I played 4500 hours of Clicker Heroes and Now I Can See Infinity
Hello, Finite reader and welcome to this rather boring euclidean experience of words strung together to form ideas and convey meaning. This will be a usual top to bottom written affair with linear thoughts to seek to build on each other to reach a conclusion that I know Finite folks really love to consume. I used to be no different. I too have memories of engaging joyously in this kind of pursuit. It was long ago…4500 hours ago to be precise. It was before I stared infinity in the eye.
So, if you don’t know what this game is, let me explain. It is a game where you click on a monster. Clicking on that monster gives you experience I think? I apologize, as it’s still difficult to recontextualized meaning in the finite sphere. I think I used to understand what clicking did, but honestly at this point in my existence I don’t. Let me show you what my game looks like right now:
The reason I no longer understand what clicking does is because I no longer have to click. I have an auto clicker and I drag that onto the monster and it will click on that monster 10 times per second. I have another auto clicker that I will drag onto the level up box of my heroes. Between these two things the game plays itself and whatever abstraction of experience, money, levels, progress used to exist, it no longer does in the same way.
It took me 4500 hours to produce that screen that you’re seeing up there.
You’ll notice that even Steam has but one message for me. It tells me to stop. It begs me to stop. I thought it would be funny to say no to recommending this game. The idea of playing something for 4500 hours and then deciding to recommend against it. That’d be a pretty funny joke, but they make me write something about why I don’t recommend it and that’s a bit too much work for me to commit to the joke.
I stopped playing this game once I got all the achievements within it and doing so took me 4500 hours. However, as I mentioned the game was automated. I didn’t have to really play, I just had to have it open. It just had to be playing in the background. The actual amount I would play the game would be about five to ten minutes in a given day. But when we discuss a game like a clicking based game, we really start to abstract with “gaming” even is. Because one could argue this is just all the work of crypto-mining with no reward, but that’s wrong. This is more like flash cyrpto-mining and doesn’t require a graphics card to burn through the core of the earth in the pursuit.
A very long time ago, I played a game called progress quest. It was a game that literally played itself. Your adventurer would clear randomly generated content, kill random generated monsters, get random generated loot, and slowly level up. The only real progress that could be made was due entirely to how long the game was left running. There wasn’t skill in this game, the only thing that mattered was how much time you put in. However, in a very abstract notion, that isn’t different from other games. Skill is often an acclimation of experience and knowledge gain through time. A person with 2000 hours into the most difficult game you can imagine is going to be pretty good at it. A person with 1 hour into that game is going to suck.
One could argue everything is a time investment on a fundamental level and games like Clicker Heroes or Progress Quest just take out the middle man. They are “games” where numbers just get bigger and your monkey finite brain can feel better.
So, the interesting thing about Clicker Heroes is what gameplay there actually is in the game. Because the game goes on nearly infinitely, there is technically an agreed hard cap within the game, but where does one stop? My goal was to get all the achievements on Steam. The gameplay is what you as a player can do to reduce the time it takes to finish your goals. In a game like Clicker Heroes this means being as efficient as possible on the mechanics the game does have.
The challenge of Clicker Hero is that every 5 levels you face a boss. Every subsequent boss will have 8 times the health of the previous boss. If the first boss has 1 health, the second boss has 8, the third boss has 64, the fourth boss has 512, the fifth boss has 4,098, and so on. This is what we call exponential growth.
Nothing you do in this game gives you the ability to do exponential damage on that scale. Everything you do in this game scales linearly against a monster that scales exponentially. Let’s say that you buy an upgrade that gives you 5,000,000 damage. Let’s say that you can do that for every boss you fight. So, you go from 5 million to 10 million and you’ve doubled your damage. You go from 10 million to 15 million and now you’ve only increased your damage by 50%, then 30%. The boss is increasing their health by a factor of 8 every single time. No matter how great the numbers you purchase or can purchase, exponential growth will make an absolute fucking joke out of you.
We do have our own exponential growth, because every 25 levels, the heroes get a times 4 multiplier to their damage. The problem is that while this can sometimes keep pace with the monsters health, it is a much weaker exponential growth. The way the game functions is that you constantly get as far as you can, then restart the game all over again. But by doing so you get access to perks and benefits that increase your ability to do a number of things from gaining currency, doing more damage, or taking less monsters to get to the next zone.
