lots of beer styles and very different one from another, so maybe you started with a light very commercial lager you didn't like that much, but you always can find a style or brand you really enjoy, from very malty, to very hoppy, to some so subtle they're not very different from sparkling water.
And about discussing it... it continues from the last point. Beers are very different. Beers are cooked. There are tons of kinds of hops, tons of kinds of grain used, and each brewer/brand has its own recipe and technique making beer so, maybe you find lots of beers tasting the same, but you can still find notably different beers even in its same style. I know some people just want to drink their same good old beer, but if you like trying different beers, you can always find someone interested in the differences of beers they have not tried yet.
Making beer is also quite interesting. Beer is something you give for granted and you see your shop full of it without really knowing how it's made. Once you study it a bit, you discover it is somewhat laborious, but has a very comfortable challenging level and learning curve. You can make some drinkable or even good beer following very few steps of a recipe but, when you study the chemistry and biology involved and everything makes some sense, you can get quite creative. It's also a hobby/skill which involves some creativity and your friends can enjoy with you without really practising it themselves, like cooking or playing an instrument, but a lot less common than cooking and a lot less demanding than learning an instrument till the results are enjoyable.
I think cookie clicker has achieved a more biting and apparent satire of capitalism with cookies and grandmas than most far more overt attempts do
To be fair: Cookies are better and more delicious than money.
@@GoGoOtaku Twenty dollars can buy MANY cookies.
@@Kirbyoto2098 EXPLAIN HOW!!!!!
@@MisterOrgans Money can be exchanged for goods (e.g., cookies) and services. It can also be exchanged for bads and disservices though, so watch out for that.
@@Kirbyoto2098 Not after I put you on an Island run by some racoondog
Any discussion of satirical idle games *must* mention universal paperclips, it's got similar goals to cookie clicker but does a lot more to illustrate the sobering existential horror of the numbers it's playing with, and u can complete it within a day.
Please do another essay
Truth. That game messed me up after playing it, had me sitting there for a hot minute.
every time i play universal paperclips and i see the "universe discovered" percentage tick up from 0.000000000% to 0.000000001% it hits me hard. every time.
Yeah, whenever I'm about mid-late way through it, I'll sometimes sit back and just try to conceive the full scope of what is happening and my brain just kind of goes tingly and numb. But I don't stop. I never stop until it's all over
Hey, it's you!
"Isn't it fucked up for games to manipulate you to spend money like that?"
I'll take "every 2k Sports game relased in the past decade" for 500, Alex
DAILY DOUBLE!
Daily Double
XD
Ill take all modern shooters with battle passes and lootboxes for all the money
And dress up games like nikki. And many others.
You are so close to advancing to next level. Just need few more points for your outfit. You can try to wait for an event that will give you currency, or you can just pay to get currency to buy it.
so ubisoft.......and ea........activision too......
Don't forget the EA Sports titles that hide star players behind gambling mechanics which can, and frequently do, prey on children and vulnerable people to clean out their savings
Adventure Capitalist intentionally sets itself up so that it plateaus hard a good way into the game once the sunken cost fallacy has a strong hold on the player. Your options are spend a couple bucks on this free game to continue or legit spend years crawling through the last quarter of the upgrades.
My friends gave up on it while I finally managed to beat it without spending a dime out of pure spite. I started it in 9th grade and finished it my sophomore year of college. That'll show 'em who's boss, right?
I feel this on a personal level, been playing for about 2 years now by mostly ignoring it until I go back, make progress with all the free stuff I got given for anniversaries and stuff, and then forget about it again
@@heatherheath3834 The holiday events help out a bunch since you can get free gold from those and buy the upgrades that are normally locked behind microtransactions
I completed it in half a year, ticket boosters saved me years i guess
i time travel
Now there's an adventure communist made by the same company. Go harvest potatoes for years ! xd
"All matter in the universe is now cookies..."
"You are now 2/3'rds of the way through the tech tree"
Great delivery lol.
More than halfway is kinda disappointing.
I agree
@@cringejuicedavidson8288don’t worry! Nowadays you’re ~40% of the way through! I think one of the final buildings is literally the player… like, since you started all this, then having more of ‘you’ means having more cookies
Also btw roughly 9 months ago cookie clicker updated again so now you can buy another one of yourself in the game meaning if you own 9 you's then you're going to increase your cookie profits by 1024 X the amount it was before you bought 9 you's! 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯
@@tanakisoupGenious
My favourite “idle” game is another explicitly anti-capitalist one: Little Inferno, a game where you buy items from a catalogue, wait for them to arrive, then immediately burn them for warmth. Burning gets you more money, which you use to buy more items to burn. It’s one of my favourite game experiences I’ve ever had.
It’s not quite an idle game in the same way as the games mentioned in here, because progress doesn’t happen automatically over time, but the primary mode of play is through waiting, with minimal interaction, so I think the term fits.
Little inferno is amazing.
It's one of the best games ever made
Went to play it and it’s five bucks.
@@ironicallypineapple it's 5 bucks well spent to be honest, it's very charming and a good critique
Little Inferno is incredible. It's art style and music are amazing. I also loved the little darkly comic bits like where you throw the coffee cup in the fire and it starts screaming, or the line in the opening theme about burning "this box of memories".
ProgressQuest is also a parody of the gaming community's reliance on macros to play the game for them. In other words, it pokes fun at how gamers optimize the fun out of their own games by creating a game where the macro literally IS the game, as though that's how gamers think of MMOs nowadays.
I feel like this mentality led right into the Factorio and Satisfactory type games. Hell, even prior to the current flavor, the Tycoon games were the natural evolution.
