It’s what it says on the tin: exactly one million checkboxes, each of which can be checked or unchecked, with the results visible to all. Some players apparently try to check as many as they can, and others try to uncheck them. You can scroll down to big swathes of relatively stable checked or unchecked boxes, and check or uncheck those, possibly with results that last a few seconds longer than doing this in more popular areas of the grid.
It’s got to be a depressing metaphor for something, a real-time shared experience of why we can’t have nice things. Everybody’s competing to either make their mark, or undo the work of others. The fact that the game’s literally played by clicking as many times as possible has got to be part of the metaphor, right? We’re all clicking ourselves to death online every moment, and it’s utterly pointless.
Regret it?! No! That site’s great. It took me a minute to find out for every checked box I unchecked, my checked box number decreased by one. And that checkbox number jump option at the bottom right…genius! Some of the boxes have a bold background and your statistics in the upper right will refect how many of them you’ve checked in parentheses. It’s strangely addictive, I feel. It’s a good thing I don’t have any administrivial matters to work on this weeked.
Ahah! The thicker borders are in different colors so the numbers in parentheses reflect how many of those you’ve checked. The ol’ colorblindness reared its head on me! Still a fun pastime, though!
Interesting… I’ll be in an area where no boxes are checked, wait a few seconds and see no activity, but as soon as I start checking boxes they will quickly get unchecked again. Almost like somebody’s following me …
Yeah, there’s a large area about 10% of the way down that’s all checked, and if I start unchecking a large rectangular block suddenly the whole area will fill in again all at once. There’s no way that’s real people doing that.
One Million Checkboxes, a simple online game that invites visitors to click or unclick check boxes, has become an unintentional case study in human behavior.
I remember a similar “game” (or whatever the heck this is) a few years back, that was pixels of a big image, that you could change to any of the Crayola 10 colors. Some people would create, some people would destroy, some made simple patterns, some didn’t create anything of their own but worked to preserve and fix what others created, and so on.
Interesting… so, the mass unchecking is apparently being done by bots, but not part of the game design. Once again, it’s other people messing it up for the rest of us.
If you’re addressing me – well ticking a box, for fun, is of course not precisely “work”, but it’s doing a thing, versus un-doing a thing someone else did. These are (in this game) fundamental different modes. The NYT article I linked above explores a bit of the psychology involved, as expressed by this tweet:
Not sure if that was a reply to me or not, but I don’t consider checking any more valuable than unchecking. In fact, the first couple times I was at the site, I was doing a lot of unchecking. But it was random, not just watching for boxes to get checked then immediately uncheck them. Programming a bot to immediately reverse someone else’s work, whether it’s checking or unchecking, just seems like jerkish behavior.
I’ve wondered exactly what type of player would this game is actually meant for. After giving it some thought, I’ve reached a verdict: This game is for the type of player who wouldn’t give this game up.
Let me elaborate. With unlimited powers of creation and destruction, this would naturally pull in two distinct types, the one who likes to create things, and the one who sadistically enjoys destroying everyone else’s creations. Think of it as a simplified Minecraft open world. Obviously the first type’s efforts are doomed to fail because there are too many destroyers, not to mention players who want to create something different. However, the second type also can never get what they want, not only because the creators are constantly foiling their efforts, but other destroyers are trying to mess them up as well. So the artists who want to create that one pretty pattern and keep it that way are going to give up in disgust, but the jerks who want to ruin the experience for everyone else are going to get a rude shock as to how little power they have and give up as well.
Ultimately that leaves only players who are totally open minded in their approach to this ever-changing world…no creation is ever permanent, no destruction is ever permanent, no victory or defeat ever lasts, and every single player is completely powerful and completely powerless at the same time. So in the end, you just gotta do your thing, whatever that may be. You’d think that a game like this wouldn’t be very appealing, but the amount of action it’s received definitely proved that there was a definite fanbase for something like this.
…I say in the past tense, because apparently the…goal?..was to check all million boxes, which happened at some point, and now all action has ceased. Personally I didn’t care either way, but the game insisted on tracking my check count, so to avoid any semblance of favoritism I worked to bring the numbers (including the numbers for specific colored boxes) back to zero. It was surprisingly simple, and I’m glad I had the initiative to attain this small triumph before the game reached its conclusion. (Hey, I said small, all right? )
I didn’t know the game was over, but that makes sense. The instant all one million boxes were checked at the same time was an obvious stopping point.
So the doers won, and the undoers lost. Too bad bots were involved; the victory was not earned.
(I’m not being 100% serious or even 50%, and also realized that doing vs. undoing can be seen the other way around. To check a box is to mar it, litter it, and to uncheck is to restore it, clean it up.)
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