The Rise of Idle Games and the Death of Work Life Balance

It’s the same thing every time — you click into a YouTube video and you move your finger to the lower right corner of the screen, ready to skip the ad after five long seconds.

As someone who played video games on a regular basis, I wasn’t surprised that Google was showing me five seconds of gaming ads whenever I tried to navigate through YouTube, but one day YouTube decided that instead of MMORPG and FPS, I might want to try out something called AFK Arena, to which Google introduced me through surging waves of ads.

That was four years ago. Now idle games like AFK Arena are everywhere.

Idle Games — A Quick Overview

It may come as a surprise to some, but idle games are nothing new. The word “idle” may have a fresh, exotic ring to it, but its workings take root in something much older. Idle games are an extension of incremental games, a genre with a design philosophy way less convoluted than its elusive and puzzling name. Incremental games are known for minimizing interactions between the player and the game itself. The game Cookie Clicker, which is a landmark in many Gen Zs’ memory lane, is a perfect exemplar of what an incremental game is: simple, relaxing, maybe somewhat mechanical.

As easy as it would be to attribute the success of idle games to nothing but nostalgia, the overwhelming love received by more recently released idle games seems to argue otherwise, which is curious, to say the least. All the trademarks of incremental games, like repetitive gameplay, minimal player engagement and a non-existent storyline, when combined, seem like an invitation to IGN’s annual list of worst games released (and probably be placed below LOTR: Gollum, which is sure to deal a real blow to any game developer’s self-esteem).

So, what’s the magic?

Remember how I said idle games are not a synonym, but rather an extension of incremental games? Most idle games, especially those in the mobile gaming market, have either steered away from or added to those three aforementioned characteristics of incremental games. In some cases, the change in design ideology is so drastic that it would not be unfair to say that idle games have become an independent genre.

For instance, while AFK Arena boasts of allowing players to progress in the game without having to even be in the application, the statement is only telling half of the truth. If you’re a casual player who just wants to cruise through the game by crushing your enemies in PVE, you are more than welcome to only check back into the game every six hours. However, if you want to be good at the game, you’d have to slave away and take part in these events that get tossed your way every two weeks. Just like that, players find themselves constantly doing something in the game, be it actively or passively.

What is worth noting, though, is that sometimes these events are so demanding that players have to empty their wallet of in-game resource to go anywhere with them. Since resources are generated through the ever-so-rigorous act of waiting, it’s incredibly easy for players to run out of what is necessary to complete the task at hand.

But worry not, for unlike real life where you’re stuck in the winter cold for 25 minutes for a bus, in these games, you can wait faster, at a cost.

Sit and Watch the Cash Roll in

If you’re someone who looks at the App Store or Play Store every now and then for new games to enjoy, chances are, you’re already familiar with some of big idle game titles like Gold & Goblins and Idle Miner Tycoon. The way that they sit smugly at the top of the charts as one of the top-grossing games of the week sends some gamers and game developers into a frenzy.

While gamer rage is neither unheard of nor uncommon, the reaction itself is surprisingly understandable. There are a number of meticulously made idle games out there in the wild, but they are a rare species. And while putting little effort into the development of a game, in itself, is not a crime, the way that some idle games integrate ads and microtransactions into their gameplay shows that their developers have nothing but revenue on their mind. For truly, when you have to watch thirty ads just to get through one level, you’re not playing “Arcade Tycoon Simulator” anymore. You are, in fact, playing “Ad-watching Simulator”.

But how much can a game like that make? If the player experience is as terrible as it was made out to be, the playerbase would, without a doubt, dwindle and the game would make less than one of those struggling writers portrayed in Hollywood movies.

Let’s look at Codigames, an indie game studio that has, up until this point in time, published 23 active games on the IOS and Andriod platform. Out of those 23 games, 19 are idle by nature. The company had only 16 games released back in 2021, but according to an article written by VIT Emprende that year, it saw a staggering profit of 18 million. A large part of that profit, of course, came from their 13 idle games.

One thing is certain: games with simplistic gameplay styles are making a comeback, a scrumptious, lucrative comeback.

The Faster We Walk

Still, it seems almost ludicrous that these idle games, with their incredibly simple mechanics, are garnering so much money for their developers. Sure, the games have brought in new twists and turns to their predecessors, but in an environment where players would blast a game for not containing entirely original elements, it wouldn’t come as a shock to anyone that the genre would fail. And that would be the case, if not for one factor — time.

