Particle Clicker

Particle Clicker is the educational clicker that CERN itself built: a Cookie Clicker-style incremental where you run the detector, colliding particles to collect Data, spending it on Reputation and Funding, and hiring PhD students to automate the whole laboratory. It came out of CERN Webfest 2014, and the original app still runs at CERN's own domain.

What the loop feels like

You click a collision, Data accrues, and Data buys a PhD student. The student clicks for you, which is both the automation loop and the joke about academia in one move. That's Particle Clicker.

Students automate collisions, Reputation unlocks detectors, Funding pays for everything, and the HR panel becomes the most important screen in the lab. The satire of grant economics is baked into the resource triangle, and it lands because the institution wrote it about itself. That's Particle Clicker.

The systems doing the work

The named systems are active clicking for raw Data, idle automation through hired students, and a three-currency economy of Data, Reputation and Funding where each purchase feeds a different career axis. The upgrade tree doubles as a physics career path, detectors as milestones, papers as reputation, and the whole thing is small enough to finish in a sitting or two.

Where it stumbles

Scale is the ceiling. There is a clear end to the curve, the strategy is thin once the hiring order is known, and the 2014 web-tech build shows its age in small ways. As a lesson in what a clicker can teach, it is excellent; as a long-haul incremental, it is a demonstration rather than a world.

Playing it today

Live and free at CERN's own domain, verified playable in this rewrite with a fresh gameplay capture for the entry. Open source on GitHub under the particle-clicker org, so the whole experiment is inspectable, which feels appropriate for the institution involved.

The verdict

The rare institutional joke that teaches you something: the upgrade tree is a physics career path, and the grant-money satire lands because CERN wrote it. Educational clickers are usually dreadful. This one has a sense of humour and a particle accelerator.