Cookie Clicker is more visually appealing, but Clicking Bad is more exciting. Which will you choose as your procrastination method?
When you think of monstrously addictive Internet games, chances are FarmVille and Candy Crush Saga come to mind. However, there are now two more browser-based games looking to consume all your time: Cookie Clicker, a cookie empire simulator, and Clicking Bad, a crystal meth empire simulator.
Cookie Clicker is the more visually appealing of the two. The premise is simple: You want to make cookies, not for love or money, but because you want some damn cookies.
You can manually make cookies by clicking on the giant cookie button — if you’re a loser. The cool kids, however, buy automatic clickers that make the cookie every few seconds using the cookies they made by manually clicking. The coolest kids buy grandmothers to bake the cookies for them. And then farms to grow cookie trees, factories to pump out mass-produced cookies, mines to drill for golden cookie ore and so on.
Pretty soon, you’re buying spaceships and iron grandmothers to transform all physical matter in the universe into cookies, so you can buy better cookie-making equipment so you can make more cookies to buy better cookie-making equipment…
There’s something casually terrifying about Cookie Clicker. Beneath the cheery facade of wholesome goodness lies an inescapable existential void. You get feedback from the game through a headline-generating news ticker at the top of the screen. Invariably, the news is all negative: Your farms are polluting the nearby river, some alien scumbags stole some of your cookies and your 60 or 70 grandmas want to know why you don’t visit more often.
I didn’t want any of this. I didn’t want to own a fleet of sweatshops; I didn’t want to open an interdimensional rift. All I wanted to do was to make cookies. But, to paraphrase Justin Timberlake, a million cookies isn’t cool anymore. You need a billion.
And so, you buy that time machine for several hundred million cookies. You buy that antimatter condenser for 4 billion cookies. You buy the upgrade that doubles the performance of your cookie factories by hiring children. After all, kids are faster and don’t need health insurance. (Thanks, Obama.)
In contrast, Clicking Bad is a far less crushing experience if only because the demented ethics are so stark. Of course making meth is evil! Have you watched Breaking Bad?
Like Cookie Clicker, you start off by mashing the “cook meth” and “sell meth” buttons until you’re rich enough to create a network of meth-producing RVs and drug dealers. True to its television heritage, Clicking Bad is redolent of the dearly departed AMC show. Every other sentence in the game ends with “bitch.” You buy sleazy lawyers to get the Drug Enforcement Administration off your back. You can buy a goatee that helps you sell more product.
But the game runs into some queasy moralistic problems when you start considering it in relation to the show. Breaking Bad is a show about how evil Walter White becomes. In Clicking Bad, however, you aren’t a mortal family man with cancer; you’re a demigod who cooks meth in an off-planet Heisenbelt. You launder your money on the New York Stock Exchange.
Clicking Bad operates with such wacky, grandiose flourish that the moral core of Breaking Bad gets lost in the empire building. Games should be fun, sure, but it feels churlish to turn one of the bleakest pop culture stories ever told into an amusing little postmodern wank. On the other hand, this thought only occurs in between mashing the sell button and buying another crooked senator, so maybe it’s not such a hindrance.
Of these two games, Clicking Bad is the more exciting one because it’s still constantly evolving and because it’s more mechanically complicated and rewarding than Cookie Clicker. Baking cookies is fun, but it comes nowhere close to building a network of methamphetamine supermarkets. Bitch.
