The real hidden gem here is the hilarious 40 minute mermaid-themed true crime podcast parody that you'll only hear a portion of if you progress quickly. As far as I can tell, it's fully custom-made for this game? Can't find any references to the characters online.
https://stimulation-clicker.neal.fun/ sounds/true-crime.mp3 - it's hosted on Cloudflare, but even so I don't want to cost OP significant bandwidth, so join the two strings above for the direct link.
"Aww, he was all cat 'n tonic when he first saw her." An absolute classic. I would do anything to know more about how this came to exist.
Speed-ran the game using this (well, I injected jquery first to select the element using $() because I'm an absolute Baboon) in about 45 seconds, spam clicking all the upgrades, and clicks stopped going up after hitting "342,044,125,797,992,850,000,000,000,000 stimulation" with 10k clicks per second.
What a ride. Love the implied commentary on our over-stimulated lives!
Fun fact: browsers' devtools consoles have de-facto standardized convenience aliases for querying the DOM, similar to jQuery [0][1][2][3][4]. This means you could do something as simple as:
to create the simplest dependency-free cheat speed runner. (And, as mentioned earlier, shrinking -- or logically also zooming in -- the page results in more DVD bounces.)
Ah, thanks for the heads-up, apparently there is something borked in Chromium wrt $ / $$ encapsulation, as it seems they are nor reachable from the (global) context setInterval so doing `window.$ = $; window.$$ = $$;` fixes that in Chrome. Not sure why. (Yet again embarrassed myself by trying a snippet that "simply must work ® according all documentations ™" in single a browser only before posting. Sigh.)
I bet it's working as intended. The $ symbol is probably a special feature of the console and is not intended to be a property of window. Inside setInterval, the function is no longer being executed in the special console environment, which has access to that symbol.
Yes, I guess there could be some intention behind that, presumably some security precautions, but still: the fact that you can see $ in the globalThis (as a non-enumerable prop), and that globalThis you see from inside the timeout-ed function is strictly equal to globalThis seen directly from the console, that makes it somewhat spooky.
And it (`setTimeout(()=>{console.log(typeof $==="function")},0)`) works in Firefox. (Interestingly, you cannot get $'s descriptor in there, but you have it always available in timeout.)
131,903,042,042,866,960,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stimulation per second
I envy your rig - mine glitched a lot to get it in <3min. Might not be doing myself a service by actually answering the Duolingo questions via LLM... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-J0ppP-H9s
The podcast makes a couple of winking references to other bits of the game, including a mention of "that time that poor boy was pushed into that hydraulic press".
Absolutely. Reminded me of all the effort GTA spent on radio, to much fanfare.
The entire production value is fantastic. Glad to see Neal expanding. This is only a half step away from something less jokey, and more marketable.
If that's the path he chooses, of course. But judging by his smiling face in the center of it all wearing a poor fitting crown, I think he's just in it for the lulz. And I may respect that even more.
This great packaging has a critical social media tone for me. Absolutely amazing fun and addictive showing almost dark patterns. For a deep dive:
"Ethics of the attention economy: The problem of social media addiction", [1]
I say this as someone who's tried all the state-of-the-art voice generation systems: so far, nobody has trained an AI to "chew the scenery" nearly as effectively and effusively as these voice actors having the time of their lives playing southern belles and bean company owners who are blisteringly envious that a dead mermaid is stealing their spotlight by dying from a megalodon attack.
Haha, the problem is: we still haven't gotten AI to generate voices! "State of the art" just uses regular TTS engines and then adds extra inflection as "special sauce" or stretches it out, etc. At least, that is how it works for these AI generators that need to do it "at scale." When you can spend more on classic speech models, you can go well beyond that (see Siri, Google, Alexa, etc).
I finished the game without cheating. I felt like a frog being slowly boiled (and it really does feel like you're boiling at the end). It's quite the journey...
I love how everything here isn't even farfetched. It's just standard YouTube and TikTok content. The red notification bubbles were also a nice touch, I felt myself really drawn to those, and if I think back, I guess that's the earliest example I can recall of where these patterns all started: Facebook's little red notification bubble
As far as clickers go, finishing this game without cheating is very easy. Only takes like 20-30 min. But nonetheless, it was enjoyable. Really regretted clicking the subway surfer wormhole button. Luckily that was right at the end.
Spam DVD logo upgrades as fast as you can. Open your browser as big as it will go. When the DVD logo gets close to the top, start shrinking the browser slowly. I think the DVD positioning is calculated from the bottom of the page, there's a bug where the logo(s) will get stuck near the top as you shrink the page and will constantly re-register a bounce multiple times per second. Eventually all the logos you buy will get clumped at the top, and you can get 1MM Stimulation per "bounce".
My phone could not handle it at all, it started dropping widgets after the slime (like subway surfers and hydraulic press disappeared) and then it started to lag before finally my whole phone became unresponsive for a couple minutes even after the tab was closed. On an iPhone 12 mini so not the newest but still a little surprising that it stopped so early in the game.
You need 2,000,000 stimulation points for the last item which wins the game. It sounds like a lot, but by that point you’ll be generating an insane amount of points per second and passive consumption is worth more than clicking. It does get overwhelming, at one point I had to mute the sound for a minute or two before resuming.
If you want to know what the last item is, rot13 the next paragraph (https://rot13.com/ is an easy way to do it):
Gur ynfg vgrz vf “tbvat gb gur bprna”. Gur tnzr jneaf lbh gurer vf ab tbvat onpx nsgre gung. Vg fjvgpurf gb n pnyzvat ivqrb bs jnirf ba gur ornpu, jvgu perqvgf.
