Fine, let's write about the stupid Banana game
You might have noticed that the second most played game on Steam right now is Banana, which released back in April, but has seen an explosion of popularity over the past couple of weeks. What is Banana? It's a free idle clicker in which you click on a picture of a banana to make numbers go up. If the number goes up enough, the game drops additional pictures of bananas into your Steam inventory. Actually, it's not even an idle clicker - simply leaving the game open all day is enough to generate a slow but steady supply of these banana pictures.
There are a variety of banana pictures, some animated, from crystalline bananas through uwu bananas to banana black holes, all of them "made by the community in Discord" according to the Steam page. The banana pictures can be sold on the Steam Marketplace, with the developers (and Valve) taking a cut from every sale. Most of them are sold for pennies, but there are a rare few that are traded for considerable sums. At the time of writing, there are four "Crypticnanas" on the Marketplace that go for £1335.09 a peel. The homely "Thickglassnana", meanwhile, can be yours for a mere 71p, which is around the price of a bunch of tasty, potassium-rich real-life bananas from Sainsburys.
It's the trading element, of course, that underpins the Banana game's popularity - this and a dollop of FOMO, a love of hoarding and haggling over crappy tokens, and a faint hope, especially among despairing video games journalists, that Banana might turn out to be something more than it is. To their credit of the game's creators, they aren't making any grandiose Curiosity-Cube-esque promises. One of the devs, Hery, has openly described Banana Game as "a legal 'Infinite money glitch'" in conversation with Polygon.
As you might expect of a legal infinite money glitch, Banana has a massive botting problem, and Hery is bracingly upfront about this too. "Since the game takes basically one percent to no resources of your PC, people are abusing up to
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