Latest news with #NealAgarwal
TechCrunch
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- TechCrunch
Thousands of people have embarked on a virtual road trip via Google Street View
It's Friday afternoon and I'm listening to Bowdoin College's radio station, interspersed with ambient car honking noises. I am not in Maine. I am not in a car. I am at my desk. This is Internet Roadtrip. Internet Roadtrip is what I will call a MMORTG (massive multiplayer online road trip game). Neal Agarwal, the game's creator, calls it a 'roadtrip simulator.' Every ten seconds, viewers vote on what direction for the 'car' to drive on Google Street View — or, you can vote to honk the horn or change the radio station. The direction with the most votes gets clicked, and the car continues on its scenic path to … wherever the chat decides to go. Internet Roadtrip is reminiscent of Twitch Plays Pokémon, an iconic stream from over 10 years ago in which viewers voted on what button to press as part of a collective Pokémon Red game. But Internet Roadtrip is far less chaotic — both because only a thousand or so people are playing at a time, and because we have better organizational tools than we did in the Twitch Plays Pokémon era (thank you, Discord). A radio station in Maine (WBOR) is currently curating songs for us in the in-game radio — Neal Agarwal (@ 2025-05-12T19:56:38.315Z Progress on the virtual roadtrip is slow. The car moves at a pace slower than walking. Discord moderators have had to temper newcomers' expectations, explaining that it's pointless to suggest driving to Las Vegas from Maine, since it would likely take almost 10 months of real world time to get there. The same goes for Alaska, but it's not just a matter of time that's the issue. 'Google Street View works by taking multiple pictures and putting them together. In some areas of the roads leading to Alaska, there are gaps in pictures available and so we would get stuck there, were we to go to these roads,' the Discord FAQ reads. 'All potential roads to Alaska have these gaps. We checked.' There is no objective on Internet Roadtrip, as opposed other Street View-based games like GeoGuessr. Some Discord members discussed driving to Canada, which is a somewhat realistic goal, given our current position in Maine. But the destination isn't the goal — it's the joy of spontaneously listening to college radio from a liberal arts school with a thousand strangers on the internet, while taking in the scenic backroads of Blue Hill, Maine.
The Drive
13-05-2025
- Automotive
- The Drive
1,000 People Are 'Driving' Across the US One Photo at a Time on Google Maps
The latest car news, reviews, and features. As you're reading this, nearly 1,000 people are traveling across the United States in the same car. It's not a real car, of course; it's Street View-based software called Internet Roadtrip, made by developer Neal Agarwal, and the road-trippers vote every couple of seconds to decide where they're headed off to next. The journey began in Boston, Massachusetts earlier this month, and there's absolutely no telling where it will go or when it will end. The interface is refreshingly simple. Most of the screen is taken up by images collected from Google Maps, a small steering wheel that moves, and arrows that indicate where the car can go. The column on the right side of the screen provides real-time details such as how many drivers are online, the number of votes that each option is getting (sounding the horn is surprisingly unpopular), and the number of miles driven since the beginning of the road trip (about 450 as of writing). There's also a live chat which reminds me of the chat rooms that were popular in the 2000s, both in terms of the design and in terms of the random shit people digitally blurt out, and a radio at the bottom. If you want to 'drive,' it's as easy as clicking on an arrow. Open the site, click on the direction that you want to take the car in, wait about four seconds for the other drivers to make a choice, and the steering wheel will veer in the direction that receives the most votes. Every intersection spawns a heated debate in the old-school chat. Of course, sometimes there's only one way to move: Forward. You can't shift into reverse, for better or worse. You even have to vote to change the radio station because, remember, everyone's in the same car. It's kind of hard to go anywhere on purpose when people keep pulling the car into strip mall parking lots. Internet Roadtrip There has to be at least some sociological and philosophical value in this experiment. Beyond that, the Internet Roadtrip is a cool way to see the country, and discover sights that you likely would have never stumbled upon otherwise. The car's in Scarborough, Maine, at the time of writing, not terribly far from the Canadian border. What will happen if we get there? Will we keep driving and explore the Great White North, or head back south? Nothing moves especially fast on this road trip, but we may not have to wait long to find out. Shoutout to the developer's many other games and absurd curiosities over at Got tips? Send 'em to tips@
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Worst Page on the Internet