I had to restart because I unwittingly clicked the mukbang guy too early: can't handle him unless he is drowned out by everything else. By contrast I enjoyed the wormhole button. Kind of the whole point of the experience, liked it way better than certain noises :)
Yeah, that game should come with a seizure warning. I've never had a seizure but my brain started to feel pretty uncomfortable during my second completionist playthrough.
Jonathan Blow had a great (imho) rant about those type of notifications that someone clipped from one of his live streams. (Warning: strong language.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9nmCIrs7HI
I saw that the Shadow of the Colossus remake has little achievement notifications when you kill colossi and that really burns my biscuit. You're watching this slow-motion scene of a colossus dying, sad music plays, you wonder if you're doing the right thing, and the PlayStation is like "yayyy!~ You're such a good gamer!~"
Jonathan Blow has good points sometimes, but he comes off as very "old man rants at cloud" most of the time. He's been stewing in his own sauce for far too long.
Wow, that was amazing. This is honestly a better piece of contemporary art (in terms of making you think about modern life and what is happening to our environment, the impact on ourselves, our kids, etc.) than most of what you might see at a fancy art gallery or a contemporary art museum in NYC.
Neal has continually outdone himself with every single release. Everything he makes is a labor of love and is so special and deserving of attention. From the factual stuff like "The Size of Space" and "Deep Sea", to the more amusing "Absurd Trolly Problems", "The Password Game", and so on. It's all so good and feels like a gift to the internet.
Stimulation Clicker's social commentary has to the best thus far. I know click games are a thing, but to combine that mechanic with a parody of the state of the modern attention economy is just pure art.
Neal, if you're reading HN, you rock. Please know how appreciative we are.
Rather, I think they are not accessible enough. A picture on a wall, a movie or music can be experienced by hundreds or thousands of people all at once. Games in an art gallery have a much lower natural limit to the number of people who can interact with them simultaneously (at least in the same physical space). Sure, you can watch others do it, but that's not really the same thing (it's more like watching performance art than playing a game).
I have in fact been to art galleries which had interactive game-like exhibits. I basically never got to interact with them because, lo and behold, there was a long queue.
> Maybe actually go to an art gallery/museum sometime
This however is unfair and hypocritical re: assuming. I have been to many of the world's most celebrated museums of art, at least dozens of them, and have never personally seen video games in them firsthand.
I've seen and played games at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in NYC. Maybe I got lucky but it's one of like three museum visits I've ever done as a tourist in the city.
> This is honestly a better piece of contemporary art (in terms of making you think about modern life and what is happening to our environment, the impact on ourselves, our kids, etc.)
Zooming out, I think games in general is in a much better position to do this, as a medium, compared to the alternatives TV, movies and music.
I guess mainly because it's interactive, but it also feels like it can be broader than the other mediums, like on one hand you have Idle/Clicker games like these, and on the other the huge blockbuster AAA games.
I managed to cheat this by buying a bunch of DVDs and making my window as small as possible, meaning they hit the edges much more often and gained me infinity stimulation.
> Fantastic encapsulation and commentary on the modern web and attentionspace.
This is why I quit Hearthstone even though I never spent a dime on it. I realized I had been habituated into playing it every day. I started feeling like a lab rat trained to push a button for a reward.
Cookie Clicker taught me this about Destiny and Destiny 2 as well.
I got a lot of enjoyment out of those games - and they were partly the backdrop to socialising online with IRL friends who didn't live close to me - but at some point the absurdity of them became too obvious and we stopped.
That's one of the things that makes Stimulation Clicker so good, by being exposed to the most extreme version, it helps you identify other engineered attention grabbers in everyday life.
> This is why I quit Hearthstone even though I never spent a dime on it.
Good news, you now have time to pick up The Bazaar instead! (joke aside, it's quite fun, a lot more chill, and not nearly as exploitative as Hearthstone)
You're downvoted, but I agree. I found it basically a hodgepodge of 80s references over a basic story with one-dimensional characters (the heroes are Very Good and the bad guy is Very Bad). I would have assumed that it's aimed at young children, if the references weren't forty years before their time.
It's not just that, but also the main protagonist is written terribly and never given any real faults or challenges to overcome. During the entire book there is never a challenge that is not resolved by the next paragraph.
The Japanese friends that he makes are grossly stereotyped and are kept one dimensional during the entire book as well.
The main character also strikes me as incredibly creepy, and to a level where he could be classified as an para-social stalker. Just comes off as being a terrible person overall.
Spielberg's movie however is fantastic and one of those rare instances where the movie truly does outrank the book.
The film even has a proper ending which in itself is hugely thought provoking and something we definitely should consider. The book, if I remember correctly, just sets up for another book.
Short version, guy can't sleep. Someone tells him get a dog. Dog barks, still can't sleep. Well you'll also need a blah... repeat until the man has a small farm of loud animals going. Then finally "get rid of them" and suddenly it's all so quiet again.
It's pretty fascinating how much more calm everything seems when you finish/stop this game
There is a different version where a person takes drug A to solve problem X. But that has a side effect so they take drug B to solve that problem. And so on and so on and so on. Eventually, they decide to stop taking all the medicines and are finally "cured".
Lovely ending, and I appreciate how short this one is. For me it really does induce some mixed feelings for what we did to the web while at the same time I really enjoyed the nostalgia.
Another game I sunk way too much time into to get to the end is Idle Loops which ends up being kind of like programming once you get deeper into it:
https://dmchurch.github.io/omsi-loops/
(There are three versions, all open source on GitHub – this one is the third in the chain of forks, with the most updates)
I figured like thirty seconds into using the site that resizing it smaller would give me more DVD bounces per second. But then during resizing i kinda cheated myself some points accidentally, and discovered that trick where they're just bouncing on every tick.
