One Million Checkboxes goes viral, a baffling game that seems to be a new genre: the MMWOT

There’s a new online fad in town – however fleeting it may be – but this one marks itself out as one of the more left-field efforts we’ve ever seen: It’s an online game (well, of sorts) called One Million Checkboxes.

It does very much what it says on the tin. You go to the game’s web page, and you’re faced with a vast grid, a seemingly never-ending swathe, of tick boxes, except it is, of course, finite, and there are a million of them.

They can’t all be displayed on the screen at once (obviously), so the grid can be scrolled down, or there’s a search box that you can use to jump to any area swiftly (just enter the number of a checkbox).

What’s that? What do you do with these boxes? We were just getting to that – you tick them. Or untick them. Click on a box, and it’s ticked. Click on a ticked box, and it’s cleared. Everyone else on the site is doing the same thing.

So, what you’re watching in real-time is a ton of players all furiously (or maybe judiciously, in some cases) clicking boxes, or unclicking them. Start clicking a row of boxes, and you’ll likely get an attacker – as it were – following your trail of clicks, unticking them all. While presumably exclaiming: “Take that, you clicking fool!”

At the top of the page is a tick count showing how many of the million boxes are currently checked, with it changing pretty rapidly as you might imagine. Yes, this has been a popular little outing to say the least, since its creation by Nolen Royalty, an indie developer behind various experimental games (like ‘Stranger Video’ which is a “game about staring at strangers” apparently).

At one point, in a post on X, the creator told us:

“Alright I have been firefighting to keep the site up for like 14 hours straight, it’s 3am, I am going to try to get some sleep. Everyone just…don’t check too many checkboxes for the next few hours ok.”

The game appears to still be going strong, as there was plenty of activity when we hopped on. Yesterday, Nolen estimates that there were around 500,000 players who checked (or unchecked) about 60 million boxes, equating to 42,000 every minute.

Ticked off

What did we do in our game session? Well, we clicked a fair few boxes, and observed the general chaos around us, and how keen the un-clickers were. Philosophically speaking, at a basic level, this is an experience built around polarity – you’re a creator, or a destroyer, and we were happier being the former.

Then we thought about what else we might do, aside from trying to make lines or clusters of ticked boxes, and came up with the idea of trying to write out ‘Hello’ in capitals.

To begin with, this proved a tricky task. Eventually, though, we managed it, even if the letters were small (so the ‘E’ wasn’t properly defined, technically, but you could tell what it was supposed to be). It was difficult enough trying to get those small letters to stick, let alone larger ones.

However, stick they did, and to our surprise, when other players realized what we had done, the letters were left to stand, restoring our faith in humanity (or a little bit of it, anyway).

The big question, of course, is what happens if all the boxes are ticked? Presumably that’s a driver for some of the keener players who might have the page open in a background tab, checking in (ahem) from time to time, ready to join in for the last push if the overall count tips up near to a million.

Our guess is that, as with any good grind, we expect it to be followed by a suitably compelling end game. How about a raid against a giant boss tick where only the fastest clickers succeed in fashioning an ASCII art checkbox sword and shield, with which to fell the beast?

Or maybe not, but you never know, a new genre might be in the making here: the MMWOT – Massively Multiplayer Waste Of Time.

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