idle games and life

Idle games work within clock cycles of processors and virtual machines. The basis of idle mechanics begins when you click something to initiate an action and it finishes. The product becomes the currency to upgrade this initial mechanic. Eventually, you can purchase another idle tier over and over, each of which is some measurably (often exponential) longer duration but that produces a larger value when it comes to fruition. Given enough of these idle tiers operating you have a successive and continuous flow of currency from which to upgrade and purchase more of each idle tier. In the end, the process resembles a vast, scalable production scheme wherein both time and intervention become the interface dynamics that make the idle genre both addictive and yet casual. 

The reason I bring this up is that it functions analogically when I think about cicadas emerging each year. Having spent upwards of 17 years underground, each of these emerging broods of cicadas, each summer, represents that time-dependent maturation mechanic of an idle game. But in this case, cicadas are living creatures, emerging from a decade-plus long gestation underground, suckling upon tree roots only to become reproductively mature, flighted insects with loud-as-fuck courtship calls on any given summer afternoon to find a mate or die as a meal trying. 

What life, under these time-ascribed features, produces is akin to a maturation mechanic central to an idle game. A cicada, matures for a time, and emerges as a fully productive life form and highly nutritious snack to opportunistic predators. All that cicadas, as lifeforms, do to the idle mechanic is to dramatize it as a life function, seeking both energy in and reproductive fulfillment before becoming merely energy out into the system. 

These are simplistic and lazy analogies, yes, but they do offer a rich analogy for understanding a fundamental feature of life in this universe. Life is an energy-derived system, maintaining optimal order for a duration only to unload that order as a reservoir of accessible energy (in the form of food) to other life forms. And as we drill deeper and deeper into what is energy it becomes a gradient-positive chemical reaction, one where molecular products flow increasingly toward easier levels of availability until they reach chemical stability in some bond, not as decaying bug parts or organic molecules per se, but as universe-stable atoms afloat in a dynamic system. And what is energy that at level but a readily available molecular interchange fuel for potentiating otherwise-locked-up chemical reactions. And so life is an energy reservoir, awaiting this moment where something catalyzes its change into some either some constitutive or constitutive element.