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Cookie Clicker
Cookie Clicker was first released in August 2013 and quickly overtook the internet as the mindless spam game that featured no other objective than to get a big number.
This was that game that appealed to those who needed the most... of whatever it was you needed to get the most of.
Cookie Clicker was horrifying easy to play: You clicked on the big cookie on the left of the screen to generate one cookie. As you clicked, you got more cookies and as your cookie productivity increased, you could spend those cookies on upgrades that auto-generated cookies for you. It was the ultimate snowballing game.
The game had some simple sprite graphics and a nice, easy to read interface. The sidebar on the right kept track of all your upgrades, plus some useful statistical data like the number of cookies each upgrade has produced and their general efficiency.
The upgrades themselves are pretty cute, ranging from the innocuous Grandma to a production line Factory to more exotic forms of cookie production involving Antimatter and Time Machines. Upgrades cross-reference one another so older upgrades remain relevant as you access new ones.
My experiences playing it
I feel really sorry for my mouse, because this might be the fastest way to kill it.
Cookie Clicker is one of the more dangerous browser games because it is extremely addictive. There is something therapeutic about watching the cookies grow and trying to maximize your Cookies-Per-Second. I started a game just as I began writing this post and just half an hour later I'm producing 3000 cookies per second. It won't be long until I generate my first million, but believe it or not, this is nothing in the grand scheme of things.
If anything, this game is about as vast the universe. It feels just like that, because it plays at universal and even multi-versal scales (The game has a soft-reset function called "Ascension" that sort of resets the universe and allows you to keep some upgrades).
The first time I played this, I was completely hooked. I spent every waking second I could clicking the cookie and being as efficient as possible. I wanted to reach a million cookies per second, which I think I did by the end of the day. After a while, I started to lose interest in the game because the numbers got too large and I was unable to comprehend them properly. A thousand to a million was one thing, but 100 trillion to 1000 trillion sort of felt like some vaguely 'giant number' of which I had no real life comparison, and thus it felt pointless, so I ended up making the smart decision and putting it down not long after. My mouse thanked me for it.
I found that my personal draw to the game was rooted in games I used to play when I was younger, particularly empire-building games or city-building games. The first one that comes to mind is Simcity 2000, which had an open-ended game statistic that displayed your city's total population. I always played that game to try and maximize my population with the greatest level of efficiency possible, thereby foregoing any of the real challenges of that game, but this game seemed to reward that level of tunnel-visioned mindlessness, so I suppose this was capable of scratching that itch.
I've been at it for an hour now and I got my Cookies-Per-Second at just shy of 50000 and I've finished writing. I'm going to let it keep going until I get bored.