I tried A Dark Room. Then i realized it was everything addicting about RPGs distilled down to some bars that you click to fill. It reminded me of my days being addicted to Diablo 2. They are straight up skinner boxes. Clicker games are the video game equivalent of crack. They're basically dopamine stimulation buttons. Keep clicking and you'll eventually be rewarded by that little burst of feel good juice when you reach the next level.

They all remind me of this:

https://youtu.be/uBVkk5rW0lw

That's certainly one way to think about clicker games, and it probably applies to most clicker games I know of.

However, a GOOD clicker game (such as one with Universal Paperclips) recognizes that the genre is not about dopamine rushes. Instead, a good clicker game is really a management simulator.

Factorio is probably the best example: build your factory correctly, and you never have to lift a finger to do any work at all. Of course, Factorio is a management game, but at its core, its a clicker game (click to mine Iron / Copper / Stone).

Factorio becomes recognized as a good Management game because although the "clicker" mechanic exists to mine stuff, it isn't actually how the player is supposed to play. The "clicks" are there to give a sense of scale (it takes ~2 seconds for a beginning player to mine 1-iron).

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In a similar way, Universal Paperclips is a management game, and with an ending to boot. So you're "free" once you see the ending (unlike a lot of other games). Which is why I consider it to be one of the better clicker games.

Clicker Heroes also manages to make the jump into a solid management simulator. As you purchase heroes, the game is more about figuring out the optimal distribution of hero levels. Clicker Heroes does have an infinite grind however, so it loses points in my eyes.

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All in all, a clicker-game is simply a management game, like Sim City. There's just a "click" mechanic to connect the player with the absolute baseline activity of the game. In Universal Paperclips, you build a few paperclips one-at-a-time at the beginning of the game.

Honestly, the dumb skinner-box grind is far more present in mainstream games (MMORPGs, Loot Crates). Some clicker-games have this awful behavior, but the good ones tend to avoid it.

I've gotta admit, I've avoided anything with clicker in the description these days because of that experience. I've realized through personal experience, I get too into games with experience, status bars and things to manage.

I can't do RPGs any more since skyrim. I realized one day i'd played for several hours but had done nothing but craft things and organize my storage and inventory.

I get into dwarf fortress and CDDA every once in a while until i start to realize how much time i waste on them. I'll play fortresses until it takes ten minutes to do shit from fps death or spend several evenings in Cataclysm building a base and collecting food and resources and crap. I can't do it any more. It sucks me in too much.

I try to limit my gaming to platformers and arcade type games these days. I've spent way too long playing games about managing numbers, but i fail to do this effectively in life and i realize i end up spending way too much time sucked into imaginary worlds and not enough time focused on things i should.

I've wasted a lot of time on things like that. Years of my life cumulatively. Games like the diablo series and other action rpgs, the civilization games, a whole bunch of real time and turn based strategies, just about every jrpg on every console, a good majority of earlier computer rpgs and some recent ones, 4x strategy games, space sims and lots more. Thousands of hours thinking about and managing imaginary numbers. For me at least, the last thing i need is a bunch of numbers and bars with a button to fill them.

A few highly addictive browser-based MMO management games came out in the early/mid 2000s.

OGame, Travian and Inselkampf were three I spent some time in. On top of the simple clicking to maximise your holdings in-game, there was an additional layer of alliance/guild participation and meta game much like EVE Online. You tended to spend more time outside the actual game: discussing strategy, diplomacy and building tools.

'A Dark Room' is what we'd call an _incremental_ game, because it's not as much about clicking as most 'clicker' games tend to be - it's a game that unfolds, shifting mechanics and goals over time.

Most clicker games don't do much unfolding, and instead just become time management toys, trying to maximize rate of growth between extended periods of idleness. And - this is key - most clicker games aren't incremental games. Incremental games at least have some interesting draw: the game isn't what it at first appears to be. Clickers, on the other hand, are exactly what they appear to be.