Normally I'm a sucker for clicker games, but cheating the progress (even accidentally) always kills the point of it.
I cheated and opened up multiple windows of this game in a tiled window manager so I can get more stimulated, but it wasn't enough so I opened up youtube (minecraft parkour videos), netflix (comfort shows) and live streamed it to twitch providing live commentary.
After you get to the cryptocurrency it's basically game over, you can earn over a million during a few market cycles, and the speed you can do it it raises (almost) exponentially. Stocks are similar, but much slower.
During my 20 minutes I noticed stocks and crypto seem to always fluctuate within a given range. So if you buy in the low end of the range you're guaranteed to see an opportunity to sell at the higher end of the range.
Crypto is just stocks with a wider range and more volatility.
Ha, thanks! I was wondering where that post had gone as it wasn't showing in my replies. I imagine it was a confusing statement on a post about yahoo pipes.
Cookie Clicker has received updates almost continuously for the last decade. I don’t have the commitment to ascend but I understand there’s quite a bit of content to be unlocked there even after you’ve maxed out your first “run.”
It seems to have been put to rest though, it used to get an update once a year or so for a while now, but as it stands the last update was in May 2023.
Cookie Clicker got me into programming back in the day! Super simple structure (back then) and fun way to experiment with coding in an interactive way with visual feedback.
I was about to scoff at this and thought "Ugh, another cookie clicker", but then I started playing it. I'm glad it is quick because my head was going to explode. It is pretty damn brilliant take on today's stimuli overload. I think it is more a piece of art than a game. I was able to win quickly once I got crypto because it was bouncing from $400 to $50,000, but I almost barfed because there was SO much going on. Well done.
It's not even today's stimuli overload; the original Cookie Clicker has a billion things going on as well if you advance far enough (and leave all the graphics settings on).
A Dark Room (https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/) is fantastic as well. It's not only a clicker/idle game, but it incorporates the mechanics in an interesting way.
On the whole, I've had to adopt a policy of not even touching clicker games. I find them incredibly addictive, and most of the time I'm not even enjoying the experience or getting anything out of it, I just feel hooked. I'd say Universal Paperclips and A Dark Room were exceptions to that, in that they actually had some depth, strategy, discovery, or story. But even those two I've had to stop myself from replaycing.
I'll play Universal Paperclips once a year or so when I remember it exists and have nothing I need to do for the next 3-6 hours. So I'd add that as a warning to anyone who wants to check it out: make sure your next 6 hours are ok to spend on it, in case you get sucked in.
(Late reply, but) I got to play this over the weekend together with some other suggestions in this thread, and Dark Room was actually pretty good! Thanks for the recommendation.
There's a whole combat and map system that's hidden away initially. A lot of the progression really wants you to do that but it's hidden away at first so it's not obvious.
In that it distills the game mechanic of “make number go up” into a simplistic form. It just lakes the clicking.
PS, whenever I relapse and play too much World of Warcraft, I play some Cookie Clicker as a cleanse to remind myself of the fundamental pointlessness of the whole endeavor. Great game.
I think it is one of the few games that "changed my life" in the sense that by getting addicted to it for a few days, it made me see Cookie Clicker in every platform that tries to waste my time.
I remember when I first heard about it and I naively thought that such a simple game was silly and in now way could not be addictive, but I let myself play it for a while and it really changed the way I see games.
This is a great insight, you see it in a lot of mobile games and "live services" / MMOs especially, a big focus on "numbers go up" with relatively minimal effort or skill involved (or only the perception thereof).
In a similar vein, "stamina" in mobile games that limit how much you can do, which on the one side makes the game not "feel" like it takes much time, but which on the other encourages you to open it up a few times a day, and / or buy the "restore stamina" purchase.
"Dailies" / "weeklies", things you should do every day / week to stay up to date.
"time limited events", miss it and you'll never get the chance again.
Same to no cheating - Only been playing a couple of years, lots of background.
All-Time Stats
Total Kittens 84.84K
Kittens Dead 5710
Total Years Played 18.33M
Run Number 98
Total Paragon 90.36K
Rare Events Observed 22.31M
Unicorns Sacrificed 4.20P
Buildings Constructed 553.38K
Total Clicks 712.37K
Trades Completed 2.32G
Crafting Times 501.64M
Avg. Kittens Born (Per Century) 0.46
Transcendence Tier 27
Challenges Completed 8
I'm sadly into the incremental game genre. Universal Paperclips is still my favourite, and I replay it often. A Dark Room is another really good one with some storytelling and an ending, which is not all that common in incremental games.
But if anyone wants to get deep into it, Dodecadragons is probably the best implementation of the incremental mechanics, but it's extremely addictive, so be careful with it.
let me save everyone's time of writing each recommendation individually - by linking https://www.incrementaldb.com/ where all the games are listed together
This is a fun clicker game whose point seems cynical and self-defeating on multiple levels.
Despite the HN comments complaining about it being overwhelming and a dark reflection of how awful and distracting the internet is, clearly enough people enjoyed it to get to the front page. The stimulation torture wasn't really torture, but another level to the game.
All the content creators whose inclusion at first seems like an indictment of the kinds of internet videos that lead to addiction or overstimulation also all get a pleasant shout-out which seems silly. Are these supposed to represent what's awful about the internet?
EDIT: To hammer the dissonance home, at the end of the game we are met with a calming ocean scene that I'm guessing the average player appreciated for about thirty seconds before clicking away.
To me, this whole exercise doesn't reflect how distorted humanity has become because of technology, but of how humans refuse to look themselves in the mirror.
