Why Millions of People Click on Bananas, Cookies, and Cows: How Idle Games Have Hacked Our Brains

In spring 2024, Banana launched on Steam. It had exactly one mechanic — click the banana to raise a counter. The counter kept climbing even in the background as long as the client was running, but actively clicking brought better results. The only reward for your effort was skins of varying rarity, which could be sold on the launcher's marketplace. Common ones were worth pennies; rare ones reached prices in the hundreds of thousands of rubles. The game's peak concurrent player count topped 900,000.

It might sound completely absurd — but that sliver of absurdity is exactly the key to understanding a whole genre that's held onto millions of players for two decades now. Let's trace the evolution of idle games and dig into the psychological mechanisms behind their popularity.

You could pin the genre's starting point — idle, or incremental — to 2002. The terminology hadn't been coined yet, but that's when Progress Quest appeared, a computer game by Eric Fredriksson. Calling it a full-fledged game, though, is a bit of a stretch.

Progress Quest's gameplay was about as simple as it gets: the player picked a race and class for their future character, and stats — strength, dexterity, intelligence, and so on — were generated randomly. The screen showed numbers and progress bars illustrating actions taken — mostly fighting monsters and selling loot. Occasionally other events popped up too, enough to string together a thin plot. The longer the game stayed open, the higher the character's level, item count, and skills climbed.

The player didn't need to do anything — Progress Quest literally played itself. And almost none of the stats mattered, except maybe strength (which determined inventory size and indirectly affected leveling speed). The game was a parody of the MMORPG genre and one title in particular — EverQuest. It was a joke, a statement, maybe even a social experiment.

"This is exactly how I see popular multiplayer RPGs, where players keep grinding the same tasks for new levels and items" — that's what Eric was trying to say between the lines to the gaming community. Some people got the joke and laughed along: certain fans, in solidarity with the creator, gave Progress Quest top scores and wrote mock glowing reviews on major aggregators. But, as often happens, the joke became bigger than just a joke.

Part of the critics decided that even a fully automated process could be enjoyable. And the option to create an online account and save your progress on a leaderboard site sparked real competition — some people, without any irony, dreamed of hitting the top spot.

The phrase "You can play by doing nothing!" became a sort of manifesto.

Many idle games kept leaning into satire: for example, Cow Clicker, released in 2010 for Facebook, poked fun at the primitive farming sims that had taken over social media at the time. Still, most of these games stayed niche, without much popularity or press.

The real idle-game boom hit in 2013, after the release of the now-famous Cookie Clicker, made by French programmer Julien Thiennot under the alias Orteil. You've almost certainly heard of it: click a cookie, get a cookie, spend your cookies on upgrades that start generating cookies automatically, no clicking required.

According to Julien, Cookie Clicker's code was written in a single evening — back when it was still browser-based. He posted a link on the popular forum 4chan without expecting much of a reception. But something remarkable happened: the game became popular almost instantly — about 50,000 people launched it within a few hours. A couple weeks later, the developer released an updated version at a new URL. Since then, the game has gotten major yearly updates packed with new content, and Orteil even set up a Patreon page to turn development into his full-time job. A beta version for Android arrived in 2019, followed by an official Steam release in 2021. The cookies had, quite literally, swallowed players whole.

Naturally, the Frenchman's success didn't go unnoticed, and imitators followed — Clicker Heroes (2014), AdVenture Capitalist (2015), and dozens more. Many clickers borrowed Julien's blueprint: a branching upgrade tree, a pile of in-game achievements, a "prestige" system that resets progress in exchange for permanent boosts. Some appeared and vanished without a trace, others pulled in tens or even hundreds of thousands of players from around the world. The genre had settled: the player barely participates, the numbers keep climbing, and you keep wanting to come back for more.

But why?

Every idle game rests on a handful of reinforcing psychological mechanisms. The first is what psychologists call "variable reinforcement," described back in the mid-20th century by American scientist Burrhus Frederic Skinner. The gist: when a reward arrives at random rather than after every action, the brain produces far more dopamine than it would from predictable rewards. Every form of gambling relies heavily on this — casinos, lotteries, betting shops, and slot machines.

Idle games lean on the same system: progress here is continuous, but its pace fluctuates wildly. The player never quite knows when the next big leap will happen — clearing a long stretch, buying an expensive upgrade, or hitting a "prestige" reset with bonuses attached. Reaching any of these milestones triggers that same variable reinforcement and pulls the player deeper into the loop.

The second piece, working neatly alongside the first, is the dopamine loop. The player performs a micro-action (a click, an upgrade purchase) and immediately sees a result: numbers climb, progress speeds up. The brain locks in the "action-reward" link and demands a repeat. And it barely takes any effort — the outcome is always positive, with no penalties or losses.

The third mechanism is the Zeigarnik effect. According to it, people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks far better than completed ones. Loose ends create extra cognitive load and keep tugging at a person's attention, pulling them back to the unfinished task.

