The latest clicker game from Steam to take the gaming world by surprise is Banana. The name is simple, and so is the game. You click on a picture of a banana. That's it. But you click over and over and over until you start unlocking rewards and advancing to higher levels. You can win a new skin for your banana, trade skins with other players, and buy skins and other enhancements. That's typical of "clicker games" that arose more than ten years ago. Clicker games are very easy to play. You just keep clicking. You don't expect to have fun doing the game itself; that comes with the microtransactions when you unlock the rewards. Yes, some people find the transactions and trading to be fun. You can even automate the clicking, so the game advances while you are doing other stuff. It's estimated that most of the players are bots anyway.
The success of "Banana" is another example of how much our digital lives have been devoured by automation. It’s also the logical end point of video-game microtransactions. Is engagement with the game authentic or inauthentic? Who cares, so long as people are spending money.
The whole idea of clicker games started out as a joke, but now they are a bona fide thing, and companies are making money off them. Read about Banana and the rise of clicker games at Sherwood. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Titus Tscharntke)