We want to be the kind of people who buck the mold and escape systems of control, so that we can properly enjoy things like waves of the ocean, but at any point during this game we could just open a new tab and watch the ocean on a YouTube livestream. Instead we spend an hour clicking and advancing this manic stream of chaos.
What's more human, then: calmly watching the waves crash against the beach, or clicking buttons trying to win and discover what's at the end of a silly game?
> Despite the HN comments complaining about it being overwhelming and a dark reflection of how awful and distracting the internet is, clearly enough people enjoyed it to get to the front page.
Is this like a massive HN wooosh -- how can this be the top-voted comment?
From Neil Postman's 1985 "Amusing Ourselves to Death":
> “With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.”
> “Spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face.”
It's less about whether we "enjoy" the stimulation, more about what kind of people we become when we lose ourselves in this bizarre sea of superstimuli. We're like reinforcement agents creating adversarial examples for each other, drawing ourselves further out of any sort of meaningful life, into a fever dream where the most desirable job for the next generation is to be famous for being famous [1] rather than do anything for any kind of deeper purpose.
I like your description. I sometimes wonder if the final equilibrium state will be most people working on addictive products and the rest working on addiction treatment.
I'd say with the current state of things it's more like two singularities in which either:
- A landian-stephensian accelerationist timeline occurs where the majority of the urban population becomes some flavor of AGI-tuned VR junkie
- An extreme naturalistic counterculture movement occurs that causes majority of the civilized world to willingly roll themselves back 1 or 2 centuries technologically in order to feel something again
Perhaps the current obsession will just go the way of heavy drinking or smoking? Ie the population will eventually develop some partial immunity to the allure, but it won't even go away completely.
I personally believe that at some point, many people will realize that the majority of the people with economic means are the people who are able to concentrate and don’t waste all their time. Note that I don’t mean the super wealthy, I’m referring to people who are solidly middle class and have means. I know a lot of successful people who aren’t glued to their phones. I think there will be enough good and bad examples out there for people to start catching on.
- And there has to be the third, hyperminmaxers yearning forever more control and power trying to be(at) the machine. Thus becoming a reflection of the first.
- Fourth must be some sort of hybrid between denialist and creationist, whom I don't even want to envision through. Which would be a reflection of the second, but instead of withdrawing, they would bubble themselves into something terrifying version of the Amish.
I think it's kind of necessary to be exposed to ideas and views of people like Postman to even think of them when you play a game like this. The top comment is disappointing, but so it goes.
I enjoyed the game, for the attention to detail and making a mockery out of so many things in our daily lives that are in essence absurd, in such a brilliant yet simple way. The frowning Duolingo owl. The pillow delivery tracking made me chuckle. The only thing I missed was booking a an apartment on booking.com with a billion reminders to hurry up as the place might be gone any second, or doing an online check in. Although maybe it happened, I refreshed the game accidentally and never came back.
>> Despite the HN comments complaining about it being overwhelming and a dark reflection of how awful and distracting the internet is, clearly enough people enjoyed it to get to the front page.
> Is this like a massive HN wooosh -- how can this be the top-voted comment?
100% agree. I had to read that sentence and surrounding parts like 5 times to check if I was missing a satirical nod somewhere. It's like writing a review of Franz Kafka's books and saying "Despite what we may say about bureaucracy, clearly lots of people enjoy it because his books were best sellers!"
Lots of art is there to make you think, not to "enjoy" it.
I've been trying to disentangle myself from the internet for the last couple years. Maybe this hits better for those who haven't yet realized they are spending too much time online.
I've built up a reflex to leave any sort of overstimulatory atmosphere. I don't watch short form videos and leave any page that causes high levels of stimulation (Temu's spinner stops me from shopping there, for example).
I quit this game after about 10 minutes when it hit a comical level of stimulation and still upvoted this. I loved the commentary because the game seemed to follow the natural "evolution" of the web, straight to the point where every app has attached mini games and multiple in-game currencies. Listening to the man popping his beer can and pouring it at the same time as a live police scanner was truly dystopian but also feels like a daily occurrence in modern society.
I think it's great that you didn't really have a stomach for the absurd level of noise and flashing lights, but I just don't think it's a moral victory that people should necessarily strive for.
Maybe, but my life feels better by going for run for 30 minutes or to the gym, or spending time with my kid and/or partner rather than clicking one button on a web page for 30 minutes straight.
I quit (the first time) after the first three totally unlabeled icons appeared. Not having hovered on them, I had no idea there was anything more. Lesson for designers of scroll bars and other commonly-hidden but important UI elements.
> at any point during this game we could just open a new tab and watch the ocean on a YouTube livestream.
That's a great observation.
I'm not sure how to phrase this exactly, but there's something going on for at least some people - definitely for me - that the thing we're seeking refuge in are given meaning by the things we're seeking refuge from. Like you said, at any point during the game - or before, or after - I could open a new tab and watch the ocean on YouTube, or even watch the same thing that was the ending of the game. Except, obviously, I wouldn't, because why would I? It would be totally random and arbitrary, a kind of plot non sequitur you'd complain about if it was a piece of fiction. This ocean scene only makes sense as an ending of this game, as a refuge, a contrast, a punchline. It's the stimulation game preceding it, that gives meaning to the ending.
I've noticed I often feel similarly about many hobbies, interests, tasks, - heck, even people - they rapidly stop being interesting once I don't have any stressing obligation I should be working on instead.
(My HN comment history, too, is strongly and positively correlated with amount of stuff I should be doing instead in my life, but not necessarily want to.)
