# One Million Checkboxes

One Million Checkboxes was a free web-based incremental game created and developed by 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 checking and unchecking 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 saw thousands of participants and more than 650 million check and uncheck actions being taken before it was shut down two weeks after it began. Methods such as Internet bots, scripting languages, and hacking were used to rapidly check and uncheck boxes.
The Washington Post described One Million Checkboxes as "the most pointless website on the planet" but praised the game for providing "pointless joy", while The New York Times noted that the site became "an unintentional case study in human behavior".

## Gameplay

One Million Checkboxes was a simple website that contained one million checkboxes, with users being able to check or uncheck the boxes by clicking or tapping. Players saw the same checkboxes and could watch as boxes they checked or unchecked changed from the interactions of other players. Some of the boxes had different colored outlines, which served no particular purpose. The page displayed the overall number of checked boxes as well as a player's own count of boxes they had checked and unchecked.
A couple of days after the game's release, its developer added a feature that locked check boxes if they remained checked for a certain amount of time. The game ended 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.

## Activity

As thousands of players began to participate, different behaviors emerged. The first box was checked most often, followed by the boxes with colored outlines. Some players checked as many boxes as they could, while others behaved competitively to uncheck as many boxes as they could. Players also used the checkboxes to write messages or make creative designs, 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 then collaborating on elaborate ways to hack the game, such as by rapidly updating boxes to encode moving GIFs of actor Jake Gyllenhaal. 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.
* Grid showing a Microsoft Windows blue screen of death
* Grid showing a collection of GIFs and Internet memes
* Grid showing a rickroll GIF
* Grid showing how users encoded color, most clearly seen used to draw the character Niko from the indie game OneShot

## Development

One Million Checkboxes was created by Nolen Royalty (also known as eieio), a 32-year-old American software engineer and video game developer based in Brooklyn. Royalty had previously developed multiple other games, including ones about staring contests, a bouncing DVD-Video logo, converting blinks into Morse code, and playing rock paper scissors with a stranger. Royalty developed One Million Checkboxes over 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.
Royalty first shared the game on the Twitter on June 26, 2024, and it quickly went viral through Twitter and other social networking services, including Mastodon, Reddit, and Hacker News. Due to the game's rapid uptake, Royalty had to quickly and repeatedly add server capacity, as well as deal with multiple website crashes. According to Royalty's blog, he and a friend rewrote the backend in Go, a high-level programming language, to better handle the large volume of usage.

## Reception

As of July 3, 2024, Royalty estimated that 400,000 unique people had visited One Million Checkboxes. 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. Writing for The New York Times, Callie Holtermann stated that the game had become "an unintentional case study in internet behavior" and "cycled rapidly through the stages of internet maturity, serving as something of a microcosm of the joys and horrors of digital life".
Writers from TechRadar, USA Today, and India's The Telegraph agreed that the game was addictive. 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. 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 value of the simple, menial task, raising questions about the appreciation for small tasks and the impact of automation on human interaction".
In December 2024, The Washington Post gave One Million Checkboxes an honorable mention in its list of "5 actually good things that happened in technology this year", stating that it "showed that technology can be silly fun and bring out the best in us". That same month, The New York Times included the game in the "The Delight" section of its recap of brief viral moments in 2024.