It’s not that they’re new, far from it, but during festive seasons (Christmas, summer vacations, etc.) idle games tend to experience a spike in popularity, making them reach a lot more users. Today is no exception in this regard, so much so that even in my personal environment there are several people who have fallen under the spell of one of these titles. Even I, who have played some of them over the years, got another stab again, still don’t know if it’s luck or bad luck.

A proper explanation of what idle games are will be much easier if we start from the opposite point, i.e. conventional games. Since its inception, the game has always been intended to provide the user with fun 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 pumping out adrenaline while overtaking even airplanes in your favorite racing simulator. When you’re done, you close the game and go back to your homework.

This is a 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 possible, it is stored in a memory support that allows us to restore it when we want to continue playing, all the while the said world remains frozen in time, waiting for us to return, either in a few hours or in a few years later to pick it up exactly as we left it.

Progress Quest, for many the first idle game ever.

However, the advent of multiplayer and online games has already brought an interesting change to this model. Why? Well, because even if we’re not playing, if there’s another player we’re sharing a map with, a competition, or any other common space that does, the world will move forward without our presence. This is something that continues to surprise many people who are taking their first steps in the multiplayer world.

Thus, the relationship between multiplayer and idle games is closer than we might initially think, since all games of this type are single-player. However, they share a basic element, that the world is still “alive” whether you’re playing or not. Not surprisingly, the community believes that the first idle game in history was Progress Quest, which was nothing more than a parody of the first MMOs to succeed on the Internet. Although in fact it still precedes even more distant in time, and if I tell you, a little later, you will eventually understand it.

What are idle games?

But then, what are idle games? In short, they are games that remain active even when the player is inactive, and when I say inactive I don’t mean it doesn’t directly interact with the game, no, an inactive game can be closed and still remain active in a way I’ll explain later. I know this might sound a little strange to those of you who haven’t played this type of game before, but there are actually quite a few cases where it makes a lot of sense.

I say it’s still active “in a way” because in reality the game is logically still not open. However, when the user opens it, it checks the date and time, calculates the time that has passed since it was closed, and then in a quick calculation updates its contents to consider everything that has passed in that time span, giving the user the experience that the world hasn’t stopped , when the user was not playing.

If we imagine a shooter, a driving simulator or a platformer, to name just a few examples, this game model does not make sense, since the bulk of the experience is focused on going through the challenges that set up the game in first person Now, if you spend just a few seconds thinking about it thinking, you can certainly think of other types of games that idle games can fit perfectly into. And if not, I’ll tell you in one 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 thus very reliably copies real market conditions. Obviously, it doesn’t make any sense in this context that everything that happened between the time you stop playing and when you start playing it again is lost, right? The quotes have changed, it’s possible that some automated command that you previously configured has been executed, it’s even possible that you’ve lost everything, or that you’re lucky and now have a fortune. Why? Because the market didn’t stop when you weren’t paying attention, which is exactly the same as an idle game.

The stock market simulator case is quite complex, but I thought it was adequate for you to understand the premise of the idle games. However, you should know that the design of most of them is much simpler. Generally (although there are of course exceptions), these types of games have to do with gathering and/or creating resources of all kinds in processes that are automated. From cracking cookies, as in the highly successful Cookie Clicker, to managing a huge mining corporation, whether planetary or space.

In these games, while the player remains active, he can perform various operations (some games are richer in this regard than others), but to enter the idle phase, the game sets a certain performance. So when you reopen your mining after a few hours, you will find a message informing you of the amount of resources that have been mined during the said period and thus added to your accounts.

And then where is the fun of idle games?

If the game is still “running” while you’re away, you might be wondering what’s the point of opening it, where’s the fun, but of course at this point there are several important aspects to consider, mainly these:

• Your game’s “earnings” decrease during the idle phase.
• Normally, you will have to reinvest some of the profits into developing 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 into the game regularly, usually several times a day, even if it’s just to spend a few minutes each game session, just enough time to collect perks and rewards, do all the upgrades, and generally feel proud of how well his accounts are doing, which is also quite satisfying.

The vast majority of idle games, whether they are browser games or device apps, are free-to-play and thus can be funded in two ways: advertising and/or in-app purchases. In general, these are not games with a win, but it is true that watching some ads or buying some bonuses can significantly reduce the time we will need to get the resources that will allow us to improve the performance we get from what we are driving. In other words, idle games, especially those that involve purchases, are only good choices 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 through Tamagotchi fever back in the day, this was actually your first contact with idle games. As you will remember, it was not necessary for you to pay constant attention to the toy, but when you opened it, after a few hours the being housed within it would let you know, sometimes very explicitly, the needs it had. accumulated during the time you spent them.

As current idle games do, it calculated the elapsed time when reactivating a device and used a formula to determine the creature’s degradation (hunger, dirt, boredom, etc.) that matched it. Sure, user intervention was required to get everything back to the right level, and progressing through the game meant that 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 may remember, I mentioned the word management before, 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 as a simulator in the style of The Sims could be, but in which the lives of its inhabitants do not stop when you close the game.

So we can expect idle game mechanics to expand from life simulators to managersin which the passage of time can translate into good or bad news, which can provide an element of randomness that can be very interesting.

Did you already know idle games? Do you play any or do you prefer to always be in control? What genres do you think this game model could fit well into?