The worst page on the internet begins innocently enough. A small button beckons the user to 'Click me.' When they do, the game commences. The player's score, or 'stimulation,' appears in the middle of the screen, and goes up with every subsequent click. These points can then be used to buy new features for the page—a CNN-style news ticker with questionable headlines ('CHILD STAR STEALS HEARTS, FACES PRISON'), a Gmail inbox, a true-crime podcast that plays in the background, a day-trading platform, and more. Engaging with these items—checking your email, answering a Duolingo trivia question, buying and selling stocks—earns the player more points to unlock even more features. So far, so fun. But fast-forward 20 minutes and somehow what began with a few curious clicks has turned into a frenetic effort to juggle ever more absurd online tasks. You must continuously empty your inbox, open treasure chests to collect loot, crush pastries with a hydraulic press, purchase cryptocurrency, and even take care of a digital pet, all while YouTube influencers doing exercise routines and eating giant sandwiches vie for your attention elsewhere on-screen. By the end, you have forgotten why you started playing but feel compelled to continue. A chat box pops up in the corner, in which virtual viewers comment on your performance. 'How is this your job?' one asks, sounding suspiciously like my wife. The name of this monstrosity, which was released earlier this month, is Stimulation Clicker, and it is more than a game. It is a reenactment of the evolution of the internet, a loving parody of its contents, and a pointed commentary on how our online life went wrong. In bringing each element of the web to life and layering them on top of one another, the game ingeniously re-creates the paradox of the modern internet: Individually, the components are enjoyable. But collectively, they are unbearable. When everything on the internet demands attention, paying attention to anything becomes impossible. [Read: Beyond doomscrolling] The game is the bizarre brainchild of Neal Agarwal, a 26-year-old programmer who has spent years designing online apps that comment on and satirize digital conventions. The Password Game asks players to input a strong password that follows an initially familiar set of rules: letters, a number, a special character. But soon users are instructed to add steadily more preposterous elements, such as 'the current phase of the moon as an emoji,' corporate sponsors, and 'today's Wordle answer.' Earth Reviews parodies the star-based evaluations that have overrun the internet by allowing visitors to rate dozens of common items and experiences, including 'acne' (1.3 stars, 217,181 ratings) and 'grandmothers' (4.6 stars, 160,847 ratings). Other projects have educational components. Space Elevator lets the reader scroll upward from the Earth into the stratosphere, learning about the history of flight, space travel, and astronomy along the way. The Deep Sea does the same, but for the ocean. Taken together, Agarwal's creations have racked up hundreds of millions of views, enough for him to make expanding his menagerie of online oddities his full-time job. And for Stimulation Clicker, he pulled out all the stops. He hired voice actors to produce a 45-minute true-crime podcast about a woman who worked as a mermaid. He got real-world streamers and influencers to record themselves for inclusion. He even roped in the announcer from the best-selling Halo video-game franchise to reprise his role here. The result is a remarkable rendering of how digital life has gone off the rails. With every new feature that is introduced, Stimulation Clicker takes players on the all-too-familiar journey from 'this is neat' to 'this is ruining my life.' What was once novel becomes oppressive, because when every online experience is optimized to monopolize our attention, the feeling that is ultimately evoked is not elation but exhaustion. [Chris Hayes: You're being alienated from your own attention] The idea for the game first occurred to Agarwal during the coronavirus-pandemic lockdown, when life moved online and 'there were definitely days that felt like Stimulation Clicker,' he told me. 'You have a million different social-media feeds and everything's pulling you in every different direction at once, and it's almost like a feeling of vertigo,' he recalled. 'I wanted to capture that experience of just endless bombardment, which I feel like is kind of the defining feature of the internet at the moment.' In this, Stimulation Clicker succeeds. But although the game might seem like a dark commentary on the corruption of the internet, it's also a hopeful demonstration of how to recover the internet's promise. After all, what Stimulation Clicker does is use the experiential quality of an online game to help users understand what the web is doing to them. The game explains something that many people feel when using the internet, but can't quite express. 'I'm very much a believer that the web is a creative medium,' Agarwal told me. 'We have amazing movies that get you to reflect on life, and I don't see why a website can't also be like that. But right now it feels like the web is very underutilized in that way.' He doesn't come to condemn the internet, but to rescue it from algorithms and mass marketers. 'I'm not saying the web is terrible and kids should never use technology,' he said. 'It's more of a feeling of, like, I know the web can be better than it currently is.' In that sense, Stimulation Clicker doesn't just epitomize what ails the internet; it is also an antidote. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Unhinged Browser Game That Explains How the Internet Went Wrong
