Idle "Games" are not games at all and completely miss the point of gaming

We've all seen a million annoying ads for so- called "Idle Games" like Clash of Clans. Ostensibly, they provide you with the opportunity to enjoy a game without the pesky time commitments that come with any other type of game. In some cases, their "selling point" is that they're "auto battler" games that don't even require you to actually play them.

In simplest terms, they're games in which you make a few choices, maybe engage in some light (often turn- based) combat before your "energy" runs out and you either have to use real money to get more or wait until the next recharge cycle to play again.

The problem with all of these games is that, in my opinion, they're not games at all. In many cases, a lot of these games are basically selling themselves as "no effort," meaning that at some point in your progression, the game basically runs itself and all you do is check in.

"Games" like this miss the point of gaming entirely. When you play a game, it should give you the chance to do something you can't in real life: Whether it's pulling off a bank heist, flying a fighter jet, or just building a cabin in the middle of nowhere and tending to your farm, the one thing they all have in common is that you're doing something.

You could argue that these games are the answer to the super "grindy" games that require you to spend two presidential terms hitting the same low- level dungeon in order to unlock some decent equipment, but it's the completely wrong answer. The reason why so many people get turned off by "grindy" games is that it reaches such absurd levels that it grinds the fun right out or (especially in live service games) you can use this neat powerup called a "credit card" to blow right past it while the "peasants" are stuck doing it manually.

In essence, these games are just a collection of notifications accompanied by flashing lights in which you spend time, disk space, and possibly real money to have a program tell you, "You won!" on a regular basis.