In June, Edwin covered One Million Checkboxes, a website with one million checkboxes that players can check or uncheck, with any changes visible to all other visitors to the site. In the two weeks the website has been online, it has become an obsession for some, as players struggle to fill in all the boxes or get their friends' jobs back.
As the developer recently explained, the challenge was much more complicated than it seemed, with some players finding ways to code secret messages into checkboxes.
“Half a million people visited the site a few days after launch. In the 2 weeks I've had the site online, people have checked 650,000,000 boxes,” Nolen Royalty wrote in a recent Twitter post.
With so many people playing, Nolen was concerned that people would use the checkboxes to write offensive messages in such a large public space. His solution was to scale the checkbox rows to the size of your browser, meaning messages written through the checkboxes would only align and be readable at certain widths.
“This meant that if you drew something on your phone it wouldn't show up on my laptop and vice versa. I think this worked well; we didn't get bogged down in obnoxious graffiti and because the restriction was subtle most people didn't even notice,” he writes.
But that wasn't the only way to create messages in checkboxes. Each checkbox was actually a bit – the most basic unit of information in computing. A bit is either a 0 or a 1, like a checkbox being checked or unchecked.
At one point, Nolen rewrote the backend to keep the website online and decided to “dump the database to ASCII” when many players were using it at the same time. ASCII is basically the code that stores text in computers. “I don't know why I did it. I just did it.”
What you would normally expect to see in this case is completely meaningless, with the checkboxes being turned into random strings of letters and numbers. Instead, Nolen found messages — specifically, website URLs.
“There was a URL in my database that said 'catgirls' and I PANICTED. I thought I had been hacked! I started looking through my code, my logs, trying to find the problem.”
The website hadn’t been hacked, though. Instead, some players were fighting each other to check and uncheck boxes, while others were using checkboxes to type messages in binary. Apparently, they’d written a bot to recreate these messages if someone came along and asked to check or uncheck a vital box. The URL? It pointed to a Discord called “Checking Boxes,” where a handful of players had gathered. Players were understandably excited when the game’s creator suddenly appeared on their server.
One of the Discord members then asked Nolen if he had ever looked at the game as a 1000×1000 image. When he did, it looked like this:
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“Discord was full of really smart guys, and they were secretly writing this message to get other really smart guys together,” Nolen writes. “And it totally worked!! When I joined Discord there were 15 people, but when I shut it down there were over 60. (Discord is now private)”
Over the course of two weeks, these players used their bots to create a blue screen of death image that took up almost the entirety of the playing field, covered it with other memes and logos, and even managed to create an animated rickroll:
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“It was sick. It was cool. And I found that very impressive,” Nolen writes. “I spent my childhood doing stupid things on the computer. For example, when I repeatedly crashed my school mail server, people didn't get mad at me.
“Without this encouragement, I wouldn't be able to do what I do now.
“So to give myself a little encouragement — to provide that kind of a playground, to see what people are doing and tell them how much I love it — it meant so much to me.”
“A lot of people were upset with the bots on OMCB. I totally get it. Bots can be annoying. But the people on this Discord were so creative, so talented, so cool! The mischief makers of today will be the games of tomorrow,” he concluded. “I can't wait to see what this Discord does.”
I'm a big fan of Nolen's work, including the staring game we've written about before, because it evokes an older, more experimental, more playful version of the internet. His site's slogan is “The internet can still be fun!” and having players do silly, mischievous things is part of that spirit. Well done, everyone.