2 Let's Talk:Idle Games

Alright, so idle games- from that title you would think that they don't require any effort, skill, primary time and that they are completely pointless. You would be correct for believing that, mostly...

You see, idle games are completely pointless and don't require effort or skill, but that do require primary time. When I say that I mean time on the app/site, you have to spend your time upgrading things tracking your money and spendings, and when you're done upgrading everything- you find yourself thinking that you wasted about 5 hours in total ... on an idle game...

But once you're done you always come back to a game with a similar premise that takes a similar amount of your time. Why do we, or atleast I, do that? I'd like to think it's because basically everyone dual wields screens, so while you're watching or reading something, you also pay attention to the other screen in which you're earning something at an impossible rate. Once I figured out atleast why I still continue to play such a pointless and lacklustre game, I asked myself whether I would play them if I couldn't do other things at the same time, like listening to music or reading an ok novel (because if it was a really good novel like Reverend Insanity you would give all your attention to that), would I still play? No, no I wouldn't.

That's what I like to tell myself, but I know deep inside, that I may still give those games my apparently worthless attention, even while writing this I'm thinking to myself that some idle games do have an interesting premise... but they don't. I was specifically thinking about the ones where you unlock art or 'something cool to please your eyes', but finding the exactly same thing doesn't require you to play the game, you could just find it online...

Quite recently I found that some of my friends were playing with fake stocks depending on the real business market, and I thought, that's kind of similar actually. They place imaginary money into business and spend hours observing it ,while something else is on, and buy/sell when the time is ready. I'm pretty sure stocks don't actually work exactly like that but that's how they did it. However, I wasn't interested in joining in, it looked more boring than interesting, and that's when I realised that me playing idle games was the equivalent, time wasting and boring.