It’s not that they’re new, far from it, but during festive periods (Christmas, summer vacations, etc.) idle games tend to experience a peak in popularity that makes them reach many more users. These days are not being an exception in this regard, to the point that even in my personal environment there are several people who have succumbed to the charms of one of these titles. Even I, who over the years have played some of them, have stung again with one more, something that I still don’t know if it’s lucky or unfortunate.
Explaining properly what idle games are will be much easier if we start from the opposite point, that is, conventional games. Since its origins, the game has always been intended to provide entertainment to the user while playing the game.
Do you want to have fun? Open the game and get to work, whether it’s shooting like there’s no tomorrow, taking your humble soccer team to the top of international competitions, or oozing adrenaline as you overtake even the planes in your favorite racing simulator. When you’re done, you close the game and go back to your chores.
This is the formula that has worked for decades, from the days of Pong to the present day, the reality recreated in the game only exists while the user is playing the game. At the end, if applicable, it is stored in a memory support that allows us to recover it when we want to resume the game, during all that intermediate time said world remains frozen in time, waiting for us to return, either a few hours or a few years later, to pick it up exactly as we left it.
Progress Quest, for many the first idle game in history.
The advent of multiplayer and online games, however, already brought about an interesting change in this model. Why? Well, because even if we are not playing, if there is another player with whom we share a map, competition or any other common space that is doing so, the world will advance without our presence. This is something that, even today, continues to take quite a few people who are taking their first steps in the world of multiplayer by surprise.
The relationship between multiplayer and idle games is therefore closer than we might think at first, since all games of this type are for a single player. However, they share a fundamental element, and that is that the world is still “alive” whether or not you are playing. Not surprisingly, the community considers that the first idle game in history was Progress Quest, which was nothing more than a parody of the first MMOs that succeeded on the Internet. Although, in reality, it still precedes even more distant in time, and when I tell you, a little later, you will end up making all the sense of it.
What are idle games?
But then, what are idle games? Well, in summary, they are games that remain active even if the player is inactive, and when I say inactive I do not mean that it is not directly interacting with the game, no, an idle game can be closed and still, in its own way, which I will explain later, remain active. I know that for those of you who haven’t experienced a game of this type yet, it may sound a bit strange, but there are actually quite a few cases where it makes a lot of sense.
I say that it is still active “in its own way” since in reality, logically the game is not still open. However, when it is opened by the user, it checks the date and time, calculates the time elapsed since it was closed until that moment, and then, in a quick calculation, updates the contents of it to contemplate everything that has elapsed in said time span, providing the user with the experience that the world has not stopped while the user was not playing.
If we think of a shooter, a driving simulator or a platform game, to give just a few examples, this game model makes no sense, since the bulk of the experience is concentrated on living, in first person, the challenges that sets up the game Now, if you spend just a few seconds thinking about it, surely you can think of other types of games in which idle games can fit perfectly. And if not, I’ll give you a clue with a single word: management.
Cookie Clicker is probably the most successful idle game to date.
Now imagine, for example, a stock investment simulator that works in real time, with real information and therefore very reliably replicates real market conditions. Obviously, in that context it does not make any sense that everything that happened in the period of time between when you stop playing and when you play it again is lost, right? The quotes will have changed, it is possible that some automatic order that you have previously configured has been executed, it is even possible that you have lost everything, or that in a stroke of luck you now have a fortune. Why? Because the market has not stopped when you were not paying attention to it, which is exactly the same as an idle game does.
The case of a stock market simulator is quite complex, but I thought it was adequate for you to understand the premise of idle games. However, you should know that the proposal of most of them is much simpler. In general (although there are exceptions, of course), these types of games have to do with the collection and/or creation of resources of all kinds, in processes that are automated. From breaking cookies, as in the very successful Cookie Clicker, to managing a huge mining corporation, be it planetary or space.
In these games, when the player remains active, they can perform various operations (some games are richer than others in this regard), but the game stipulates a certain performance for when it enters the idle phase. Thus, when after a few hours you open your mining exploitation again, you will find a message that informs you of the amount of resources that have been extracted) and therefore added to your accounts, during said period.
And then where is the fun of idle games?
If the game is still “running” during your absence, you may wonder what is the point of opening it, where is the fun, but of course, at this point you must take into account several important aspects, mainly these:
- The “yields” of your game decrease in the idle phase.
- Normally you will have to reinvest part of the profits to evolve your infrastructure, resources, etc.
- Many of these games include some ‘bonus’ features and/or mini-games with a fixed duration.
In other words, and this will not surprise you at all, developers are looking for ways to give users enough incentive to come back to the game regularly, usually a few times a day, even if it’s just to spend a few minutes each game session, just enough time to collect perks and rewards, make all the upgrades, and generally feel very proud of how well his accounts are doing, which is also quite satisfying.
The vast majority of idle games, whether browser games or device apps, are free and can therefore be financed in two ways: advertising and/or in-app purchases. As a general rule, they are not pay-to-win games, but it is true that watching some ads or buying some bonuses can substantially reduce the time we will need to obtain the resources that allow us to improve the performance we obtain from what we are managing. In other words, idle games, especially those that include purchases, are only a good option for people with patience, otherwise the temptation to bite into a purchase can be very, very strong.
The successful Tamagotchi can be considered the first digital idle game in history. Image: Tomasz Sienicki
If you lived, in its time, the Tamagotchi fever, that was actually your first contact with idle games. As you will remember, it was not necessary for you to be paying constant attention to the toy, but when you opened it, after a few hours, the creature housed in it would let you know, sometimes very explicitly, the needs that it had accumulated during the time you had spent it. remained absent.
To do this, as current idle games do, when reactivating the device, it calculated the elapsed time and applied a formula that determined the degradation of the creature (hunger, dirt, boredom, etc.) that corresponded to it. Sure, user intervention was required to bring everything back to proper levels, and progression in the game meant the creature would grow, even if you only spent a few minutes a day on it.
Which brings me to a very important point about idle games. As you will remember, before I mentioned the word management, which normally makes us think of businesses, companies and so on. However, Games like the aforementioned Tamagotchi, or the popular Nintendogs and Ninencats were also idle gamesjust like a simulator could be, in the style of The Sims, but in which the life of its inhabitants does not stop when you close the game.
Thus, we can expect the mechanics of idle games to spread in the future, from life simulators to managersin which the passage of time can translate into good or bad news, which could provide a factor of randomness that can be very interesting.
Did you already know the idle games? Do you play any or do you prefer to always stay in control? In which genres do you think this game model could fit well?
