I have had a love-hate relationship with the clicker genre. I hate them because they're so stupidly simple. But I love them because I can't stop playing them once one sets its hooks in me. The whole point of the games are that they expose how little gameplay you can actually add to a game. They're all about structure, and compel you to play through exploring that structure, increasing your numbers, with the only thing stopping you being how fast you can tap or click, and how you choose to spend your resources in order to build up faster. They're a clever deconstruction of games, and if you acknowledge that small developers are making them and doing wacky things with them, then they're good fun.

The thing that unnerves me about clickers nowadays is that big companies are starting to make them. My.com's got Evolution: Heroes of Utopia [Free] and Namco's announced Tap my Katamari. These are big companies that can hire game designers to make actual games, as opposed to indies that don't know if their game will make $10 if they release it. Sizable corproations don't need to be sitting around making games without gameplay; they can make actual games with those structures around them! This doesn't imply that clickers don't require work to make them good, because they do. If you look at something like CivCrafter [Free], you have to admire the work that went into making that, and designing something that has features and a multiplayer economy to it as well. But there's a difference...