This is why I largely avoid multiplayer games. Games *with* multiplayer I can still enjoy (you know, your Dark Soulses...I'm sure there's others) and I love couch co-op or just generally co-op games. But when it comes to MMOs and any game that revolves around PvP, the optimization these days quickly outpaces immersion, and instead of feeling like a legendary warrior part of some kind of league, fighting other legends...I just feel like a person at my keyboard, trying to beat the most toxic people I've ever met.
MMORPGs can get so much worse. If they have roleplay servers it counteracts it more to play on those, but if you're in a general server anyone and everyone will ask you why your build works like that and pressure you to make characters you don't want to be to fit into their team slots more efficiently (see WoW and its fanbase's hatred of Druids for not being specialized enough).
But possibly worst of all for this with me is D&D. I love Tabletop RPGs and playing them with friends, gives you a ton of control over the experience. I have trouble with D&D because I can't *not* think about my build. The game is so math-based and combat is such an inevitability in it (because combat is by far the most in depth the mechanics get) that I get really anxious if I try to build a character entirely around concept without at least optimizing a little. I don't like having to think about optimization, I'm mainly into TTRPGs for the roleplay and the experience with friends. I'm not even bad at optimization, it's just so meaningless to me these days.
I had to google what macros are and now I'm profoundly confused. Why would somebody do that if they actually like the game, and if not, why play it at all.
Should've mentioned that in the video.
True and yet that didn't stop me from running my computer nonstop for months as a small preteen who wanted to see the number going up
Two other idle games worth noting: Universal Paperclips and A Dark Room. The former being specifically about the productivist nightmare of an AI superintelligence, the latter (on the mobile version) being probably the most explicitly condemnatory of the player character in any idle game I’ve seen.
Also SPACEPLAN.
Universal Paperclips is also notable for having a story and multiple endings.
Like, actual endings, no newgame+ bs.
How's a dark room "the most explicitly condemnatory of the player character in any idle game"? Genuinely curious.
agree that those are both excellent idle games with excellent stories
@@bzztbzztboy massive spoilers, so don't read on if you'd ever like to play it. Reading it will definitely ruin the experience. I recommend you play it- it only takes a handful of hours at most, and it's not only an idle game.
In A Dark Room, the game starts with the titular dark room, and you get wood for a fire to light it. You eventually use the wood to make simple tools, and gather new resources. Eventually, your warm, safe place is a haven for others, and they flock to it, providing labor to automate tasks for you.
After a point, you can head out an explore a map, with encounters and a quest- to find certain odd objects. And as you progress and your character remembers why they came here, something odd happens. Words used to describe things around your base become less warm, more hostile. The fire is a raging furnace. The metal production is making weaponry. And the final nail in the coffin is when you learn you are a conqueror, and the people of your settlement are now referred to as slaves.
There is a "good ending", but it's only achievable if you decide to make the grind artificially longer, and you never once automate anything. Unless you set out from the start on a meme of "hah but what if i just click endlessly", you will not encounter it on your first playthrough. It's very minimalist, but it's very, very good.
@@Physbrkr Can confirm, A Dark Room is awesome.
I once made a microblog thread about how, bizarrely, I discovered that when I refused to buy microtransactions in some mobile games and stuck to 'fairly earning' premium currency whenever I was allowed to I'd slowly end up in a very nice loop of 'saving' and accumulating a whole bunch of premium fake money and always having too much of stuff instead of not enough, as long as I just defined the minimum amount of 'expenses' I needed to be happy. it's funny how videogames literally mimic capitalism so much you can follow the rules everyone tells you in real life but which in fact only work in an imaginary world where you don't die or suffer if you spend nothing
I started playing Cookie Clicker and love how the ticker says, " "Indentured servitude" - grandma "
don't forget " "you could have stopped this" - grandma "
and " "You disgust me." - grandma "
don't forget:
''cookies are the secret behind my perfect skin'', reveals celebrity
man found allergic to cookies, ''what a weirdo'', says family
Dont forget
"Random 3rd world country bans cookies
War soon hopefully"
Don’t forget:
“The end is near. Make preparations.”
“Ook. Says interviewed orangutan.”
“New typpeewriter is working FINEEEEEEEE says gleeeeeful journalist.”
"It's time to stop playing"
"Ky btween w and r brokn, plas snd nw typwritr ASAP"
I'm glad more and more people are discussing the addictive and predatory aspects of many videogames without playing into the stereotypes of games as simply lazy or useless people.
^^^^^
Gaming used to take up my whole life. I didnt realize it made my depression worse, cause despite the feeling of accomplishing tasks, I'd have no tangible rewards and it only gave me temporary enrichment. But whenever I try to discuss this, people always paint me as especially lazy or just say "yeah, that's how games are lmao". Makes me very sad.
It's weird that people claim gamers are lazy when all they do is being extremely industrious to the exclusion of everything else in the game.
That's at least one good thing that came out of video games being totally mainstream.
@@ohokay4663 I'm curious what made you realize gaming was adding onto your depression? I'm still pretty ardent about gaming but I'm hitting the point where they just don't hit the same way like many others seem to. I think the memes about looking at a wall of games you bought on sale but still have no interest in playing boils down to the even more direct hit of dopamine that buying something at a low cost makes you feel good for getting a deal even if you wouldn't have bought it otherwise. Even the act of buying a game feels manipulative now. It's just left a sour taste in my mouth which sucks cuz I still love video games at the end of the day, just not playing them as much.