The worst page on the internet begins innocently enough. A small button beckons the user to 'Click me.' When they do, the game commences. The player's score, or 'stimulation,' appears in the middle of the screen, and goes up with every subsequent click. These points can then be used to buy new features for the page—a CNN-style news ticker with questionable headlines ('CHILD STAR STEALS HEARTS, FACES PRISON'), a Gmail inbox, a true-crime podcast that plays in the background, a day-trading platform, and more. Engaging with these items—checking your email, answering a Duolingo trivia question, buying and selling stocks—earns the player more points to unlock even more features. So far, so fun. But fast-forward 20 minutes and somehow what began with a few curious clicks has turned into a frenetic effort to juggle ever more absurd online tasks. You must continuously empty your inbox, open treasure chests to collect loot, crush pastries with a hydraulic press, purchase cryptocurrency, and even take care of a digital pet, all while YouTube influencers doing exercise routines and eating giant sandwiches vie for your attention elsewhere on-screen. By the end, you have forgotten why you started playing but feel compelled to continue. A chat box pops up in the corner, in which virtual viewers comment on your performance. 'How is this your job?' one asks, sounding suspiciously like my wife. The name of this monstrosity, which was released earlier this month, is Stimulation Clicker, and it is more than a game. It is a reenactment of the evolution of the internet, a loving parody of its contents, and a pointed commentary on how our online life went wrong. In bringing each element of the web to life and layering them on top of one another, the game ingeniously re-creates the paradox of the modern internet: Individually, the components are enjoyable. But collectively, they are unbearable. When everything on the internet demands attention, paying attention to anything becomes impossible. The game is the bizarre brainchild of Neal Agarwal, a 26-year-old programmer who has spent years designing online apps that comment on and satirize digital conventions. The Password Game asks players to input a strong password that follows an initially familiar set of rules: letters, a number, a special character. But soon users are instructed to add steadily more preposterous elements, such as 'the current phase of the moon as an emoji,' corporate sponsors, and 'today's Wordle answer.' Earth Reviews parodies the star-based evaluations that have overrun the internet by allowing visitors to rate dozens of common items and experiences, including ' acne ' (1.3 stars, 217,181 ratings) and ' grandmothers ' (4.6 stars, 160,847 ratings). Other projects have educational components. Space Elevator lets the reader scroll upward from the Earth into the stratosphere, learning about the history of flight, space travel, and astronomy along the way. The Deep Sea does the same, but for the ocean. Taken together, Agarwal's creations have racked up hundreds of millions of views, enough for him to make expanding his menagerie of online oddities his full-time job. And for Stimulation Clicker, he pulled out all the stops. He hired voice actors to produce a 45-minute true-crime podcast about a woman who worked as a mermaid. He got real-world streamers and influencers to record themselves for inclusion. He even roped in the announcer from the best-selling Halo video-game franchise to reprise his role here. The result is a remarkable rendering of how digital life has gone off the rails. With every new feature that is introduced, Stimulation Clicker takes players on the all-too-familiar journey from 'this is neat' to 'this is ruining my life.' What was once novel becomes oppressive, because when every online experience is optimized to monopolize our attention, the feeling that is ultimately evoked is not elation but exhaustion. Chris Hayes: You're being alienated from your own attention The idea for the game first occurred to Agarwal during the coronavirus-pandemic lockdown, when life moved online and 'there were definitely days that felt like Stimulation Clicker,' he told me. 'You have a million different social-media feeds and everything's pulling you in every different direction at once, and it's almost like a feeling of vertigo,' he recalled. 'I wanted to capture that experience of just endless bombardment, which I feel like is kind of the defining feature of the internet at the moment.' In this, Stimulation Clicker succeeds. But although the game might seem like a dark commentary on the corruption of the internet, it's also a hopeful demonstration of how to recover the internet's promise. After all, what Stimulation Clicker does is use the experiential quality of an online game to help users understand what the web is doing to them. The game explains something that many people feel when using the internet, but can't quite express. 'I'm very much a believer that the web is a creative medium,' Agarwal told me. 'We have amazing movies that get you to reflect on life, and I don't see why a website can't also be like that. But right now it feels like the web is very underutilized in that way.' He doesn't come to condemn the internet, but to rescue it from algorithms and mass marketers. 'I'm not saying the web is terrible and kids should never use technology,' he said. 'It's more of a feeling of, like, I know the web can be better than it currently is.' In that sense, Stimulation Clicker doesn't just epitomize what ails the internet; it is also an antidote.
