One Million Checkboxes Sent Me Into An Existential Meltdown

Summary

• One Million Checkboxes is a webpage with one million checkboxes, created by Nolen Royalty, where users can check or uncheck boxes. That's pretty much it.
• The site has gained popularity and attracted script kiddies who have created bots to automate the process, sparking a debate on whether using scripts diminishes the human interactivity aspect.
• To be fair, Royalty encourages the use of scripts, but some users (including me) argue that it ruins the fun and value of the simple, menial task, raising questions about the appreciation for small tasks and the impact of automation on human interaction.

One Million Checkboxes is, technically, a game. I think? Really, it’s just a webpage that has, as advertised, one million checkboxes. Created by Nolen Royalty, also known as eieio, the site is fairly sparse: there’s a counter in the top right corner telling you how many boxes have been checked, and another below that tells you how many you, personally, have checked.

The goal of One Million Checkboxes is to check all the boxes. Every time you check or uncheck a box, that change reflects for every single person on the webpage. It’s not very complicated. There are a handful of coloured checkboxes which are marked separately in your check count, but that’s as complex as it gets.

According to the ‘what’s my deal’ section on eieio’s website, Royalty’s interest is in “building games in surprising places” and “helping strangers interact over the internet”. It’s pretty clear what the point of One Million Checkboxes is – it’s a team effort between total strangers, all working towards the same goal. Except there are really two teams, the checkers and uncheckers, and it’s this clash of interests that has created so much buzz.

Holy Hell, That’s A Lot Of Boxes!

A quick glance at Royalty’s Twitter page reveals that so many people have played the game that Royalty has had to set up multiple servers for the page and take the site down multiple times to tweak its code in order to not spend a small fortune on bandwidth costs. Another tweet said that the site was averaging about 45,000 boxes checked or unchecked a minute. Yet another said that, on Friday, about 60 million boxes had been checked or unchecked. That was just within 20 hours of the site being up.

Clearly, One Million Checkboxes is resonating for a lot of people, though I’m probably thinking about it more deeply than the average person. As someone who loves menial tasks and crossing to-dos off a list, I’m well aware that there’s a lot of pleasure to be derived from simply clicking boxes. The idea of being able to create a huge, unbroken sea of blue check icons scratches an itch in my brain, as I’m sure it does for many people. But that’s just the ideal that people are working towards.

In practice, One Million Checkboxes is a sort of battlefield. Predictably, for every bull-headed person clicking hundreds of boxes a day in an attempt to fill the page with ticks, there is someone trying to uncheck every box so that the goal is never reached. This is where the interest lies – what could have been a simple exercise in cooperation has now turned into a PvP, checkers against uncheckers fight. This is the point, this proxied social behaviour, organically fostered by playing on human nature. It’s fun.

Here’s The Existential Meltdown

Because One Million Checkboxes is a simple, old-fashioned web toy that’s easily manipulated with Javascript, that is exactly what people started doing. This in itself is not a problem – in fact, I’d go so far as to say Royalty encourages it, judging from their tweets. Botting and scripts are a feature of the early internet, and many coders see webtoys like this as practically begging to be meddled with. It’s kind of cool that people are mucking around with it for no other reason than because they can, and it’s a way of participating in the game.

But the botting also strikes me as sort of anti-social. I’m not a coder, so I don’t have a natural instinct to meddle with webpages or to assume that will be others’ first instinct. So when I first opened up the page, checked some boxes, and saw them getting immediately unchecked, my first thought was that this was an opponent. It suddenly became fun. It was my goal to keep the boxes I’d picked checked. I had a purpose – to defeat this unwitting opp. I took it way more seriously than an employed adult with bills to pay should have. My partner walked into our room just now and found me hunched over at my PC, furiously clicking tiny boxes, and asked with genuine concern if I was okay.

Death To The Wordle Bot

I used the Wordle Bot and it made me feel bad about being right. It sucks.

Realising, then, that the page was inundated with bots created specifically to wipe out my progress destroyed the purpose. It was fun when I thought I was on an even playing ground, going click for click against other people, human against human, but human against bot? That’s not fair, and if it’s not fair, it’s not fun.

This has then devolved into a second mini-battle, this time on social media. Some people think that writing scripts for this simple webtoy diminishes its purpose by taking away the impact of human interactivity and turning it into a script war. The other side says that scripts are entirely valid ways of automating busywork, and this is what One Million Boxes is, at its core – busywork.

Many, on both sides, have compared it to r/Place, the recurring Reddit-hosted collaborative project originally created as an expression of human collaboration, which was then overtaken pretty much entirely by bots.

Both sides are, I suppose, correct. It’s a page full of checkboxes, and it’s not that serious. But I still feel a deep despair that I can’t quite get at the root of. Is it the fact that one person’s way of playing with the toy – the scripter, namely – makes it unusable for anybody who doesn’t want to play the same way? Is it that scripters don’t care that botting ruins the fun? Is it that the idea of menial labour, busywork, has so little value to people that it immediately gets automated? Why don’t people appreciate the tiny joys of tiny, inconsequential tasks anymore? Is this a reflection of tech culture, in which everything has to be keyed for efficiency, which often means removing humans from the equation entirely? Why does that make me so angry? Oh my god, am I a secret Luddite?

Anyway, that was my day. I’ve just been checking these boxes and descending into madness. How was yours, honey? Did you have a good day at work? Do the cats look happy? That’s great.

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