Pushing Buttons: Why viral voyeurism game Clickolding became a surprise hit | Games

A man wearing a weird animalistic mask sits slumped in an armchair in a grotty motel room, watching you click a handheld tally counter. He says he will pay you $14,000 if you click until the numbers reset at 10,000 – so that’s what you do. Occasionally, he makes polite yet suggestive demands – do it faster, slower, stop, start again – but he doesn’t move except to occasionally flex his hands.

While you click, using the left mouse button, you wander the room, looking at the paintings on the wall, the detuned TV, the thermostat. But as you edge toward the end number, the man slowly begins to reveal snippets of his life, and the already dark tone of the world grows dimmer by the second. That’s it, that’s the whole game.

Since its launch on 17 July, Clickolding has drawn a lot of attention. It has garnered wide coverage in the gaming press and attracted almost 500 reviews on the PC gaming store Steam, most of which have been highly positive. But why has a strange piece of interactive art that lasts barely 40 minutes caught the imagination of critics and players?

Partly because Clickolding is a fairly obvious allegory about voyeurism and transactional sex. The man in the chair is vicariously enjoying another person using his treasured tally counter, which he describes as though it’s a romantic partner whom he can no longer satisfy. (“We’ve been together a long time. But I can’t click it the way you do.”) The relationship between the two people in the room is kept deliberately ambiguous, but we know this isn’t a hostage situation – the player is free to leave and the game ends if they open the hotel room door. And yet threat lingers in the room like a bad smell.

The player character is required to perform specific physical acts that aren’t overtly explicit, but which are clearly a turn-on for the seated man. (“You’re a steady clicker. I like that.”) But there’s also emotional labour, as the man reveals aspects of his tattered personal life. The power dynamic subtly shifts. At different times you are the servant, the carer, the partner, the stranger – all with barely any dialogue.

The game also captures something universal about the experience of being stuck in a hotel room for any length of time. While you’re there, it becomes a weird sort of transitory home, intimate – you undress there and sleep here – but also alien and oddly fascinating. Who chose the floral wallpaper, the kitsch bedside lamps, those particular paintings – and why? How does the thermostat work? What’s outside the window? Visually, the room is naturalistic and detailed – it could be a room in the latest Resident Evil or even Call of Duty.

Clickolding came about almost as an exploration of design principles. At this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, members of the studio Aggro Crab bought a clicker at a nearby thrift store, and then sat with industry pals in a hotel lobby making up games to play with it. One of those friends was Xalavier Nelson Jr, creative director at experimental indie studio Strange Scaffold, responsible for idiosyncratic titles such as Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator and An Airport for Aliens Currently Run By Dogs. According to an oral history of the night on Wired, Nelson became interested in the hyperrepetitive appeal of the clicker and began to think about how to use it in a new game project.

Clickolding continues the legacy of parody games such as Cow Clicker and Cookie Clicker, which were designed to critique the first generation of social media games such as FarmVille, in which players performed endlessly repetitive tasks to accumulate resources and level up characters. But with its adoption of mainstream game design elements – realistic visuals and first-person camera – Clickolding extends its parody to all games that rely on fast clicks to progress, whether that’s shooters or real-time strategy sims. Here, the man in the chair becomes a metaphor for the compelling game mechanic, baiting the players into being faster, better, more accurate.

As you progress steadily toward 10,000 clicks, boredom sets in, yet you feel compelled, perhaps even duty-bound, to continue while the man in the chair reveals glimpses of his broken life story. It’s weird and mundane, simultaneously uncomfortable and oddly comfortable. Perhaps the reason it has garnered so much attention is that the monotony of continually clicking a button in a dull motel allows for your own thoughts, feelings and experiences to creep into the room with you and the masked man. It’s rare for games to give us that much space to freak ourselves out.

What to play

In Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure, a cute little sort-of RPG, you play a misfit young adult on her first journey out of the town she was raised in – but the whole world is a grid of sliding tiles, and whenever you move, the line of tiles moves with you. This turns battles into sliding-block puzzles where you have to transport a sword across to a monster to slay it, and the usual towns and forests and graveyards into giant playing boards. It took a good while for me to get my head around it, but it’s a unique blend of story and puzzles that is way more interesting than a match-three. You might recognise the artist from the 2010 landmark indie game Braid.

Available on: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4/5
Estimated playtime: 6 hours

What to read

• An exceptionally thorough, well-resourced report from Bloomberg on Roblox’s “paedophile problem” makes for grimly compelling reading. Reporters Cecilia D’Anastasio and Olivia Carville speak to victims, vigilante players trying to track down in-game abusers and a Roblox developer who has been imprisoned for abducting and abusing a teenaged girl.

• Windows Central reports that Microsoft is considering even more subscription options for Xbox Game Pass, which, as readers of last week’s newsletter will know, is already too complicated. Please, have mercy.

• Our summer games preview series is back, looking at some of the hundreds of games announced in the June showcases and interviewing the people who made them. Some interesting picks so far: Cairn, the Dark Souls of climbing games; kid-friendly Curiosmos, in which you playfully explore the origins of the solar system; and Tears of Metal, a hack-and-slash game set in medieval Scotland, made by French-Canadian developers who’ve never been to Scotland but really love Braveheart. There’ll be more in the series throughout July and August.

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What to click

Question Block

Thank you for all your questions from last week – we have a good stash of them now. This week’s query comes from reader Gren:

Why do I feel as if I’m the only person playing VR games? Meta has sold more than 20m Quest headsets, compared to Series X/Series S sales of 28m. I see endless articles about Xbox, yet outside of a few Reddit forums, no one ever writes or talks about this and other VR platforms.

Keza here to answer this one. I am also very interested in the disparity between the number of Meta VR headsets sold and the number of people who appear to be using them (at least for games), as developers are not reporting huge software sales. I do get the odd email from a fellow VR enthusiast, Gren, but aside from the time around the launch of Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, it’s never been a huge topic of conversation among general players. Anecdotally, most people (myself included) just haven’t been captured by VR gaming beyond the novelty factor. Interestingly, when we do put out articles about VR games, very few people read them. The same is true for mobile gaming, actually.

That might go some way towards explaining why you don’t see much VR coverage in the mainstream and specialist games media – but as I’m sure you’re aware, there is a lively community of VR enthusiasts on Reddit, Discord and other forums. If you’re looking for more, Eurogamer’s Ian Higton does regular entertaining VR coverage on YouTube.

If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on [email protected].