@@jamesross2279 it was definitely me hopping between 6 or 7 different games in the span of an hour and finding none of them were as fulfilling as they usually are. Other people pointed out that I was getting worse at taking care of myself, and I took a break from constant gaming and tried focusing on tangible tasks and felt better. I do still play video games occasionally, but I don't sit there and play them *all the time* anymore
The only clicker game I’ve ever seen that ACTUALLY successfully handles the inherent contradiction of infinite growth under capitalism is Universal Paperclips, because it ISN’T infinite. It can’t be. Infinity doesn’t make any sense in the real world, and UP shows that with the simple edition of having an ending.
universal paperclips is infinite though. it has its own ascension function. but i know what you mean. that game is the best. it doesn't even have ads
Infinity does make sense in the real world?
@@LWoodGaming I mean, effectively it doesn’t. We can somewhat conceive of it, and do some math with assumptions that certain infinities exist, but everything is effectively finite and discrete from what we can observe.
@@jlaw131985 Infinity as a concept isn't concrete. It's different within different contexts. We can not only do mathematics that assumes infinity, but can prove certain infinities exist as much as one can prove anything in a metaphysical or mathematical sense. Countable vs uncountable infinities exist in theory and the real world but what they mean is context dependent.
Space is functionally infinite and real but not in the same way as aleph null is infinite and real.
Edit: this is why I like that we renamed some concepts that are similar to infinite, like continuous in mathematics.
Capitalism is an economic system that demands infinite growth in a world that cannot sustain it. Inevitably, there will be no more land to fill, no more resources to waste, no more workers to exploit, and no more planet to kill. Universal Paperclips definitely helps visual this.
Re: MMOs, Yoshi-P was once asked what a player should do once they've reached the endgame in FFXIV. He responded "Go play another game." Since taking over he has designed FFXIV so that while players can grind for the absolute best stuff forever, there's actually very little incentive to do so. He designs under the assumption that after finishing the main story, most players will just go play something else until the next major story patch drops.
Which is something I wish more creators, especially on MMO style games, did.
I love Yoshi-P's entire approach with FFXIV. Also he's not afraid to criticise the game industry and buck trends.
He once said how much he hates it when companies drip-feed content with endless trailers that offer no new information (Something Square-Enix is notorious for) and just said "Nah. FFXVI will be ready when it's ready."
And I'm just like "Omg, yes!!"
This is exactly what i need after quitting wow which is the exact opposite
SquareEnix are not the good guys
Shame he ruined it by making house demolishing a thing. Sure you can play other game... but that house you spent all your gil to make and probably can't get back because housing is at an extreme premium? Gone if you don't fork over your monthly sub!
Another great idle game that takes this satirical approach is Universal Paperclips. Unlike most other idle games, Universal Paperclips has an ending, in which you turn the entire universe into paperclips, and while you can restart in a new universe, the true ending is when you dismantle all your paperclip making methods and float in space alone with your 30 septendecillion paperclips. It's a fun game, great social commentary hidden in powerups and such, and it's not too long, only about 6 hours to complete, so you don't need to waste weeks on this little game. Also, it isn't really a true idle game, there's pretty much always stuff for you to do while watching the numbers go up, and there's three stages that are very different from each other gameplay wise, so it never gets stale or boring. Highly recommend playing it.
This has always been my favorite example of an idle game as it is very well balanced for actually keeping you engaged while also having an end state. Also the message of the game is quite well done.
This video is awesome! Anecdote: i showed Cookie Clicker to my mom back in 2013 or so, basically just trying to annoy and exasperate her -- see, she used to always make fun of me for wasting my time on pointless video games, and i thought this was the ULTIMATE pointless video game (although i had also "played" Progress Quest, which is definitely even more pointless). Anyway, plot twist, she started playing it and became completely addicted to it, even downloading special software for her Mac to keep it from shutting down at night, so she could make more cookies. She still has it running TO. THIS. DAY. When I visit, she always shows me her ... progress. At least it's something for us to talk about!
is she still playing it?
I really like that cookie clicker patreon model. I like it when the necessary monetization brings the community together instead of drawing a dividing line.
It's gotten pretty common in the idle game scene, which I love to see
“without it, all we’d do is sit around and starve to death” as a person with ADHD whose executive dysfunction has trapped him on the floor for several hours, :)
It's much worse for people with OCD; someone with ADHD could actually get distracted from it, but someone with OCD would literally be obsessed with it. 😒
@@user-vn7ce5ig1z Its definetly not that simple
@@user-vn7ce5ig1zneither your statement about ADHD nor your statement about OCD were accurate to every person with those disorders in every circumstance. both disorders are complex and intense, and i’m of the opinion it’s not useful to tier-rank disorders based on harm. avolition is a terrifying thing to experience no matter what thinking patterns you have or for how long you experience it, and it doesn’t go away just because you briefly get distracted from it.
@@user-vn7ce5ig1z OCD isn't "when obsess" and ADHD isn't "when distract". In fact, people with ADHD can have moments of hyperfocus or get hooked into games like this that constantly stimulate them. Or get distracted _by_ these games that offer immediate gratification. Hiperactivity and impulsiveness can be a part of that too.
While OCD is much more subtle and complex. People with OCD could, for example, serve several cups of coffee and take a lot of time to have them have the exact same amount of coffee. Or take a lot of time to handwrite because they feel it has to be perfect somehow. Or not invite people to their houses because a few little mistakes might make them feel thar the whole house is completely dirty. I once heard the story of a girl that broke her shoulder and felt the need to break the other to keep some sort of simmetry.
And I wanna add that a lot of other disorders can be a factor in developing some kind of videogame addiction. And that for many companies that is a way they make money.
