The entire genre started with Cow Clicker by Ian Bogost, which was a parody of Facebook games at the time and their lack of interactivity. The problem was though that the parody worked as an actual game for many people, and became the thing it criticized while spawning an entire genre of idle games like it.
Tv Tropes had an entry that is called something different now, but i knew it as "Truffault was right." It's point was that you can't make a movie about the evils of war without inadvertently throwing in enough cool stuff (handsome actors, big explosions, lots of drama) that you end up glorifying it by mistake. That's what happened to Bogost...for all his commentary he just strengthened the whole social game mechanic by distilling it to its ideal form.
Before Cow Clicker there was also Progress Quest [1], which was a similar attempt at deconstructed satire (of fetch quests that were not much more than progress bars), but just as much also paved the way for games/game systems that aren't satire using the same distilled mechanics. (Several MMOs come to mind that have "progress quest" systems to keep players checking in every few hours/days.)
According to Wikipedia, Cow Clicker was first released in July 2010[0]. That would mean that the SMBC Theater's sketch "MMO" precedes it by a few months[1].
Tv Tropes had an entry that is called something different now, but i knew it as "Truffault was right." It's point was that you can't make a movie about the evils of war without inadvertently throwing in enough cool stuff (handsome actors, big explosions, lots of drama) that you end up glorifying it by mistake. That's what happened to Bogost...for all his commentary he just strengthened the whole social game mechanic by distilling it to its ideal form.