In June, Edwin described One Million Checkboxes, a website with a million checkboxes that players could check or uncheck, with each change perceptible to all other site visitors. It became an obsession for some in the two weeks the site was online, as players struggled to fill in all the boxes or undo their peers’ work.
The combat was a lot more complicated than it seemed, as the game’s creator recently explained, as some players found ways to encode hidden messages into the checkboxes.
“Half a million people visited the site within days of its launch. People checked 650,000,000 mailboxes in the 2 weeks I had the site online,” wrote Nolen Royalty in a recent Twitter thread.
With so many players, Nolen was worried that people would operate checkboxes to write offensive messages on such a immense public canvas. His solution was to adjust the rows of checkboxes to the size of the browser, meaning that messages written with the checkboxes would only be aligned and 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 it worked well; we weren’t stuck with gross 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 check boxes. Each check box was essentially a bit—the simplest unit of information in computing. A bit is either a 0 or a 1, just as a check box is unchecked or checked.
At some point, Nolen was rewriting the backend to keep the site online when so many players were using it at once, and he decided to “throw the database into ASCII.” ASCII is basically the code that stores text in computers. “I have no idea why I did it. I just did it.”
What you would normally expect in this situation is complete gibberish, as checkboxes are replaced with random strings of letters and numbers. Instead, Nolen found messages—specifically, website URLs.
“The URL with the word “catgirls” in it was in my database and I PANICED. I thought I had been hacked! I started searching through my code, searching through my logs, trying to find the problem.”
The website wasn’t hacked, though. Instead, while some players were fighting each other by checking and unchecking checkboxes, others were using the checkboxes to write messages in binary code. Apparently, they wrote a bot that would play these messages if someone came in and checked or unchecked an crucial box. The URL? It led to a Discord called “Checking Boxes,” where a compact number of players had gathered. Players are understandably excited when the game’s creator suddenly appears on their server.
One Discord member asks Nolen if he’s viewed the game as a 1000×1000 image yet. When he did, it looked like this:
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“The discord was full of very smart teenagers who were secretly writing this message to gather other very smart teenagers,” Nolen writes. “And it totally worked!! There were 15 people when I joined the discord, but over 60 when I closed the page. (The discord is now hidden.)”
Over the course of two weeks, these players used their bots to create a blue screen of death that filled almost the entire playgroundhe covered it in other memes and logosand he even managed to create an animated rickroll:
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“It was sick. It was so cool. And it moved me,” Nolen writes. “I spent my childhood doing stupid things on my computer. People generally didn’t get mad at me when I repeatedly broke the school email server, for example.
“Without this support, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now.
“So just giving myself a little bit of encouragement — having a playground like this, seeing what people are doing and telling them how much I love it — was really meaningful to me.”
“A lot of people were mad about the bots on OMCB. I totally get that. Bots can be frustrating. But the people on this Discord were so creative, so talented, so cool! The pranksters of today will be the ones making the games of tomorrow,” he concluded. “I can’t wait to see what this Discord will make.”
I’m a substantial fan Nolen’s workincluding the staring game we wrote about earlier, because it evokes an older, more experimental, more fun version of the internet. Its site’s slogan is “The internet can still be fun!” and players doing silly, mischievous things is part of that same spirit. Good job, everyone.