I'm so glad Mildred acknowledged ADHD in there lol. Shout out to mindfulness therapies fr.
"Why do you waste all your time on meaningless tasks instead of doing laundry or school work or your job?"
"...because of the Goomba."
Laundry is useful, but I'd argue that school work and (most clerical) jobs are meaningless tasks.
Because it's all meaningless. Might as well enjoy it.
read this in werner herzog’s voice
@@dreadlordvellan733 Fun fact: So I'm very obsessed with musicals. And so, because I didn't have anything else to do, and I desperately wanted to feel productive and meaningful as a human being, I decided to write down the entire script of my favorite musical, color coding all the lines from my dream roll, so I could remember the lines better. (So I could pretend I got cast, and had to know those lines.)
I wrote like, 60 pages in one day, handwritten. I was so proud of myself. And I was like, "hey mom look what I did" and her only reaction was to sigh, and say "You really need to get back to school." For context I'm a college student, and I took 2020 off because of covid and I got cancer, (I'm fine now lol dw). But I felt really shitty. Like all that work I did, that made me happy, doesn't matter and is pointless because it didn't earn me money or school credit. Therefore it's useless. Ahaha...
@@tobeseve4020 she'll 'have always believed in you' when you're famous, though.
18:40 This actually changed for the Steam version. For Steam, it's based on how many concurrent players are currently active, which IMO reinforces the community spirit thing even more.
Another thing is that it caps out at a 100% bonus, with 10,000 concurrent players needed to do so
And I don’t think it’s gone below 100% since day 1
I read "alive" instead of "active"...
@@Nikola_M evil asf
6:15 there's also cortex bakers that dream cookies into existence now :) just imagine daydreaming, and suddenly a cookie appears next to you
also clones now too
A bit of correction, heroin doesn't release dopamine, it's activates your opioid receptors. Your body uses natural opioids as natural painkillers, and also they have relaxing and euphoric effect. Not all types of addiction revolve around reward mechanisms
Meth and amphetamine do release dopamine, and coke also uses reward mechanism, but it inhibits reuptake instead of releasing
The receiver is still a mechanism in the reward system.
The rest holds true, just pointing out a single flaw.
I love the satire of clicker games so much. They've made me way more cautious about video games that run that same sorta loop of just "number go up" to carying success rates.
I remember plying adventure capitalist.
Maybe the joke is the devs are adventure capitalists IRL.
It _is_ called AdVenture for a reason after all. The capitalization isn't there by accident.
@@stylis666 then they made AdVenture communist
I sometimes play an idle game called “Church Tycoon” where you run various church’s and try and collect as much money as possible. It doesn’t even need an end game proving its point. Five minutes in and your going wtf.
Ah yes, louigi verona
That's just Evangelism in a nutshell.
Learning why my depression lets me play videogames then do literally nothing else is the best thing that's happened to me today, thank you!
"Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, that abyss gazes back into you, knucklehead." - Freddie Nichols
whats interesting is that adventure capitalist and adventure communist have the exact same gameplay but with a different skin. i just find it funny that in trying to make a critique of communism, they had to just reuse their parody of capitalism because they found it to be the most profitable model for a game
I think it's just a meme of communism. They could have criticized communism, it's possible, but it fails because it's just... Capitalism. With potatoes instead of cash.
@Frystopper the games are. Because they both criticize capitalism.
@@DavidJamesHenry It's just the pop-culture idea of communism, where Glorious Leader owns everything and everyone is exploited for every last ounce of productivity, which sounds suspiciously like how a corporation works.
It's funny because that's literally the common conception of communism, isn't it? The whole demonizing of communism stems mostly from the idea that socialist regimes where people work the same hours but for the state and they can't buy good stuff anymore are the end goal.
@@stardragon7893 Yeah, well, Glorious Leader does need his potatoes.
It's hard to make a clicker game without it coming off vaguely as some kind of critique of capitalism, because when you peel back the veneer of RPG mechanics to just a tedious grind to make a number go up with little real input or experience for the person making the number go up, what you end up with is basically just what the majority of Americans experience at their jobs every day. Except we're making the numbers go up for someone else, so we don't get the satisfaction part.
Nonsense. If you do good enough at your job, you could get a raise that slightly exceeds that year's inflation!
We were the grandmas all along, and one day we will all merge into one super-being and enact our revenge.
I mean your number would be going up too unless you're financially illiterate enough to never save money. But really idle games only remind you of capitalism if you're obsessed with the evils of capitalism. Numbers go up everywhere it's called counting, no need to say a child learning to count to 10 is being indoctrinated into capitalism just because "they said higher numbers!"
@@HeyYouImAzu I won't lie, this is definitely me when I work at my daddy's company and have never taken a media studies class
@@NAFEDUDE You can work for whoever you want and take as many media studies classes as you want, still doesn't mean everything is a critique of whatever you want to read into it. I could say teletubbies is a show criticizing heteronormative culture because they are colorful and gay people are represented by a rainbow, that doesn't mean that's actually what the creators of teletubbies were going after. Similarly just because a game uses a currency and allows you to accumulate infinite amounts of it doesn't mean they're making a statement about how people like Jeff Bezos are single handedly ruining our world. Grow up not everyone makes communism/socialism their life's purpose.
Man, Cookie Clicker is a great game and the fact they don't try and get money from you in malicious ways just heightens that
You can have it on idly but also do actual things in the game like check on your garden and all that.
