Tuesday, April 22, 2025

This is the twenty-seventh installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season. Currently the wind is blowing toward the topic of scarcity.

A few days ago, I talked about the artificial scarcity of video games, how they make you worry over resources that aren’t even real. Minecraft is a relatively tame example of this, as the game has a natural abundance that makes the work you put into mining and exploring worth it in the end. Some games prey on this scarcity mentality by offering reprieve from the worry in exchange for real money, paying your way to success instead of working for it. Patience is an important part of combating scarcity, since the abundance of the land doesn’t come about faster by paying more money or putting more energy into it, despite what commercial agriculture might think.

Another type of game that actually rewards patience, and also turns the scarcity mentality pretty well upside-down, is the idle game. The basic idea of these games is that you start some kind of process going, whether that’s making cookies, paperclips, or wigs, and then watch as the game essentially plays itself. You can periodically interact with the process by upgrading the speed at which things are generated, or sometimes gain boosts from performing a certain task, but for the most part, the game requires little input or interaction. You eventually build your factory from making dozens of paperclips per minute to thousands per hour, to eventually converting all the matter in the known universe.

Idle games really go beyond combating scarcity to making a parody of abundance. Your idle kingdom can tax its citizens for a quad-trigintillion coins per second, which I believe is supposed to be 10^102. There’s absolutely no pretense of realism whatsoever, but that isn’t really the point. The point is that by playing a game like this, you have something to do even when you aren’t really doing anything. This is appealing to many players who want to play games as much as possible, even when they are supposed to be participating in real life, as well as people who don’t feel like they have much else to do other than manage a universe-consuming paperclip factory.

I’ll have some more words tomorrow. Probably not univigintillion of them, but at least a few.