Stimulation is what we live for. We go outside to be stimulated. We say that we want to stay home to relax and disengage, but really, we spend a lot of this time on our devices—getting stimulated. Try as we may, we can’t escape our desire for stimulation. As a result of our relationship with technology, how many of us are so stressed that we are trying to reduce screen time or even opt out of having a smartphone?
On one of my recent bouts of getting overstimulated and doomscrolling to the bottom—at this point, I don’t even know if I do this willingly or if I’m addicted—I encountered a post about a game called Stimulation Clicker by designer Neal Agarwal. An odd work, Stimulation Clicker is barely a game in standard terms. It’s a clicker game or idle game like Julien Thiennot’s Cookie Clicker (2013) and last year’s Banana Clicker.
In Stimulation Clicker, you frantically click a button at the center of the screen. The main draw is that numbers incrementally increase as you continue to click that tantalizing button. It’s like scrolling through an app and seeing new content or receiving a response after posting. Whilst clicking away, you can spend amassed clicks banked to buy distractions, I mean upgrades, that passively increase your click meter or multiply their value. Beware! This is sadistically comforting and eventually becomes a huge hassle and cognitive overload.
Here lies its genius. Stimulation Clicker is not concerned with you, the player, the zombie, having a good time. Stimulation Clicker is about revealing to you, the clicker, that your rush for dopamine in the digital age is boring, pointless, and unhealthy. Maybe you go to great lengths to avoid doom-scrolling in your daily life. Still, in much modern work, you must answer hundreds of emails and look at a screen for at least eight hours. Maybe in your spare time, you love watching live-streaming content from streamers like Ludwig Ahgren (featured in this game). Maybe you use technology to improve yourself by learning a language on Duolingo or exercising using workout videos. Stimulation Clicker simulates all this gradually and then all at once. It is nauseating by design.
While clicking away, the game, in a way, transported me outside my body. I was spectating myself! It was pathetic. I clicked and watched as a man ate obscene amounts of food on the left side of my screen. An endless runner game ran on the bottom right on a loop, all while the flashing images and sounds on the screen crescendoed into a cacophony of digital despair. I have never been more depressed playing a game. It was illuminating.
This barrage of stimuli quickly overstays its welcome. This is intentional by designer Neal Agarwal. I’ve grappled with the pernicious game design of games like Vampire Survivor (2022) and Balatro (2024) whose simplistic gameplay is a trojan horse for addictive game design. A problem I encounter with these video games is their fundamental design. They are made to be played seemingly forever with their infinite variations and irresistible gameplay loops. I can’t put games like that down. They make me feel like a junky.
Stimulation Clicker is meant to come to an end. After a certain point, you must stop. The experience becomes ever more torturous. Or if you endure, like I did, you eventually reach a peaceful end after about an hour.
Stimulation Clicker forces us to introspect how we use or are used by technology. Regardless of what you want from your screens, the game implies you probably don’t need it. Take some time and touch grass, as the kids say. Go to the beach sometime. Marvel at the waves as they hit the shore. Throw your phone in the salty water and watch it disappear. Click no more.
This is a fantasy, of course. You must click and will click forever until you die. Stimulation Clicker, by overwhelming the player past a breaking point, shows us the absurdity of the relationship we built with tools meant to improve our lives. Are they worth it?