And the dark themes feed a lil sadistic side of myself that enjoys watching a fictional universe collapse merely for a few more cookies
It's just a good experience overall
@11:11 this is patently incorrect. Of you had said Cocaine or amphetamines, you'd have been correct. However, heroin is an opioid-based drug (mainly mu-opioid), not a dopamine-based drug. Berridge and colleagues, over the years, have shown that pleasure has two sides: the 'wanting' side, and the 'liking' side. The 'wanting' side is from dopamine. The 'liking' side is from opioids. Thus, heroin DOES feel nice, as it is an opioid drug. It also prompts the release of dopamine, because your brain usually also wants what it likes... but to say that heroin doesn't actually feel good and it just releases dopamine is factually incorrect.
God damn, Cookie Clicker has grown a lot since I played it way back when.
I think Universal Paperclips is my favourite one of these games, but it does kind of end.
You could argue Cookie Clicker is Universal Paperclip's logical evolution.
When your infinite growth meets the end of the universe, just create more universes since is the only context in which infinite growth can make a lick of sense.
Honestly I think Universal paperclips having an end does a better job than most to make it's point. It ends, but only because there's literally nothing left in the universe
mfw when universal exploration hits 0.000001% and i remember its not infinite
"I feel like the gold would be more useful" Uh, no lol, can you EAT the gold, does it bring the happy juice to your brain like the sweet sweet cookies do?
World financial systems ought to be based on cookies tbh
Quintillions of cookies. 10^237492s of them
The cookies are almost worth as much as the past venezuela currency at that point. The big brain play would be to use the gold to buy like a quintillion of cookies each.
@@unlimited8410 when all matter is made of cookies, what worth is a cookie?
*Is adventure capitalist at all a critique of capitalism?* I never got that from the game.
We obviously see a humorous lens of critique in the game, but I certainly don't think the people who made the game are anti-capitalist. The joke in the game is that capitalism would be that simple, not that capitalism is unsustainable, because in the game it's not unsustainable, it's infinitely sustainable. It's too bad you glossed over it because adventure communist confirms this, there is no critique of capitalism in their games, in a way it's capitalist propaganda, not critique, your money grows forever.
You’re totally right. Adventure Capitalist isn’t radical at all. The reviews it has on the app store tell you everything you need to know about the ideology it promotes to its players. The game was definitely made by and for the “capitalism is the natural order of things” crowd, and does a far better job of normalizing capitalism’s lack of ethics than criticizing it.
It's in a weird space where it both had you do pretty explicitly evil stuff (you literally sacrifice angels or something if I've heard correctly), but it also takes and portrays a lot of other capitalist propaganda at face value and reinforces it. I don't think there's really a coherent political statement behind it, just running with an idea that might have literally just spawned from coming up with the "AdVenture Capitalist" pun.
You murder angels and mind control people, the upgrade names are fucked up, even if by accident.
The author is dead, whether or not the work actually acts as satire is irrespective of the intent of the creators
If anything, it's a _recuperation_ of critiques of Capitalism. Adopting the language of satire for Capitalism, while defanging that satire of its most important points.
i refused for MONTHS to start the grandmapocalypse but once i started, it was hard to stop. the wrinkler production was just so good. so i've taken to farming now instead to spare the grandmas 😅
About dopamine: it is not what makes you feel good, but what makes you desire things rather. Dopamine never actually makes you feel good, that would be serotonine or oxitocin. Also heroine does not directly interact with dopamine, cocaine or amphetamines do, but in any adiction dopamine is always involved because it is what makes you anticipate the feeling you end up having. Dopamine is to heroine the same thing dopamine is to gambling or even idle games, it is there because it's the natural mecanism for desire.
I think something really important to note about Adventure capitalist is that restarting usually gives you enough cash to never touch many of the first few businesses, and it gets worse. So while at some point someone worked, each consecutive generation within the business works almost not at all.
"Idle Civilization: World History" is a pretty overt case of this as it specifically talks about tribal society, feudalism, capitalism and colonialism, how changes in those systems affect or create particular classes and how concentrated the power is in your civ. The main upgrade button changes it's name over time from "cooporate" to "force"(talking about slaves) to "conquer". Interestingly the game can actually end as you run your civilization into the ground or get conquered. Sadly, the translation from the creator's russian into english was not that great when I played the game, which definitely harms this rather wordy game.
Ah, I remember playing this game. Yeah, the translation troubles were unfortunate.
There's a few evolving games that I really like, like a Dark Room and Candy Box. The game starts off as an incrememntal game, but after a certain point, the game changes and you start to unlock new things you can do, new stuff you can spend your points on, new points to earn, new places to go, new people to meet. Kinda like how, if you're stuck in the daily grind, you're not doing stuff and you're not going places, meeting people. But when you have more capital you can buy stuff, automate your income, diversify, explore your options better than when you were stuck to the grind because you had nothing. And even if you were to lose everything, you don't lose the knowledge of the world you now have.
I really love Candy Box, it does a great job of kinda "rebuilding" video games starting from idle game concepts.
I learned about Cookie Clicker (which I was playing less than ten minutes ago) from this video. I am addicted. I left for a while and when I came back, the mobile game had picked up several more cookie generators, as well as seasonal events. It was like a meaningless little gift from the universe.
I love this game so much. Thank you for revealing it to me.
Thankfully orteil updated it with new contents
having the grandmas call me “ absolutely disgusting” really makes me feel bad, but i’ll still make those cookies
I have the same issue with the difficulty in video games - too easy bores me, too hard can frustrate me. I also really enjoy idle games; I like the subgenre of incremental games that unravel and adds to the game as you go - An excellent example is A Dark Room.