Idle games are built on endless (or extremely long) chains: it always feels like the next upgrade, the next level, the next "prestige" reset is just around the corner. After closing the game, a person's mind stays with it: "just a bit more, and I'll have enough!" That unfinished gestalt keeps pulling you back.

And even "prestige" — the progress reset — doesn't feel frustrating, because the reward outweighs the loss: a new dopamine loop kicks in, one that runs faster thanks to the boosts earned from the reset. This turns the whole experience into a series of short cycles, each one a bit faster and a bit sweeter than the last.

One more small but important detail sets idle games apart from gambling: here, you can't lose. No bets, no losses — only gains, only pure dopamine without risk. Getting started is easy; walking away is hard — the brain happily hooks itself with a steady dopamine supply.

Modern gamers live in an age of release overload — dozens of major titles and hundreds of indies come out every year. The old joke about games bought on sale that never get launched grows truer by the day. Ironically, we want to play, but we're also increasingly exhausted by games: by the time it takes to learn them, by the tension, by the risk of losing and being disappointed, and, ultimately, by an oversaturated market with no rules left.

Against that backdrop, the idle genre offers a sense of progress without any mental effort or risk — a simple process with a very pleasant reward. The casual nature of "incrementals," which for a seasoned gamer should read as an obvious downside, ends up being read as purely positive under these conditions — a kind of outlet that lets you rest and unwind.

On top of that, many players run these games in the background: while watching a show, listening to a podcast, or working. Clickers don't demand constant attention, so they fit neatly on a second monitor. That's given rise to a specific subgenre you could loosely call overlay games — projects that take up just part of the screen and sit right on top of the desktop, offering simple but sticky progression that requires the game to stay running at all times. Examples include Rusty's Retirement (2024) and Cornerpond (2025).

Idle games have made their way into mobile gaming too, perfectly capturing the "pull out your phone for a minute, collect currency, level up" format. Between 2015 and 2020, the genre took over the App Store and Google Play charts.

Steam phenomena like Banana, mentioned at the start of this piece, added one more ingredient to the formula: an economic angle. People clicked the banana not just for the dopamine, but for the real chance to earn actual money. The game's peak concurrent count coincided with a frenzy over rare skins.

In spring 2026, Task Bar Hero launched, echoing some of that "banana" success. It's an overlay game where a squad of upgradeable characters moves through a location and fights monsters. Wins periodically drop chests with random loot — consumables and gear pieces. Nearly every in-game item can be listed on the marketplace: prices here don't reach the astronomical heights of Banana, but the odds of pulling mid-value items are noticeably better. The project's peak concurrent count topped 500,000 players, and the daily average is still holding steady at 200,000–300,000.

For a while, the genre was written off as fluff — something unserious, even dumb. But over time, projects started appearing that pushed the formula forward and gave players' experience more substance.

Universal Paperclips, released in 2017, is a game about an AI that turns all matter in the universe into paperclips. Behind the facade of a bare-bones clicker hides a philosophical parable that digs into some genuinely deep themes — a great example of narrative design working in lockstep with gameplay to deepen the experience.

NGU IDLE (2019) and Melvor Idle (2021) aren't as narratively deep, but they noticeably "leveled up" the RPG side of clickers. And Leaf Blower Revolution (2020) delivered gameplay that's absurd in its own way, yet meticulously designed, with an original progression system.

Even games from other genres have started absorbing idle elements. The hugely popular Vampire Survivors is essentially a semi-idle game: the character attacks automatically, and the player only moves around and picks upgrades. It worked out so well that the industry is still dealing with the fallout — the vampire-like genre that's since taken over game launchers. Incremental games have stopped being a fringe curiosity and turned into a tool that, in the right hands, can set trends.

But it hasn't been without its excesses. In mobile idle games, monetization is often built around "time-gates" — artificial waiting periods that can always be skipped for cash. Developers deliberately stretch out progress so players will pay to speed it up. Another blight is the ad farm, forcing players to watch clips for in-game bonuses. These projects are built on manipulation designed to squeeze as much money as possible out of trusting users. Given the genre's psychology, it works especially well.

That said, this isn't a flaw of the genre itself, but of the business models used by certain developers and publishers. It's not hard to tell an honest idle game — one with transparent balancing that respects the player's time — apart from a manipulative cash-grab. And, as it turns out, there are still more examples of the former.

Idle games are a mirror of our times. They offer control over growth, the illusion of achievement without effort, a chance to rest and switch off — and they genuinely work.

They work because they answer a simple need: getting results without risk. Success usually demands time, effort, and luck. The genre offers an alternative — progress that's easy to reach and always inevitable, free of frustration and negative emotions.

The popularity of these games is a pretty predictable pattern. We're tired of complexity, and we're chasing easy dopamine. And we find it by clicking on bananas, cookies, cows, and dozens of other interactive elements. And the real question isn't even whether that's dumb. It's what it says about us. How many hours have we already handed over to numbers that mean nothing? And, more to the point — why doesn't it bother us one bit?

I'd bet that at some point in your gaming life, you've tried an idle game. Were there any that stuck with you — that let you relax and unwind? Let us know in the comments!