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One Million Checkboxes

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One Million Checkboxes
Gameplay in the Safari browser on an iPhone
Developer(s)Nolen Royalty
Platform(s)Browser
ReleaseJune 26, 2024; 9 months ago (2024-06-26)
Genre(s)Incremental game
Mode(s)Single-player
Multiplayer (formerly)

One Million Checkboxes is a free web-based incremental game developed by the American software engineer and video game developer Nolen Royalty in June 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 selecting and deselecting the same boxes. According to Royalty, the website took him two days to develop.

Although Royalty expected the site to receive no more than a few hundred visitors, the game received thousands of participants and involved more than 650 million check and uncheck actions before it was shut down two weeks after it began. Methods such as Internet bots, scripting languages, and hacking were used to rapidly alter boxes.

The game received an overall positive reception. Multiple publications described the game as addictive and praised its simple premise, while others criticized the usage of bots on the website.

Gameplay

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One Million Checkboxes was a website that contained one million checkboxes. Users were able to check or uncheck the boxes by clicking or tapping. Every player saw the same state of checkboxes and could watch as boxes they checked or unchecked changed from the interactions of other players.[1] Some of the boxes had different colored outlines, which served no particular purpose. The page displayed the overall number of checked boxes on the website as well as the number of boxes the player had checked.[2][3][4]

15 days after the game's release, the developer added a "sunsetting" feature that locked checkboxes if they were not unchecked quickly.[5] The game was shut down after two weeks of uptime, with 650 million check and uncheck actions having been taken, though users are still able to play on their own.[6]

Development and release

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Torso of man wearing a sweater in front of a body of water
Game developer Nolen Royalty in 2024

One Million Checkboxes was created by Nolen Royalty (eieio), a 32-year-old American software engineer and video game developer based in Brooklyn.[2] Royalty had previously developed other games, including ones about staring contests, a bouncing DVD-Video logo,[7] converting blinks into Morse code, and playing rock paper scissors with a stranger.[8] Royalty developed One Million Checkboxes in two days after a conversation with a friend, 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, a general-purpose programming language.[2]

Royalty first shared the game on the Twitter on June 26, 2024, and it went viral on the platform and other social networking services, including Mastodon, Reddit, and Hacker News.[8][9] Due to the game's rapid uptake, Royalty had to quickly and repeatedly add server capacity while dealing with multiple website crashes.[9] According to Royalty's blog, he and a friend rewrote the backend in Go, a high-level programming language, to better handle the large amount of activity on the site.[5]

Activity

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As thousands of players participated, patterns in behavior emerged. The first box was checked the most often, followed by the boxes with colored outlines. Some players prioritized checking as many boxes as they could, while others behaved competitively to uncheck the most boxes. Players also used the checkboxes to write messages or create artwork, often using Internet 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 collaborating on elaborate ways to hack the game, such as by rapidly updating boxes to encode moving GIFs of actor Jake Gyllenhaal.[2][10] 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.[11][12]

Examples of art encoded by bot writers

Reception

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In July 2024, Royalty estimated that 400,000 unique people had visited One Million Checkboxes.[2] Writing for The Washington Post, Shira Ovide called the game "fantastic" and referred to it as "the most pointless website on the planet", comparing the simple pleasure it provided to that of popping bubble wrap.[9] Writing for The New York Times, Callie Holtermann stated that the game had become a case study in internet behavior and represented a "microcosm of the joys and horrors of digital life".[2]

Writers from TechRadar, USA Today, and India's The Telegraph agreed that the game was addictive.[3][10][13] Although The Telegraph's Mathures Paul stated that playing the game was "pointless", he complimented the site's "beautiful retro feel" and noted that some players would appreciate competing against other humans rather than artificial intelligence or chatbots.[13] Writing for TheGamer, Tessa Kaur noted that One Million Checkboxes had been compared to r/place, a recurring online social experiment hosted on Reddit. However, Kaur expressed concern about the encouraged use of bots and scripts, arguing that it "ruins the fun" and brought concerns of bot activity on human interaction.[4]

In December 2024, The Washington Post gave One Million Checkboxes an honorable mention in its list of the "5 actually good things" in technology of the year, stating that it highlighted how it "can be silly fun and bring out the best in us".[14] That same month, The New York Times included the game in "The Delight" section of its recap of brief viral moments in 2024.[15]

References

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  1. ^ Rockson, Gabrielle (July 3, 2024). "One Million Checkboxes Creator Dubs It 'Dumbest Website of All Time' – and Proof the Internet Can Still Be Fun". People.com. Archived from the original on January 8, 2025. Retrieved July 4, 2024.
  2. ^ a b c d e f Holtermann, Callie (July 3, 2024). "Are You a Checker or an Unchecker?". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on March 7, 2025. Retrieved July 4, 2024.
  3. ^ a b Nield, David (June 28, 2024). "This One Million Checkbox game is sparking an internet war – and it's taken hours of our life we'll never get back". TechRadar. Retrieved March 13, 2025.
  4. ^ a b Kaur, Tessa (July 1, 2024). "One Million Checkboxes Sent Me Into An Existential Meltdown". TheGamer. Valnet. Archived from the original on March 13, 2025. Retrieved March 8, 2025.
  5. ^ a b Royalty, Nolen (July 25, 2024). "Scaling One Million Checkboxes to 650,000,000 checks". eieio.games. Archived from the original on March 2, 2025. Retrieved July 27, 2024.
  6. ^ Ovide, Shira (September 3, 2024). "This is what happened to the world's most pointless website". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Archived from the original on October 6, 2024. Retrieved September 3, 2024.
  7. ^ Evans-Thirlwell, Edwin (June 27, 2024). "A game called One Million Checkboxes has sparked a terrible online war". Rock Paper Shotgun. Archived from the original on January 15, 2025. Retrieved March 13, 2025.
  8. ^ a b Ropek, Lucas (June 28, 2024). "Waste Your Life Playing This Game Where You Check Boxes Forever". Gizmodo. Archived from the original on July 2, 2024. Retrieved March 13, 2025.
  9. ^ a b c Ovide, Shira (July 2, 2024). "This is the most pointless website on the planet. It's fantastic". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Archived from the original on August 30, 2024. Retrieved July 4, 2024.
  10. ^ a b Curtis, Charles (July 3, 2024). "One Million Checkboxes, the addictive internet game that will make you so mad, explained". USA Today. Archived from the original on March 13, 2025. Retrieved July 4, 2024.
  11. ^ List, Jenny (August 30, 2024). "Online Game Becomes Unexpected Pixelflut". Hackaday. Archived from the original on November 11, 2024. Retrieved September 8, 2024.
  12. ^ Smith, Graham (September 14, 2024). "One Million Checkboxes players hid binary, QR codes and rickrolls among the boxes during its two week war". Rock Paper Shotgun. Archived from the original on January 15, 2025. Retrieved March 13, 2025.
  13. ^ a b Paul, Mathures (July 4, 2024). "A pointless game is the Internet's new obsession — One Million Checkboxes". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on March 13, 2025. Retrieved March 13, 2025.
  14. ^ Ovide, Shira (December 20, 2024). "5 actually good things that happened in technology this year". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on December 20, 2024. Retrieved March 8, 2025.
  15. ^ Kircher, Madison Malone (December 19, 2024). "The Year in Micro News". The New York Times. Archived from the original on February 19, 2025. Retrieved March 13, 2025.
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