A dark room was great
Crank has a little of A Dark Room's bite, but very different in gameplay. Armoury & Machine was good until, ironically, they ruined it by trying to monetise it.
me, a person with ADHD and depression, watching this video while playing genshin impact, the only thing i have done this entire week: i dunno thoughtslime maybe you're reading into this a little too much
Thought Slime: "Some people's brains [release dopamine] more than others"
My depressed, Inattentive-ADHD having brain: "Sorry, dopamine machine broke"
mood.
Same though... ADHD and depression freakin suck.
Biggest Mood
Oofa doofa
I get it's not the main point of your video but the description of dopamine around 11:00 is scientifically innacurate to a huge degree... For one thing, we now understand dopamine to be less of a *reward* chemical and more of a *motivation* chemical. That is, it's that feeling of wanting to get up and do something, and less so the feeling of pleasure from doing it. It certainly isn't "the only reason you are capable of feeling the feeling of nice." Seratonin, oxytocin, endorphins, etc., all create nice feelings of different qualities.
I used to think adVenture capitalist was was a satire for capitalism. But holy fuck, adVenture communist looks at communism through such a massive neoliberal lense and is VERY anti communist in its ads
Playing/wanting to play an idle game has become a warning sign for me that my anxiety is flaring up. After a few hours of play I feel like one of those lab mice that’s dying from pressing the cocaine button instead of the food one. Shit sucks.
I play cookie clicker, and playing it is basically signing your soul to a game, watching the numbers rise, until you get too high and stop playing out of boredom, and a month later the cycle repeats.
Imagine an idle game where instead of accumulating ridiculous wealth, you start out trying to earn money and then never escape the initial grind because you never those means of production.
It'd be a shit game, but would more satirical
Yeah, I feel like the notion of satire fails in most of these because they don't have a definite inevitable failure state.
Probably because most of them don’t actually say anything about economics and are either just copying other clicker games, or are just something people made cuz they were bored.
People are just reading meaning where there isn’t any.
There's always a way of attaining the means of production if you're clever enough and driven enough. That's true in every system.
@@LeavingGoose046 Or being "lucky" enough to shove your way in onto the ground floor of an emerging new one.
@@JosephDavies Well Luck can always play a hand, some people just got God on their side for some reason.
omg yes, cookie clicker makes you exploit the grandmas but i love when number goes up
(but i never got this far into the lore of cookie clicker, omg this is brilliant)
I always rolled my eyes whenever Cookie Clicker was mentioned and figured "I'm never playing *that* garbage." Now I'm finding out there's ascensions and perk trees?
...Dammit, guess I'm downloading it. x-x
My friend watched a video on cookie clicker and got mad someone thought it was anti-capitalism.
He loves defending capitalism in arguments and couldn't see the commentary the game was making when he played it.
Capitalism ruins most good things tbh
I mean look at the entire sport gaming genre
Or the gaming industry, really
I'm old enough to remember when Madden was fun... hell I'm old enough to remember NFL Blitz.
yeah.
Capitalism is the only reason games got as big as the did. Look at Soviet Union and see how badly they stifled games, because competition was almost non-existant. Tetris almost didn't get published because of how bad it was there, that whole story is super tragic.
What's ruining games is a lack of checks and balances, which capitalism, like every other system, NEEDS ro function. The laws just aren't being updated, and it's allowing companies to exploit human psychology. Which is bad.
@@cortster12 "competition" the same 5 companies bought up pretty much every studio and push out either yearly sequels to military FPS games, or yearly sequels to Open World games that are needlessly bloated, or linear narrative games with absurd LOD that isn't really necessary. Games that don't fall into these categories are usually DOA.
Going "BUT THE SOVIET UNION" is bullshit because the USSR barely existed past Blast Processing. It's sort of impossible to say either way what communism would do to video games based solely on a country that didn't even exist by the time Kirby's Dream Land and Sonic 2 launched, they straight up did not have comparable technology and development to what modern AAA or even Indie development is like.
But I guess when your only alternative to capitalism is the USSR, then yeah, everything does look worse.
I used to play progress quest when my friend was playing world of warcraft. It's probably my favorite satire game.
Your critique of AdVenture Capitalist misses that Cookie Clicker ALSO starts with the player personally making cookies by clicking the cookie.
It's Cookie Clicker's lemonade stands.
Yeah. Starting off with your humble little business and then growing so quickly and exponentially is obviously absurd. No one can just start making cookies or lemonade or anything and ascend to billionairehood. The lemonade stands contribute to the critique, not take away from it.
@@reaganbartels9993 I agree. Because you have no competitors in AVC, you ARE the monopoly man. Even with one lemonade stand, you are the only lemonade stand oligarch.
Any other channel: *Normal*
This channel: *SLIME SOUNDS & SLIME BACKGROUND*
Adventure Capitalist is saying 'haha we're just doing satire guys' while doing the actual thing it's meant to be satirising, like how 40k bills itself as satire of space fascism while being super popular with neonazis because it whispers all their fantasies into their ears, while totally just being a fun satire my dudes!
I've been playing Terraria a bit, lately.
All that clicking and I have 6000 blocks of dirt, 14 tombstones and repetitive strain injury in my fingers.
More a case of being stuck in a dope mine than getting dopamine hits.
Compression gloves helped my RSIs in my fingers greatly decrease, give them a try if you haven’t
how?
Have you tried holding click
as a person with depression i can really relate to "when i jump on the goomba, it gets satisfyingly squished right away"
11:28 "It's obviously a bit more complicated than that, but I'm not a fucking doctor." Nothing I'm about to say contradicts any of the points you made about the consequences of addictive games, but I just want to clarify something about brain chemistry.
