One Million Checkboxes was a free web-based incremental game created and developed by American software engineer Nolen Royalty in 2024. The game consisted of a web page containing one million checkboxes, which visitors could check or uncheck. All visitors saw the same state of the checkboxes, leading them to interact with each other by checking and unchecking the same boxes. The game ended two weeks after it started, after all boxes were checked.
| One Million Checkboxes | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Developer(s) | Nolen Royalty |
| Platform(s) | Browser |
| Release | June 26, 2024 |
| Genre(s) | Incremental game |
Gameplay
editOne Million Checkboxes was a simple website that contained only one million checkboxes, with users able to check or uncheck the boxes by clicking or tapping. Players saw the same checkboxes and could watch as boxes they checked or unchecked changed from the interactions of other players. Some of the boxes had different colored outlines, which served no particular purpose. The page displayed the overall number of checked boxes and the specific player's own count of boxes they had checked and unchecked.[1][2]
With plans to end the game after all boxes were checked, Royalty added a feature that locked checked boxes if they stayed checked for a certain amount of time. The game ended after two weeks of uptime, with 650 million check and uncheck actions having been taken.[3]
Emergent behaviors
editAs thousands of players began to participate, different behaviors emerged. Some players checked as many boxes as they could, while others behaved competitively to uncheck as many boxes as they could. Players also used the checkboxes to write messages or make creative designs, often using bots that could check and uncheck boxes at high speed. The game's developer, Nolen Royalty, discovered that teenagers were leaving secret messages for each other through sequences of boxes via binary ASCII representation, and then collaborating on elaborate ways to hack the game, such as by rapidly updating boxes to encode moving gifs of actor Jake Gyllenhaal.[2][4][3] For a brief period of time, Royalty removed a feature that imposed a rate limit on the frequency of boxes being checked, and users implemented a rickroll animation of singer Rick Astley.[5]
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Grid showing a Windows blue screen of death. -
Grid showing a collection of gifs and internet memes. -
Grid showing a rickroll gif. -
Grid showing how users encoded color, most clearly seen used to draw the character Niko from indie game OneShot.
Development
edit
Royalty developed One Million Checkboxes over two days after a conversation with friend Neal Agarwal, inspired by frivolous websites from the early days of the Internet. He bought the domain name for $10 and initially made the site in Python.[2] Royalty first shared the game on social network X on June 26, 2024, and it quickly went viral through social networks X, Mastodon, and Hacker News. Because of the game's rapid uptake, Royalty had to quickly and repeatedly add server capacity and dealt with multiple website crashes.[6] According to his blog, Royalty rewrote the backend in Go with his friend Eliot Hedeman, to better handle the large volume of usage.[7]
Reception
editAs of July 3, 2024, Royalty estimated that 400,000 unique people have visited One Million Checkboxes.[2] Writing for The Washington Post, Shira Ovide called it "fantastic" and referred to it as "the most pointless website on the planet."[6] Writing for The New York Times, Callie Holtermann said that it became "an unintentional case study in internet behavior" and that it "cycled rapidly through the stages of internet maturity, serving as something of a microcosm of the joys and horrors of digital life."[2]
References
edit- ^ Rockson, Gabrielle (2024-07-03). "One Million Checkboxes Creator Dubs It 'Dumbest Website of All Time' – and Proof the Internet Can Still Be Fun". People. Retrieved 2024-07-04.
- ^ a b c d e Holtermann, Callie (2024-07-03). "One Million Checkboxes Is Exactly What It Sounds Like". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2024-07-04.
- ^ a b Ovide, Shira (2024-09-03). "This is what happened to the world's most pointless website". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2024-09-03.
- ^ Curtis, Charles (2024-07-03). "One Million Checkboxes, the addictive internet game that will make you so mad, explained". USA Today. Retrieved 2024-07-04.
- ^ List, Jenny (30 August 2024). "Online Game Becomes Unexpected Pixelflut". Hackaday. Retrieved 8 September 2024.
- ^ a b Ovide, Shira (2024-07-02). "This is the most pointless website on the planet. It's fantastic". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2024-07-04.
- ^ Royalty, Nolen (2024-07-25). "Scaling One Million Checkboxes to 650,000,000 checks". eieio.games. Retrieved 2024-07-27.