You’ve probably heard at some point from your friends that their job is encroaching on their free time, that they now barely have any breathing room from their work, when on their contract, it says they’re working 30 hours a week. Then you think to yourself, “Didn’t grandpa used to work 40 hours every week? He seemed happy enough.”

Well, yes, but also no.

Statistically, work hours around the world have seen a steady decline over the last few decades. For instance, Canadian workers in 1976 had to work for about 38 hours a week on average while their counterparts in 2022 only had to work 36.5 hours weekly. Despite the delicate care taken to ensure the accuracy of the data collected, however, it’s likely that those numbers have not reflected the reality of the contemporary working experience. What we need to understand is that depending on how the data is compiled, workers completing the survey may simply put down the number of working hours as stated in their contract. This method may work wonders for certain industries where employees must be physically present at the jobsite in order for any work to be done, but it fails to account for fields that ask for nothing more than the worker’s digital presence. And the truth is, it’s not a rare sight for individuals in those fields to sometimes partake in overtime work while at home, which skews the accuracy of the data.

In essence, grandpa was happy because his contract said he needed to work 40 hours a week, which was exactly what he did. Your friend is upset because if they only worked the hours listed in their contract, they might get fired.

When work bleeds into one’s personal life, entertainment is often the first to be sacrificed (closely followed by the wallet for all the double shot espressos that one needs to stay awake). This is where idle games swoop in and save the day.

The simplicity of idle games is perfect for the contemporary lifestyle. Minimal player interaction? Perfect! I so happen to be anatomically incapable of growing a second pair of arms to tend to my phone while both my hands are stuck to the laptop keyboard. Haven’t got a plot line? No worries, I wouldn’t have the time to read it anyway with all the market research I have to perform. We all know it: idle games are not the most stimulating, but they are the most convenient form of digital entertainment that the modern crowd can afford to enjoy.

As Entertainment Morphs

Now that it’s established that idle games secured its place by capitalizing on the paucity of personal time in the modern society, another quandary arises. Are we no longer drawn to games with a fleshed-out story and complex mechanics? If we are to check out the Steam charts, we’d see that’s far from the case, as AAA games are still holding up rather well. They simply fall short on filling the hole that is productivity

There’s a certain guilt that many feel when playing AAA games. I remember playing Resident Evil: Village some time ago on a Sunday. I was on my seventh hour of the game. A cutscene was playing, which made the screen go dark for a moment. From the reflection on the monitor, I looked at myself for the first time in the past two hours and thought about how instead of shooting at some random frog man and looking like a raccoon sitting in the middle of a dumpster, I should really be doing something productive. When I got home after work the next day, I didn’t want to start up the game. That was when a tinge of guilt tugged at me, not for not advancing my career, but for not meeting my entertainment quota.

The experience was perplexing, but it was far from unique. Some of my friends have mentioned how their toil at work has led them to feel a dire need to catch up on some video gaming, but when they actually started the game, they felt terrible because the act of gaming, in fact, aggravated their exhaustion. But they went through with it and returned to work in a state worse than before.

Productivity is often deemed an absolute merit in the workplace, yet the pursuit for it appears to have extended beyond its original setting and have invaded the realm of entertainment, where one feels uneasy if they couldn’t meet their goal of relaxing. The dystopian, almost paradoxical concept of productive entertainment is illustrated in its full, horrid glory through none other than idle games, which, as aforementioned, allow players to make progress even if they’re not actively interacting with the game. For those who are in the workforce, this feature alleviates some of that anxiety of not being able to maintain productive and advance in the game while they themselves are in the office.

A problem, however, never ceases to be problematic just because a solution is found. The fact that entertainment is not, by nature, a goal, but rather the opposite of one needs to be recognized if we were to even begin to tackle the issue. Of course, it’s easier said than done as the tug of war between the desire to further one’s achievements in life and the need to relax has been going on for centuries, but one’s mental health is bound to suffer when they continue to generalize the concept of productivity and make relaxation a chore as well. As productivity, being a notion that’s irrevocably tied to work, continues to seep into the personal side of an individual’s life, a grave question awaits our response: will the line between work and entertainment eventually be entirely gone?