"ClickThirty" proves that inanity can succeed on Facebook

Here at Games.com -- The Blog!, we're willing to accept that Facebook games tend not to be the most complex things in the world. Frankly we think that's part of their appeal -- you don't need a PhD in gaming to figure out how to plant crops in Farmville or match gems in Bejeweled Blitz. That said, we're beginning to fear that the trend towards simplicity in Facebook gaming is beginning to reach a ridiculous zenith.

Exhibit A in our argument: A new Facebook game simply called "how fast can u click in 30 seconds?!?!" Like the title promises, the game asks you to click a button as many times as you can in 30 seconds, changing the window's background color every time you do. Once thirty seconds are up, you can share your score with your Facebook wall, enticing your friends to beat it. That's it. That's the whole game.

The mere existence of this game isn't that surprising. What is surprising is the game's relatively healthy growth. As the Facebook Indie Games blog pointed out, the game has grown to an impressive 250,000 monthly active users in just a week. Considering it took a major developer like Digital Chocolate nearly three months to reach a million users, that initial rate of growth is pretty impressive. ClickThirty's 44 reviews give it a 4.3/5 average and it has somehow managed to attract 11,000 fans, over twice as many as the long-suffering Sega Dreamcast fanpage.

Of course, it's only been a week, and those 250,000 users could end up being the ceiling for the game, rather than the floor. That said, we're not sure we like what the early success of this game says about Facebook gamers -- namely, that they're just looking for the simplest possible way to waste time and show up their friends with some sort of quantifiable number (*cough* their Mafia Wars level *cough*). At this rate, pretty soon, we'll be seeing "hit the space bar as many times as u can" and "scream as loud as you can into your microphone" as top-growing Facebook apps. And that will be the beginning of the end, my friends. The beginning of the end.