Latest news with #StimulationClicker
New York Times
11-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
With Clicks Into Oblivion, Frying Your Brain Is Fun
Fried memes and hysterical gibberish suffocate the internet nowadays. Every platform is thronged in digital chaos: psychedelic and surreal Instagram Reel art; X users cracking jokes about 'gigachads'; an 8-year-old influencer nicknamed the Rizzler. The deranged nonsense dominating the web recently led the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary to name 'brain rot' its word of the year. While brain rot can refer to harm, like the way screen addiction can wither attention spans, it can also be humorous and fun, like mega-distorted images and edits. A new browser-based game, Stimulation Clicker, turns brain rot into a joyous pastime while also satirizing how awful it can feel to mainline the web. Stimulation Clicker revolves around a simple concept: Tap a button to get a 'Stimulation,' the game's form of currency. Players use Stimulations to buy upgrades, which are all internet ephemera: gameplay from the mobile hit Subway Surfers; a mukbang A.S.M.R. clip; a hydraulic press crushing clay. These videos begin to fill up the screen and rack up passive Stimulations (so you do not even have to click the button), which let you buy even more expensive and powerful upgrades. By the end, tens of thousands of Stimulations accrue every second as the screen judders with clips, lights and sounds. 'I wanted to capture the experience of being terminally online,' said the game's creator, Neal Agarwal. 'Everything is vying for your attention. It almost causes a feeling of vertigo, where you become nauseous. You're not even sure what's important to you anymore.' Agarwal has made a variety of browser-based oddities and has said his list of game ideas has reached 1,500 and is still growing. But Stimulation Clicker was extra meaningful for Agarwal, 27, who said he was basically 'patient zero' for screen addiction. He grew up obsessed with internet forums and Scratch, the kiddie-oriented, block-based coding platform that got him into game production. Stimulation Clicker, which took four months to develop, was inspired by Cookie Clicker, the idle tapping game, and Upgrade Complete, which pioneered the meta idea of upgrading the game itself as you are playing. What makes Stimulation Clicker thrill is how cheekily accurate and intricate the gameplay is. One upgrade allows players to stack Stimulations by completing Duolingo questions; another gives players a fictional email inbox that comes complete with fraud messages. Late in the game, players can multiply their Stimulations by riskily investing in stocks and crypto coins. Agarwal teased he had even more ideas that did not make it in, like a dating app that would let players swipe on suitors. He also wanted to let people participate in remote jobs and take imaginary Zoom meetings. While no definitive science shows that the internet rots brains, one expert, Dr. Meredith Gansner, said it was possible that excessive internet use could alter one's cognitive functioning. 'A phenomenon called 'mental fatigue' exists, characterized by drowsiness and feeling like one's brain is perhaps less capable at processing information than before,' said Dr. Gansner, who works in psychiatry at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. 'Mental fatigue is often described after bouts of intense cognitive engagement, so long periods of internet use involving rapid-fire digital stimuli and information overload could qualify.' Stimulation Clicker offers a hypercharged microdose of this kind of fatigue, letting players speedrun their way to a brain-breaking amount of content. (The popular streamer Ludwig provided a 10-minute clip of him doing squats, eating a sandwich and basically gesticulating at nothing.) The game feels true to how digital disarray can overwhelm the psyche, making it feel like a thousand tabs are running in your mind at once. Luckily, light is at the end of the tunnel. Once your screen is drowned in stimuli, you can purchase the Ocean, which teleports you to a placid, water-soaked horizon. It's the end. Agarwal knew he could have kept Stimulation Clicker going forever since the upgrade system is mesmerizing. But he did not want to be a hypocrite by hooking people to a game about screen addiction. 'I wanted to capture that feeling of when you finally get out of the brain rot hole,' he said. 'How good that initially feels, when everything is suddenly quiet again.'
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.