Doesn't seem self-defeating if it aroused that level of analysis, seems like good art! Art can bring up questions that author didn't intend so it's often best not to bring the authors viewpoint into the discussion, or at least not make authorial intent the authority.
I've heard someone say good art isn't about saying new things, but saying known truths in new ways and I found this very effective. Your question about who really stays to watch the ocean is interesting, and I don't think diminishes the game.
you're looking at it from a framework that there's a "right" way to interpret a given piece of art, or that a given piece of art has "a point" instead of "a set of ways in which people interpret it". You're describing one way of interpreting it and then leveling a charge against the piece when, in reality, that charge should be leveled at that interpretation.
are you asking about this specific piece or about art in general? Either way yes I disagree.
I don't know the author of this work. I don't know what they intended, so I can't comment on their intentions. I don't know if there's an "intended interpretation" or not, I don't know what that intended interpretation is, I don't know if it lines up with the interpretation you described. If the author intended for a specific, singular interpretation, I would reject that; any interpretation is just one of many. Some interpretations make more sense than others, and how a piece is interpreted can easily change from person to person, or even over time for a single person. Whatever you get out of it: it's true that that's what you got out of it.
This is actually a 100+ year old divisive point in literary/media criticism - the older traditional view is authorial intent is the only thing that matters, the post-modern view is authorial intent shouldn't be considered at all and you should only look at the text in isolation. I think the sensible and most common view is that authorial intent should be taken into account, but should not be considered the final word - because you can't truly know what the author is intending, there may be subconscious things even the author isn't aware of (for example the complete sexlessness of HP Lovecraft is probably not intentional but probably telling), and how the author gets it wrong can be interesting and should be considered part of the piece as well (for example, when you mention how people won't watch the ocean, that's interesting, and should be considered part of the piece because the game leaves room for that kind of interpretation).
TLDR, there may be an intended point, but that's not the only thing a piece can be judged on. The best art leaves room for multiple interpretations, it has a life of it's own beyond the creator when it's experienced by people.
I didn't find it enjoyable or soothing... I played it for about 30 seconds, got the point, chuckled because it was a mildly clever poke at the stupid engagement tactics used to addict people to otherwise boring and pointless actions - sort of a demo of how we're all dumber than lab mice, who at least get food for pressing a button - and then came back here to see that some people actually kept playing it to some sort of end. Which is crazy.
> Despite the HN comments complaining about it being overwhelming and a dark reflection of how awful and distracting the internet is, clearly enough people enjoyed it to get to the front page. The stimulation torture wasn't really torture, but another level to the game.
All the content creators whose inclusion at first seems like an indictment of the kinds of internet videos that lead to addiction or overstimulation also all get a pleasant shout-out which seems silly. Are these supposed to represent what's awful about the internet?
There's a literary/artistic technique called "irony" where the depiction isn't meant to be taken at face-value and instead is actually being shown because the opposite is intended. The whole game is an ironic application of Stimulation techniques, and in order to show its negative impact, one must use them ironically.
These trends wouldn't be trends if they didn't work. The game can be awful and distracting, yet still succeed at garnering engagement. Not just in spite of the stimulation but partially due to the stimulation. It's not self defeating or hypocritical, it's a bad thing, an indictment, and also engaging all at the same time.
It got me to think and engage, so already I think it succeeds at being a great piece of art.
But is "overstimulation" ... "bad", according to the overall message? Is this game, livestreamer Ludwig, and all the achievements part of the problem being highlighted? (Not to mention the mean-spirited Mindspace parody) If you get enough stimulation here, it just seems like you get to cash it in so that you can advance to a state of higher enlightenment
> But is "overstimulation" ... "bad", according to the overall message?
Dozens of DVD signs jumping around, hydraulic press slowly pressing macaroons, infinite subway surfers, lofi girl, some guy eating burger, achievements popping left and right, hands molding some crap. All of that fit on a mobile screen with sounds of lofi, rain, thunder and constant clocking of dvd sounds. And I didn’t even reach bottom of the pit.
> But is "overstimulation" ... "bad", according to the overall message?
We're taking part in boiling a frog. The game starts off blank and peaceful with a single button inviting you to push it. It adds the DVD bounce, which is a nice little charming and nostalgic hit of dopamine. Then you get another DVD logo, which is a nice touch, double the points! Then you get a hydraulic press. Hydraulic press automation. Level ups. Audio. Oh no. Now it's the kind of unending audiovisual nightmare that browsing the modern web without adblock is, and it evolved in much the same way.
If you keep playing it -- either to find out what the whole point of this game is or because you are trapped in the game loop by your stimulation-seeking brain -- and you just keep building and building in overstimulating nonsense versions of real-world content until you are presented with the calmness of it doesn't have to be this way.
That first wave in the calm after the storm gave me literal physical relaxation: I felt the tenseness of my back & shoulders ease into a slump once the incessant babble of the attention-seeking components of the game went away. I felt better than I had a moment ago. It was nice. And it was, counter to your point, exactly a look in the mirror. Why do I put myself through the wringer on modern social media when I don't have to?
All of that to say I don't feel like the message is self-defeating at all. The dissonance is the point. Condition yourself as much as you like to the way things are by continuing to play the game, the peaceful beach is almost certainly nicer. Even just for 30 seconds.
Why not get out in nature? Touch grass, maybe, as the kids say these days.
Having a "aha" moment while playing a game is enjoyable. That does not mean it can't be critical at the same time.
One of most popular misconceptions in art is that art that deals with serious topics has to be hard to consume and no fun is allowed to make it good art. Your reflection alone is a testament to what thoughts the game produced by making you do a thing. Of course the stimulation has to be somewhat enjoyable, wouldn't be realistic otherwise – in reality this is how they get you.
