Idle games and the scale of money.

To explain an idle game is to have already lost the war.

Idle games are just that, your car is running. All the time. And you get points. But it’s not your car. It’s your computer. What you hook to that computer as it idles, the sequence you attach those things, and how much patience you have to wait, all determine your success at the game. Hit on the right combination, and the numbers go exponential. Initial clicks that counted by ones, then tens, then hundreds suddenly go into the sextillions and septillions.

Really, it was 10 million years of waiting on the next upgrade.

In short, the only thing worse than explaining an idle game is actually playing one.

The easiest way to see this work is to play the text-heavy Swarm Simulator. When I fired it up initially, I thought there would be bees. Nope. There’s just clicks to make drones. When you get to 100 initial drones, you can buy a queen that automatically makes drones. Then there’s clicks to make queens. When you get to 1000 queens, you can buy a nest that automatically makes queens who automatically make drones. Then you click for nests. When you get 10,000 nests… You get the exponential thing quickly.

More like Swarm Stimulating! AMIRITE?

The ever increasing number of drones are collecting meat that feeds the swarmlings that gather territory.  This territory plus the meat makes new larva that can become either the drones or the swarmlings. Boosting either makes big gains in the others.

And that’s the rub. There’s always three axis. In this game, there’s meat, territory, and larva. One of them is the limiting factor, so you use the other two to boost it until one of the others becomes the limiting factor.

A little more complex (and graphic) is  the idle game called Reactor Idle. You’re producing energy. The energy comes in the form of heat, which is sold for money. The money funds research. The research goes to producing more heat. 

All the little widgets on the left make lots of little monies at the top.

There is a challenge in this one that involves laying out the reactors and generators in a way to manage the heat. Failure results in little generators going kaboom.

Unless you do that. Kaboom.

Just like in other idle games, the initial clicks pale in comparison to the eventual costs. Initial windmills cost $1. Eventual expansions run in the quintillions and sextillions of dollars.

Which got me thinking about subways and transit. Idle games are an intriguing way to explain why you can’t use a bus fare to pay for a metro station. 

Look at that idle game again. But instead of collecting clicks, collect bus tokens $2 each. Now use that $2 to build a complete multi-modal bus, transit, and subway system.

It’s impossible. There is a disconnection between the scales of money. The initial clicks pale in comparison to the eventual costs. New York charges $2.75 to ride the subway. It cost $2.4 billion to build the new tunnel for the 7 line on the West Side. Even if a person paying full price rode that subway every second, it would take 30 years to pay for the tunnel. And that doesn’t include operating expenses. 

In the idle games, it’s possible to level up. There is a way to extract more clicks, automate those clicks, and ramp up to exponential growth. Individual clicks keep things going. Exponential clicks get things growing.

How do we find the same in the world of transit? We’ve said that there are three axis in these idle games. If money is one, what are you going to spend to get more of it? Land is a possibility. A new bus or metro line can bring thousands of new residents and employees to an area. The growth around the station can pay off the construction. There are even examples of transit projects being financed by the development that they spur. But that only happens if the transit is leading development, rather than following where people are already going.

To change that part of the equation, it’s necessary to spend the political capital. It’s hard to justify any transit spending. It’s uniquely difficult to send a spur out to a sparsely populated area, not just because of the cost, but also because it will bring development to an area that may not want it.

And that brings us to the hard part of these idle games. You can only spend money or meat or research or capital or land because you have spent TIME. As always, time is the forgotten fourth dimension. So it is with real life Transit Idle. For some reason, we seem willing to wait a really long time as those individual fares accumulate to that new station. We should be turning that around, accelerating the process to build the new stations using the community’s other resources, then be willing to wait as the city matures around its spectacular transit system.

Now, if only it was a game. One where you had a bunch of land to spread a system of transit. You could build ahead of ridership, then plan areas for development around the stations. The areas would grow and you could pay for the… and I’m talking about SimCity.

Perhaps, I’ve liked idle games for a long time.