I don’t really want to get into a detailed guide for how to play this game, but I could. What is important for you to understand is that almost everything in the game is a trap that has shitty linear growth and is not worth the investment you put into it. Players will look at an upgrade that increases their damage by 1000% and think it’s good. If their damage was 10, now their damage is going to be 100. But if you look at 8x8x8, then what you’ll notice is that upgrade only actually got you 12 levels and is fucking worthless. I’m at zone one million and that upgrade would be responsible for .00012 of my progress. And this is how I started to be able to see infinity. Let’s look back at my screen.
You can choose to have the numbers represented either by million/billion or by things like 2e2000, which would mean 2 times ten to the power of 2000. While that may seem confusing it’s actually very simple. Every number after the “e” equals one digit placement. 2e1 = 2, 2e2= 20, 2e3= 200. 2e2000 would equal 2 with two thousand zeros. A million is 1e6. A billion is 1e9. A trillionaire is 1e12. So, the damage I’m currently doing is 6 followed by 174 thousand zeros.
And here is where infinity starts to really shine into play. Infinity is an important mathematical concept that tends to destroy math in a lot of interesting ways I don’t understand. But humans are very very bad at understanding large numbers.
People will intuitively disagree with this. If you’re thinking, Faye, I knew this, I’m not a baby. Great, hashtag not you. Most people don’t get this. And we understand and see a million as amazingly large, we understand a billion or trillion as amazingly large, we understand our universe or the atoms in it comprise an incredibly vast near infinity, but our monkey brain just go big number big.
When playing Clicker Hero you start to think in powers of ten. If you’re doing 1e10,000 damage, that is billions of billions of billions times more damage than a billion damage. It is so insanely large that the number could out weigh all countable items in our existence. But you know what? You know what? That number is an absolute fucking joke to 1e10,006. In the same way if you currently have one dollar and someone has a million dollars. 1e20,000 is so far beyond 1e10,000, that 1e10,000 may not even exist. If we’re talking size, it would be the equivalent of difference going from the size of a human to an atom, then from an atom to something as proportionally small, hundreds of times.
And let’s compare these numbers to 1e100,000,000 or 1e(1e9). You can start to get the picture here or you can’t. I forget what it’s like being finite. However, when you start to think in infinity, we talking about a number with not actual limitation or end. It is a concept of forever and has real world implications within math. It breaks math in so many interesting ways, that I don’t understand. But what you can understand, what you can start to grasp, is just how small every number really is compared to infinity. How a billion can be outclassed to be a huge fucking noob baby, all numbers you can think of exist along this finite spectrum of smallness compared the vastness of infinity.
Before playing Clicker Heroes, when my calculator would give me an answer like 59e-6, I didn’t understand it and I got kind of mad. However, now I really get how numbers and growth and the value of the relationship between them. The interesting thing to me in this game was recognizing the potential and value of the growth that was presented to me. It was understanding that my enemy was something exponentially increasing by a factor of 8 and unless I was doing something that could match that, it wasn’t worth it.
I think a lot of folks look at games like Cookie Clicker or Clicker Heroes as complete wastes of time, but that’s a kind of interesting dismissal to me because it inherently subjects bias and value into what ISN’T a waste of time for a finite, mortal being. I’m mortal and I watched beast wars for dozens of hours. I’m still mortal, but I put a signed in time of 4,500 hundred hours into a skinner box with no furniture. But I did so very intentionally. I didn’t get tricked into wasting me time. I enjoyed my time within in, because of figuring out the math and the relationship of numbers within math. But more importantly it is because in real life, we don’t get achievements most of the time.
When we invest in our relationships, our friendships, projects, medium articles, or state activism — there aren’t numbers to crunch. Friendships are investments that take time to develop things like trust and real companionship. Projects on art can take month after month with nobody really caring until you’ve completed it. We as a society really don’t care about the journey, we want the finish product. We want to disassociate on Netflix while binge watching the entire series at once, fuck waiting a week in between episodes.
One of the real pleasures of Clicker Heroes or these kind of games is your effort directly results in your progress. It is a simulation of this that you don’t often get in real life. And while you do get it within gaming, sometimes you don’t want to get invested in a story, do the quests, or git gud. Sometimes you just want to feel like you have any direction forward at all. Sometimes you want to feel like your tomorrow is different than today and a game like that this will do that. Activism is a tree that grows only when you look at it and it feels like you never make any real impact on the day to day.
And this game may not be for you, but I want to take a moment to explain to you, why this game is for other people. Why this game can be appealing and why it is worthy of being called a game.