I never understood the appeal of being calm. It's fucking boring. Since early childhood I needed extra stimulation: first I'd listen to mom reading stories while I was playing with toys, then at school I'd listen to the teacher while playing games on my PSP. That allowed my brain to stay engaged. Now I just finished an exhausting day - I lay on the sofa, put on some music, have a slideshow on my computer screen, play this game. After finishing it, I'm feeling relaxed and tired in a way "now I'm ready to go to sleep". A friend of mine jokes that I have a motor in my ass because I can't sit still, whenever we meet I want to keep walking around, just for the sake of not sitting in one place.
I honestly think that high-stimulation is a great thing, as long as we use it to our advantage, instead of being hindered by it. The essence of life is doing things against the natural forces of inanimate physics, rather than sitting and doing nothing. The more you do, the more you live. The absolutely worst feeling in my life that I battle as an adult is being tired, when my mind and body refuse to do high-stimulation activities, and I end up just laying in bed the entire day.
Firefox on MacOS seems fine. I minimized the window size and made some soup. The GUI was a little bit laggy though. When I got back I had ~10million or so and bought all the upgrades which ended the game.
i went into this expecting a quick, shallow, PoC game to make a fast point. i was rewarded as the game continued to add incredible depth, showing real care and thought.
if there's one thing i can recommend, it's to read all the emails. they are hilarious and gave me the most joy. i burst out laughing while reading some which took me over my stimulation threshold and allowed me to fully embrace the absurdity of the entire thing (which i was initially playing somewhat competitively).
First thought: this is just silly. Then 5 minutes later: let me just get the ASMR slime video for 4000 stimulations before closing this. Now 10 minutes in I added the Listen to a Murder True Crime podcast for 10,000 stimulations, upgraded my hydraulic press, and now waiting for one of my 13 (technicolor upgraded) DVD logos to hit a corner so I can multiply my points by 10.
Ran into a bug where a double tap zoomed the page and it broke the game as I could not zoom out again. Unfortunately it does not save the progress in a cookie.
I also had an issue that restarted my computer and found the hard way it doesn't save. Using localStorage to store the state is simple enough, unfortunate that it doesn't.
The whole earn coins to purchase faster ways to earn coins is objectively stupid, I'm not going to do anything with them but I still feel like I need to earn more and feel good when I unlocked new stuff.
Is that Pavlov conditioning ? Used to buy new stuff and always make more money.
haha true, the ultimate meta. why do we feel the need to earn more coins? the game prescriptively doesn't say how it should be played - a player could well be content with rain sounds....
oh my god the murder podcast mentions a hydraulic press death.
best thing in a while, bravo.
EDIT: I really wish the still-locked achievements gave a hover/hint. I simply can't figure out what these missing achievements are, and it looks like the count is wrong. Also, I wish I could revive my chicken. :(
You have to obtain the Item Shop upgrade, then buy the "Sign in with Google" item from shop, then sign in, then you can save your state to your Google Drive by pressing Ctrl+/S.
Oh no. Last time [1] I wasted half a day clicking on buttons. There were some aliens, some AI stuff, then something happened to (this) universe. Never again!
Many years back, someone had made a clicker parody game internally at Google (go/swe-simulator-game). You clicked to write CLs, DDs, build a team, get into committees, get promoted. I wish that was made available externally, it was hilarious and painful at the same time.
I find it frustrating that after purchasing an item, the email notifications are endless. They include every minor update, like the delivery person stopping for a bagel. It feels like my phone is constantly bombarded with unnecessary information these days.
Holy moly that was an incredible experience. Well done!
The increasingly-dark Duolingo bird has to be my favorite part. Maybe I didn't get all the easter eggs there, but I almost wish the whole game just turned into an elaborate plot for vengeance for the owls.
If you are interested in seeing what the depth of the game is and you are on desktop, unlock the hydraulic press by holding "enter" after clicking on the "click" button for easy currency, then after unlocking, do the same by clicking on the +1,000 simulation redemption (holding enter afterward) once you go through one hydraulic press animation. You will gain 100,000 simulation a second!
Yeah Polyglot requires not making any mistakes; mess up and you'll have to restart to get it. I can't seem to get Roaring Kitty either -- and I should note, you can check how much you've made in the stock market with the "Screen Time" button, so I can say I've made over 4 million... probably it's not working...
Nice! I’ve been playing Star Trek Fleet Command the past few days and have been wanting to build a silly clicker game to mock/mimic some of the game’s aspects and this has given me inspiration.
It’s really well done. At one point the character says something along the lines of “but they would rather do other things, like play on neal.fun instead of going to the amusement park”
I remember cookie clicker taking days to finish when it first released, I like this is a self-contained experience that ends, and really generates the kind of anxiety it's trying to comment on by the end, and then gracefully steps away at the right time.
At first, I thought it was just a clicker; then it reminded me of the game "Don't Move" https://store.steampowered.com/app/334350/Dont_Move/ which is a very short experiment on what is a game. Finally, I realized it's something else entirely, and even more annoying.
This game is truly a work of art. I literally got a migraine playing this game though and couldn't finish it unfortunately. This is the second piece of media to do this to me behind Koyaanisqatsi... now that I think of it, this seems like a modern interpretation of the film Koyaanisqatsi.
I enjoyed the humor and the ending, it reminds me of some DOS games I grew up with. Nice work Neal :)
Clicker games can be considered banal, but when there is an interesting unexpected story or comedy behind the progressions, they are fun little pieces of art.
