THE SECRET OF LIFE
Cookies. The secret of life is definitely cookies.
You think I kid but just one play-through of Cookie Clicker is enough to convince even Michelle Obama of this absurdity. In the game, as if from nowhere, I've gone from baking cookies in the questionable underbelly of my house to managing a growing cookie empire where everyone and their grandma's grandma is working for me. In ten minutes' time I've got museums being erected in honor of my cookies, kings and queens from faraway lands reveling in the heavenly gooeyness of my treats, and really, a capitalist creation to systematically infiltrate lives in both the public and private spheres of everyday people. Funnily enough, I've actually downloaded games form the Apple App Store that parallels the gameplay of Cookie Clicker but with a different premise; while easy to play since the game mechanics simply require tapping/clicking and waiting, the underlying commentary the game produces is just a dash jarring. What I wonder is why exactly this game is a piece of required reading for the class. It seems only the changing News snippets at the center of the page can really qualify as literature but am I intended to analyze the object through a unit operations lens?
A screenshot of the game Cookie Clicker. Perhaps the game can be read through a unit operations lens as it contains "discrete, interlocking units of expressive meaning" like the cookie counter, the quote display and the store with things to buy.
