One Million Checkboxes

One Million Checkboxes was a free web-based incremental game created and developed by American software engineer Nolen Royalty in 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.

On July 11, 2024, Royalty announced on X that all the boxes had been unchecked, but that once a box was checked and left that way for a certain period of time, it would freeze, effectively sunsetting the site. Approximately four hours later, Royalty said that the game was over, as every box had been checked.

Gameplay
One Million Checkboxes was a simple website that contained only one million checkboxes, with users 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 and the specific player's own count of boxes they had checked and unchecked. Later on, additional statistics were posted to a separate page, albeit without labels and simply called "some numbers, updated sometimes".



As thousands of players began to participate, different behaviors emerged. 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. Bots were developed to check and uncheck boxes at high speed.

Development
Royalty developed One Million Checkboxes over two days after a conversation with friend Neal Agarwal, inspired by frivolous websites from the early days of the Internet. He bought the URL for $10 and coded the site in Python. Royalty first shared the game on social network X on June 26, 2024, and it quickly went viral through social networks X and Mastodon, and through website Hacker News. Because of the game's rapid uptake, Royalty had to quickly and repeatedly add server capacity and dealt with multiple website crashes.

Reception
As of July 3, 2024, Royalty estimated that 400,000 unique people have visited One Million Checkboxes. Writing for The Washington Post, Shira Ovide called it "fantastic" and referred to it as "the most pointless website on the planet." Writing for The New York Times, Callie Holtermann said that it became "an unintentional case study in internet behavior" and that it "cycled rapidly through the stages of internet maturity, serving as something of a microcosm of the joys and horrors of digital life."