1. Okay folks, here is how you stop yourself from playing Cookie Clicker on a Windows PC:
Run Notepad as an administrator, go to file > open
Open C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Add this line to the end of the file: 127.0.0.1 orteil.dashnet.org
Save and restart your browser
2. Congratulations on your newfound freedom. Go and actually get something done!
3. To be fair, while Cookie Clicker seems to have been designed by a mad psychologists to maximize addictive potential, the only way it makes money is through ad revenue and not by hammering you w/ endless microtransactions. There are no loot boxes or other types of gambling, just an endless and effective gameplay loop.
4. Your goal is to make as many cookies as possible. By making cookies, you are able to buy buildings and upgrades to allow you to make more cookies, which allow you to buy more buildings and upgrades and so on. This is really no different than Diablo at its core. You do a thing to get better at doing a thing just for the sake of it.
5. While this gets called an idle game, it only really is until it dawns on you that your most effective strategy is to get as many bonus-providing random drops as you can. You will at first be excited to leave it running overnight to see how many cookies you build up but eventually that just becomes downtime where you can't get the random drops.
6. You do thankfully get options to play less actively but it is never as lucrative as getting a lucky couple drops in a row, where you can gain days worth of cookies in a few seconds.
7. So you keep it open in a browser window all the time.
8. You get an upgrade at some point where a sound lets you know there's been a random drop in the open browser window even if you're not actually looking at it at the moment. At this point, the game is only nominally in the background and whatever you might have been looking at in another tab is secondary to keeping an ear open to listen for that little sound.
9. The sound is a bell which is appropriate for the Pavlovian tab-switching response it evokes.
10. As far as the actual idle aspect of the game--buying buildings and upgrades to those buildings to make cookies to buy more buildings and upgrades--it's wonderful. You would not care so much about getting the random drops were it not.
11. You see, not only do you buy buildings to make cookies and then buy upgrades to those buildings, you also buy upgrades that allow one building type to improve a different building type. This is just the beginning. You get achievements that let you make more cookies. You can give up all your cookies and start afresh w/ which gives you additional upgrades. You have mini games that improve your output cookie output.
12. This is to say, finding an optimal strategy to Cookie Clicker involves serious mathematics and that's awesome.
13. I am not kidding about having to block Cookie Clicker in my hosts file but I really don't hold that against it. By giving me a reason to think about math instead of doing my actual job, it really added a nice layer to my day-to-day. Eventually, I just needed the mindspace back. It's a real classic of the genre so give it a go sometime--just not when you have a deadline approaching.
No comments:
Post a Comment