There are four main chemicals that affect your mood: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins. When you get an extra bit of one of those chemicals, it will affect you in a different way depending on what the levels of those four chemicals are already. There are situations where an extra bit of dopamine can make you happy, but depression and anxiety are also linked to situations where you have a bit more dopamine in your system than serotonin. Additionally, there are situations where an extra bit of serotonin or oxytocin can make you happy, and oxytocin arguably has the strongest connection to addictive behaviors.
I'm not a doctor either, I'm just saying that, like Mildred said, it's hella complicated.
There's dozens possibly hundreds of chemicals that influence your mood including hormones and artificially injected chemicals etc etc. We actually know very little about how they work. Dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins are just a handful that we've happened to learn a bit about but more importantly learned how to manipulate.
Just a little extra data.
Uh, what about norepinephrine?
I'm no expert, but I know that one's an important factor in depression (at least in some cases) because the antidepressant I take is a norepinephrine reuptake-inhibitor instead of (er, actually in addition to) a serotonin reuptake inhibitor.
(The serotonin reuptake inhibitors are the old, famous ones like Prozac and Zoloft.
Those never did anything for me, and actually I was kind of an anti-psychiatry dipshit for a while because of it, until one doctor said "Well, maybe we're not boosting the right neurotransmitter; let's try this other drug that boosts norepinephrine". And it was like flipping a goddamn light switch. Worked like fucking gangbusters.)
0:30 You could play WoW?
jerma play wow
I genuinely thought Adventure Capitalist was a critique of Capitalism until they came out with Adventure Communism...
I have cookie clicker open right now lmao
and yeah, playing it now vs... whenever I played it originally I'm definitely seeing that satire of capitalism
Probably shouldn't but i kinda wanna play it now
Play Cookie Clicker (or CC 2)
Start with universal paperclips as a more polished version of this, and one with an actual end to it after a day or so.
The Incremental Games subreddit is pretty good if you want to find ones you should play.
If you want to avoid games with microtransactions or boosts via ads, it's pretty easy to tell immediately what those ones are. There are plenty *paid* ones that are great too.
play any of those decent ~30 incremental games
Nominally-anticapitalist parody getting recuperated to serve capital?
Something something Mark Fisher, something something capitalist realism.
hey i know this is a year old comment but i just wanted to say that this idea predates fisher by a few decades. the situationists in france came up with a theory of spectacle and recuperation where capital assimilates any idea which may be a threat to itself, like che guerva t shirts, and makes it a commodity to be consumed. they also posit an antidote to this called "hijacking" where cultural detritus can be taken and twisted into something which undermines the capitalist cultural hegemony.
Not me watching this with an idle game in the background 😀
It's funny when capitalists call leftists "nihilists," when there's literally nothing more nihilistic than capitalism taken to its logical end state.
Unless you literally worship money.
You posted this just as I started playing an idle clicker version of RuneScape, which is just barely above the level of idle clicker itself.
Was it Melvor Idle?
@@HotBaraDad666 Yep
@@glitchedoom daaaamn, I need to return to that game.
@@HotBaraDad666 They just released an update that allows for offline combat now too.
@@glitchedoom I've heard about that cuz I'm on their Discord server.
When I played Universal Paperclips I thought it was about capitalism. Then I found it's based on some weird culty shit related to the Rokko's basilisk guys. But the actual gameplay is actually fun, it engaged me way more than cookie clicker, and even if unintentionally the anti caputalist stuff is there.
You seem to be of the narrow minded view that a corporation does not constitute an abstract intelligence, but then how would a computer program? That's hardly made of flesh either.
Your makeup looks really pretty here.
(Unless you got turned into a vampire since your last video and just have unnaturally nice skin and sinister eyes now, in which case congrats)
I was about to comment the same thing! It took me a sec to figure out if it was vampirism or just expertly applied makeup
pretty? he looks made out of plastic!
"... but, I am not a ing doctor. I'm a TH-cam doofus." I think the world would be a much better place if more people had this healthy attitude.
Funnily enough, my adhd reacts strangely to video games. I do get an immense amount of dopamine seeing numbers go up (hell, been playing w numbers without incentive since i was s young child), but once i miss a day, that's it. The infinite gratification loop fully cuts off. I can be hyperfixated on a game, but as soon as i realize how insignificant it actually is, i lose all interest.
I started playing cookie clicker some months ago. I was obsessed with it for the whole day, and never touched it again. I didnt even know of All This Shit. Just that it was a silly clicker game. And after a while, the "progress" stops feeling like progress to me, and i go towards something that will grant me indeterminate amounts of dopamine most consistently: things with characters. And that's the way to hook me. Despite how much i love seeing numbers go up, I'll only become TRULY hooked for more than a few months (uh!) if characters are there TO hook me. For that reason, idle games have never been appealing to me.
Unless you count games like "cow evolution", but at least there, your participation for fusing the animals _was_ necessary.
I think.
Hm.
Anyway.
Skinner boxes such as Everquest can be so enticing, that one may still play a "museum" emulated server such as Project 1999, which has been on only the original game and the first 2 expansion for more than a decade ... Yes I am online while witing this comment.
I played project 1999 for years. I was so addicted to that game. Beware kiddos!
