Cookie Clicker is a 2013 incremental game created by French programmer Julien "Orteil" Thiennot.

Though the game has no clear ending,[2] it has over six hundred achievements,[3] and users may aim to reach milestone numbers of cookies.

[8] On August 8, 2019, the mobile beta for Cookie Clicker was released for Android devices after a long delay.

[2] In an issue of Digital Culture & Society, Paolo Ruffino notes that the game is "supposed to be a parody of FarmVille" (a popular game which Ruffino says could be played easily with an algorithm, as the optimal action is always obvious), but that it is "equally addictive".

[15] The game includes dark humour in the names and descriptions of some of its upgrades, achievements or mechanics, and generally has themes of dystopia, cosmic horror, and apocalypse.

Examples include an achievement titled "Global Warming" (upon owning 100 factories), a news ticker tape reading "New cookie-based religion sweeps the nation."

and the "Grandmapocalypse", in which "the screen turns molten red and the central cookie is attacked by 'wrinklers'", and the world at large is implied to have been taken over by a hive mind of mutated grandmothers.

[2][16] GameRevolution commented that the game contains "supernatural dark turns that call into question the user's morality", citing how a player can choose to enslave grandmas to manufacture cookies.

Kiberd suggests that Cookie Clicker is "saddling [the concept of fun] with ideas about success, achievement, and productivity", and "uses its own form as a critique of the larger structures of expectation and reward".

[15] Destructoid emphasizes that it is "centered around the pursuit and accumulation of vast wealth", providing players with "the illusion of progress, without any substantial advancement actually being made.

"[19] An academic work published by University of Minnesota Press analyzed Cookie Clicker as an object of new media art that subverts "the experimental opacity of digital media" and forces the person experiencing it to "fac[e] the expression of digital historical experience: the broad sense of existential disenfranchisement characterizing so much of the experience of contemporary technology".

[20] Sebastian Deterding, a professor of design engineering at Imperial College London,[21] acknowledges that the game exists at one level as a parody and ridicule of Farmville and EverQuest,[22]: 200  but said the game transcends this, engaging in gamification of progress, allowing players to "keep at a single 'silly' pursuit for hundreds of hours [engaged in] a real, self-regulatory skill",[22]: 204  and that its players can and do play it "out of enlightened existential spite", perhaps including the author who acknowledges baking octillions of cookies over thousands of hours of gameplay, "orders of magnitude more time...than any other video game in my life".