Two games I have played in the past of this ilk are Spaceplan [0] and Nodebuster [1], both of which only take around an hour or so to progress through. Fun and interesting like Neal's game.
I finished the game and immediately went to pick up my phone to check Instagram. Before I started I had just been thinking about how my lack of capacity to focus has been causing me to get nothing done. Not sure how to escape/re-train myself.
I was able to find a bug to get lots of clicks. Buy at least one bouncing DVD, open dev tools into responsive mode and make the screen width 52pixels (the lowest allowed). The DVDs will then bounce with each frame, racking up a bunch of points.
A small improvement would be to stop based on the balance, rather than a number of clicks, to avoid going into ludicrous Yes JS Numbers Are All Floats territory.
let max_amt = 2000000000*2; // Twice most expensive item
let btn = $('.main-btn');
function cl() {
btn.click();
let curr = $(".main-stat-num").innerText.replace(/\D/g, '');
if (curr < max_amt) {
setTimeout(cl, 1)
}
}
cl()
I ended up stopping the execution using max=10 and then removing annoying elements using the web inspector and keep running. I really liked the subway surfers though
I needed the ocean at the end. It's a very good game. The variable reward and quick repeatability captured me... It showcases what we are exposed to in a condensed manner.
Well done Neal and team. I clicked around and chuckled at the obvious stimulation "memes", but quickly felt a compulsion to "win". Ended up scoring huge with the crypto mini game and unlocked everything. I'd say the biggest surprise was clicking on the ocean without thought (since I was mindlessly clicking at everything), and was left a bit disappointed that it ended. Lesson learned: Read everything carefully before clicking.
Has anyone tried a speed run yet? Would be awesome if there was a leaderboard! I've done it twice now, I can see myself watching YouTube videos on people sharing strategies on the best sequence of upgrades to buy.
The best strategy is to write a helper function in the console to click for you. Then invest heavily in the DVDs, DVD bounce rate, stimulation per bounce, and general SPS increases.
I reached several quintillion stimulation, at which point I was offered to purchase "go to the beach" for 2 million. This ends the game and plays a relaxing beach video.
if (button) {
const clickButtonMultipleTimes = async () => {
while (true) {
const userInput = prompt("Enter the number of times to click the button (or type 'exit' to stop):");
if (userInput === null || userInput.toLowerCase() === 'exit') {
alert("Exiting the click process.");
break;
}
const clicks = parseInt(userInput, 10);
if (isNaN(clicks) || clicks < 0) {
alert("Please enter a valid non-negative number.");
continue;
}
for (let i = 0; i < clicks; i++) {
button.click();
}
alert(`Clicked the button ${clicks} time(s)!`);
}
};
clickButtonMultipleTimes();
} else {
alert("The button with class 'main-btn' was not found on this page.");
}
Unfortunately, at some point (while I was getting 5-10k SPS), there was this blue droplet(?) (for a lack of a better word) passing down my screen. Tapping it crashed the game for me on Firefox for Android in the sense that pretty much everything turned non-responsive after that. :\
EDIT: Almost crashed Chromium on Android / Vanadium, too.
The crypto prices were so unrealistic. I was able to just keep buying Bitcoin with 2x leverage when it was low and make millions when it subsequently went up after. I barely paid attention to any other ways to make stimulation. Please implement liquidation mechanisms and more volatility.
I found a cool cheat. Get a few DVDs going then resize the window quickly in a bunch of directions. It'll group them all together and you'll get a ton of stim all at once every time you resize the window. It also makes the sound effect sound like a Geiger counter.
This is a Black Mirror level hellscape. It really does capture the overstimulation of the modern world without filters. I found myself simultaneously anxious and inclined to keep clicking so I can unlock the next tier. It's over the top but not by much.
Found a weird bug... I've got a 3 monitor setup and the background animations (rain + pinwheel) only appears on 2 of the monitors... If the window straddles two of the monitors the animations only play on one half of the window!
Has anyone tried a speed run yet? Would be awesome if there was a leaderboard! I've done it twice now, I can see myself watching YouTube videos on people sharing strategies on the best sequence of upgrades to buy.
"Impressive. Very nice"
Finished without cheating. But halfway disabled sounds. It is too much.
You can easily finish the game by buying stocks, especially bitcoin. No cheating needed, was super simple. But great nonetheless.
My phone became overstimulated and hot :o It is actually addictive even when I know it's totally stupid. Good to know I am not resistant to these "games". Nice experiment, thanks for sharing!
Love the idea, but after a couple minutes this just gave me a headache with all the different videos, sounds and animations going on. I don't think I'm cut out for new age dopamine generation.
Just did 2+ hours of fascinated clicking as if I found a new part of Wikipedia, mainly because I assumed the "one way trip" to the ocean was a euphemism for what happened to the Titan submersible.
This is great but I can't make it work reliably. It crashed both on Android Chrome (a while after buying on-screen banners) and on Opera dekstop (earlier, before reaching crypto).
My most efficient hack without JS: get the hydraulic press, start it, and click once to collect 1,000 stimulation. Then spam the space bar repeatedly to get another 1,000 for every key press
My takeaway from this is to get in the right side of interest.
Once you start making money with the crypto, it goes fast. One could say this applies to real life (stock market or crypto). But at the start, it is slow.
I must not be the target audience for this kind of thing, but I really don't get it. The few times I've opened HN today I've seen this at the top, and the number of points has been higher. I've opened it 3 times, and clicked the button, and some other icons showed up below. The first time I didn't open even bother to mouse over the icons, so I didn't know you'd be buying things. I closed before I got to 50 stimulations. The second time, I did hover over the icons showing up, and clicked a couple, and nothing seemed to happen other than spending stimulation, so I closed before 100. I just did this a third time as it's now over 1200 points, and I really just don't understand what is going on. What am I missing?
