Idle & Clicker Games
As the myth note above explains, this lineage began as satire. Three years later, in 2013, Julien Thiennot built Cookie Clicker in a single day and posted it to a forum: fifty thousand players within an hour, one and a half million visits a day within a month. The discovery that watching a number climb feels good on its own gave the idle game its own shelf. No skill required. No luck required. All it needs is time passing -- a game that sits slightly apart from all four springs, the strangest one on this map.
The myth, corrected
Idle games and clickers were deliberately engineered as a profitable format
The genre's starting point was satire. Cow Clicker, made in 2010 by Georgia Tech game researcher Ian Bogost, was a work of criticism aimed at how empty the mechanics of social games were, cycling players through purchases and invitations. Click the cow. Wait six hours. Click it again. That was all. But it genuinely caught on -- more than fifty thousand people played it -- and Bogost ended up selling a special cow himself for real money, a second layer of irony on top of the first. Something built as criticism turned into a real genre.