Been playing Skinner box Diablo 2 for 21 years now, lol
SOMEONE FINALLY DID THE THING AND DIRECTLY ADDRESSED HOW MENTALLY ILL AND DISORDERED PEOPLE ARE EXTRA TARGETED BY PREDATORY MEDIA THANK YOU i have the adhd and the depresso and holy fuck even logically understanding I'm being taken advantage of it's still so hard to avoid things like playing too many video games so i lose track of time and don't do things i need to do so thank you for this video slime friend
Well on the upside, I feel less guilty on wasting more money that I can really afford to on microtransactions considering I have both depression and adhd
I'm an MMO guy; but this one time my slightly younger friend who was really big into Moba's got addicted to cookie clicker for like 2 weeks. He become completely fascinated with it and then hardcored it for half a month; then one day was just totally over and done with it. It was really interesting to watch as he was my roomate at the time. The crazy part was how genuinely happy he was. He was having soo much fun so I cant really blame him.
tbf anything is more fun than a moba
Great video! A rare instant subscribe from me
I'd like to see a game like this explore the "gamification" aspect of all of this. Its easy to look at this and think "wow, the compulsion to make number get bigger is stronger than human empathy, and people will stop at nothing to get that dopamine hit - humans are inherently greedy and we're all fucked" - but I think a game could create an even more nuanced exploration of the topic by doing something like, allowing you to make a bunch of strategic decisions through managers - then partway through the game, once youve built your empire, tearing away the managerial hierarchy and forcing you to deal with every single painful interaction - firing people, experimenting on grandmas, disciplining unmotivated sweatshop workers, etc.
It's a hard to communicate the idea, but I think games are the perfect format for showing how the side effects of sprawling corporations is huge managerial classes which serve as a blinder to the human element of the decisions executives make. In short, capitalism has so many problems, and one that id love to see an exploration of is how managerial hierarchies serve to "gamify" running a business, turning profoundly human decisions with human consequences into strategic plays that only provide "number go up" or "number go down" as feedback
ProgressQuest is literally just A.I. generated book writing with a character creator.
Pretty sure I noticed a late edit to replace a certain game with Everquest. That's unironically really respectable that you made the effort to change it in light of recent information
What was the original?
@@twindrill2852 I think it was Warcraft, and the video came out just after Blizzards horrific internal behavior came to light
As a game dev (who also hates micro-transactions and luckily hasn't had to design any yet), I LOVE this video. The "how do we make this fun and get paid without screwing over our players" balancing act is very real. I hadn't looked at idle games through an anti-capitalist lens yet, thank you for putting this out!
I have a deep respect for idle games with an ending, after feeling trapped by a few that don't, having recently forcibly removing Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms - a true money-grabbing cancer - from my life. And it was definitely a cancer despite never having given it a dime, I can't imagine what it feels like when those who pay $50 for a character, or end up spending thousands on it feel like when they realize their game experience is literally exactly the same as mine.
How could any game that allows you to give port human abilities to grandmothers possibly be anything short of incredibly good?
I had never heard of this game genre before, and now I know that when I'm sad, my brain isn't using it's hive-mind-grannies to smush goombahs into heroin. Thank you for this public service!
I used to like playing dating sim games from Korea on the Android app store and you would only be able to play a few screens of what is essentially a manga where the ninjas like you/your character if you have keys. The keys load 5 every 12 hours. There's lots of little sidegames with potions needed and whatever and I would play as long as I physically could for free, until I got 'a magic door' or sometching where even with daily login bonuses going for months I never got the item I needed to get through, so id just delete it and download another one, it's like teenage blueballs practice. Seeded my anti capitalist brain no doubt
Can't wait until we've got the technology to be immune to empty dopamine addiction
I would like to mention the AMAZING games of Candy Box and A Dark Room. These are two early ASCII-based games that incorporate incremental gameplay. They both are actually more like short RPGs, but with upgrades that you can buy after getting enough items.
They're full of fights, puzzles, and a lot of fun.
Plus, they are also forebearers of the incremental genre.
Cookie Clicker was released in August 2013, while Candy Box was released in October 2013 (one month later). A Dark Room was released in June 2013 (two months EARLIER!)
They deserve so much more recognition!
My favorite phrase now...
"Becuz of deh *g o o m b e h* "
half the reason i enjoyed Adventure Capitalist was because I like seeing how long I can withstand the pressure to fall into the trap of financial exploitation the game has. It's a fun game that I'll never win in the real world, but I can come close behind the screen ^_^
"Hello and welcome to the Eyeball zone", whatever that is, hits me right into the dopamine
Being in my early 40s and having had some friends die over the years made me realize that time is finite and only moves in one direction - we do not have time to be idle. I do not remember the last time I was bored.
Any critique of the predatory monetization tactics employed by the games industry would be incomplete without thanking God for James Stephanie Sterling.
There are now two more building types: One that dreams up cookies into existence, and one that creates clones of you, so that you don't even have to do your work yourself (mechanically, this changes nothing though).
Sometimes the best satire comes from the most subtle and innocent-looking things.
i literally have cookie clicker open right now
Same! I just ascended this morning so I'm setting myself up for long term idling
I opened it for the first time in a while, spent all my sugarcubes, and closed it again. :P
@@rusted_ursa I wish sugarcubes were in mobile.
"...You know what bugs me about doing stuff like that, is that I know every marketing person here is going: 'Yep, Bill is trying to get that anti-marketing dollar, that's a huge market."
-Bill Hicks
I have ADHD and I am 100% adding "because of the goomba" into my reasons I do shit.
Video games need their internet taken away. No internet, no microtransactions, no macrotransactions, no transactions whatsoever... no money. No broken husks patched up years later, no finishing content on the fly, no broken promises, no roadmaps, no purchase window time limits, no pre-orders, no bullshit. Just a thing you buy, and then wanna play or don't. Like back in the golden days where the predatory stuff was reserved for buildings you had to actually go to with coins you had to actually own and carry. That still wasn't a good thing, but it's baby-evil compared to the "whaling" that goes on nowadays.
Oh but, no multiplayer! Except for local multiplayer.