I think this is a scenario where if you have to ask, you'll never know. Perhaps, ironically, there just wasn't enough immediate stimulation for you to continue...
The sad but funny part of this is: If I sent this to my computer science class of 12-13 year olds, 50% would not even get the joke and just go and play it like their usual brainrot cookie clicker.
I would love to play this but the site stops audio playback on mobile because it tries to play click sounds all the time. Are you able to add a mute option? :)
Oh man that is wild. As soon as I added subway surfer, it became so much easier to keep clicking the simulation button. I was watching that random video and don’t even notice I keep clicking.
Wonderful comment on our noisy world. Highly recommend some sort of warning for users, particularly the subway surfer wormhole. I'm not light sensitive but even I now have a headache.
By un-disabling the stock market buy and sell buttons, I was able to buy even when I didn't have enough money (stimulation), and I was also able to short-sell shares. So funny!
unbelievable. he's cracked the code in a few areas. what is the one thing that all of these stochastic processes implement? e.g. is there a rhythm or proportion of them to each other, or a shape?
It's not a simple bifucation process or fractal, it's something else. I use fractals in music and they are too unstable to produce this ebb and flow of consonance and dissonance the game uses in the evolution of each widget.
it's practically a hypnosis method. what is the underlying pattern in these?
If you manually decrease window.innerWidth and window.innerHeight to low values (i.e. 50 and 50) then the bouncing dvd gets triggered ceaselessly. I enjoyed this unironically :D
I thought my head was going to explode by the end... At some point during the game (right at the very end) I couldn’t even find my cursor on the screen anymore hahaha
I really don't know if I could survive nowadays internet without uBlock. The picker functionality just changes the internet for me. I can make most of the noise disappear.
I don't want to read comments, but I can’t be the only one who wrote a script to click forever and turned the page into a chaotic, laggy nightmare. Pure art honestly
I not only enjoyed it as a satire on the overstimulation problem but also learned that my compulsive-obsessive syndrome has a high correlation with overstimulation.
Major Cookie Clicker / Upgrade Complete vibes with this with a touch of social critique, love the descent into absolute chaos. Fun game and incredible artwork!
I finished the game. Got to level 32 and bought the upgrade Go to the Ocean for 2,000,000 stimulation. The audio chilled out and it went to the credits.
This is also a good example of how horrible the web has become and how inefficient JavaScript programmers are.
Even if you hit the "end" none of the elements are cleaned up so will continue to use cycles in the background. If it's supposed to be a permanent end, then you should remove all elements besides the serenity media.
i finished the game in 20mins, got a headache now. very creative, i like it.
what happens after you buy the trip to the ocean? the game hung up at this point on my phone, seemed to use a lot of RAM. lots of animations were lagging from quite early on.
OMG. I wanted to get the end, but I was doing it on mobile. I upswiped once, and leftswiped once, so it took THREE tries. The first two tries were each more than 10 minutes in. When I was finally, done, I realized I had skipped my planned workout.
Well, for the second most popular thing on HN in the last 30 days, I'm sort of struggling to figure out what this is and why people love it. I opened it and clicked like 20 times, got some icons that do nothing, and came back here. I can see from the comments that it's apparently more interesting if you drop into developer tools and automate clicking, but I assume that's not the creator's intention? No normal person is going to click 50,000 times -- what is this? It's a game? For who? Some sort of commentary on our stressful attention seeking age? Spoilers please.
My game froze up when I bought that upgrade. Not sure if that's by design or it might have been an internet hiccup. What happens when you go to the ocean?
It's a form of digital art meant to highlight the absurdity of the modern internet. Being overwhelmed by all of the forms of multimedia stimulation to finally escape to the ocean and appreciating simplicity is the point
It falls under the category of "incremental games" that are generally simple but addicting due to the dopamine release from watching those numbers go up
The genre exists in a weird place. Progress Quest is maybe the start, and then you get Cow Clicker, which was definitely a parody but took off because everyone thought it was funny, and then Wikipedia tells me AdVenture Capitalist started as a parody but then became a popular and profitable game. And that's kind of the problem with the genre: it's kind of artistically meant as a parody or a joke, but people keep liking them and wanting more, and now it's a real genre, and a few of the games (like Paperclips) have a lot of artistic value far beyond the initial "haha it's not much of a game" joke.
On its own it's not necessarily an issue, but I'd consider it a warning sign. The times in my life that I've obsessively played games like this have been times when my emotional health was suffering. I felt overwhelmed by life and the world, and games like this gave me a synthetic feeling of progress and accomplishment, gave me something extremely simple to do that I couldn't fail at. Games like this were a symptom of my problems at the time, not the cause, and when my life got more stable, I lost interest in playing them.
If they're playing in moderation, just to pass the time during otherwise-boring events, probably not an issue. If they're pretty much always playing, or if it's intruding on their life, or if they're not otherwise engaging with the world, consider worrying about their emotional health.
Thank you! I noticed too I played much more games when in low mood seasons. Especially Minecraft (inb4: yes, I'm 40yo but play Minecraft) has a lot of small quests I could achieve. Also, the old Diablo I play on my phone (DevilutionX) allows me to kill time (and beasts) but I find it repeatable, yet still satisfying.
https://stimulation-clicker.neal.fun/ sounds/true-crime.mp3 - it's hosted on Cloudflare, but even so I don't want to cost OP significant bandwidth, so join the two strings above for the direct link.
"Aww, he was all cat 'n tonic when he first saw her." An absolute classic. I would do anything to know more about how this came to exist.