Table of Contents
TO A man in a strange animal mask sits hunched in an armchair in a rundown motel room and watches you click away at a portable counter. He tells you he’ll pay you $14,000 if you click until the numbers reset to 10,000, so that’s what you do. Occasionally, he makes polite but suggestive demands (do it faster, slower, stop, start again), but he doesn’t move, except to flex his hands occasionally.
As you left-click, you move around the room, looking at the pictures on the wall, the untuned TV, the thermostat. But as you get closer to the final number, the man slowly begins to reveal bits and pieces of his life, and the already dark tone of the world grows dimmer by the second. That’s it, that’s the game.
Since its release on July 17, Clickolding has been attracting a lot of attention. It has received extensive coverage in the gaming press and attracted nearly 500 reviews on the PC game store Steam, most of which have been very positive. But why has a strange piece of interactive art that lasts just 40 minutes caught the attention of critics and gamers?
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 prized tally counter, which he describes as if they were a romantic partner he can no longer satisfy. (“We’ve been together for a long time, but I can’t click like 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 the threat lingers in the room like a bad smell.
The player character must perform specific physical acts that aren’t overtly explicit, but are clearly arousing to the seated man. (“You’re a constant clicker. I like that.”) But there’s emotional labor, too, as the man reveals aspects of his tattered personal life. The power dynamics shift subtly. At different times you’re the servant, the caretaker, the companion, the stranger, all with barely any dialogue.
The game also captures something universal about the experience of being stuck in a hotel room for an extended period of time. While you’re there, it becomes a kind of strange, transitional home—intimate (you undress there and sleep here), but also strange and oddly fascinating. Who chose the floral wallpaper, the kitschy 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 from the latest Resident Evil or even Call of Duty.
Clickolding began 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 down with industry friends in a hotel lobby to invent games to play with it. One of those friends was Xalavier Nelson Jr., creative director of the experimental indie studio Strange scaffoldingresponsible for such idiosyncratic titles as Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator and An Airport for Aliens currently Run By Dogs. According to An oral history of Wired’s nightlifeNelson became interested in the clicker’s hyper-repetitive appeal and began thinking about how to use it in a new game project.
Clickolding continues the legacy of parody games like Cow Clicker and Cookie Clicker, which were designed to critique the first generation of social networking games like FarmVille, in which players performed endlessly repetitive tasks to accumulate resources and level up characters. But with its adoption of conventional game design elements (realistic visuals and a first-person camera), Clickolding extends its parody to all games that rely on quick clicks to advance, whether they’re shooters or real-time strategy simulators. Here, the man in the chair becomes a metaphor for the game’s mechanics, urging players to be faster, better, and more precise.
As you progress toward 10,000 clicks, boredom sets in, but you feel compelled, maybe even forced, to continue as the man in the chair reveals glimpses of his broken life story. It’s strange and mundane, awkward and strangely comfortable at the same time. Maybe the reason it’s garnered so much attention is that the monotony of continually clicking a button in a boring motel allows your own thoughts, feelings, and experiences to sneak into the room with you and the masked man. It’s rare that games give us so much room to be scared.
What to play
In Arranger: A role-playing puzzle adventurea cute RPG, where you play a young adult misfit on her first trip outside the town she grew up in, but the entire 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 carry a sword to a monster to kill it, and the usual towns, forests, and graveyards into giant game boards. It took me a while to figure out, but it’s a unique mix of story and puzzles that’s way more interesting than a match-three game. You might recognize the artist from the landmark 2010 indie game Braid.
Available in: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4/5
Estimated playing time: 6 hours
What to read
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An exceptionally comprehensive and well-resourced Bloomberg report on Roblox’s “pedophile problem” It’s a grim and gripping read. Reporters Cecilia D’Anastasio and Olivia Carville speak to victims, vigilante players trying to track down in-game abusers, and a Roblox developer who’s been jailed for kidnapping and abusing a teenage girl.
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Windows Central reports Microsoft is considering even more subscription options for Xbox Game Pass, which, as readers of last week’s newsletter will know, is already overly complicated. Please have mercy.
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Our Summer Game Preview series is back, looking back at some of the hundreds of games announced at 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, created by French-Canadian developers who’ve never been to Scotland but really love Braveheart. There will be more in the series throughout July and August.
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What to click on?
Block of questions
Thanks for all the questions last week. We now have a good number of them. This week’s question comes from a reader. Green:
Because I feel? Like I’m the only person playing VR games? Goal Has sold more than 20 million Search headphones, compared to X Series/S Series Sales of 28 million. I see endless articles about Xboxstill outside Some Reddit forums, but no one writes or talks about this and other VR platforms.
Keza is here to answer this question. I’m also very interested in the disparity between the number of Meta VR headsets sold and the number of people who seem to be using them (at least for gaming), as developers don’t report huge software sales. I get the occasional email from a VR enthusiast, Gren, but aside from around the time around the launch of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, it’s never been a big topic of conversation among gamers in general. According to some anecdotes, most people (myself included) just haven’t been drawn to VR gaming beyond the novelty factor. Interestingly, when we publish articles about VR gaming, very few people read them. Same goes for mobile gaming, actually.
That might partly explain why you don’t see much VR coverage in the gaming and trade media, but as you’re probably aware, there’s an active community of VR enthusiasts on Reddit, Discord and other forums. If you’re looking for more information, Eurogamer’s Ian Higton has Regular and entertaining VR coverage on YouTube.
If you have a question for Question Block, or anything else to say about the newsletter, please reply or email us at pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.