Clickolding: fear, isolation, and god [REVIEW]
Rhianne Ward
Note: this post has been transferred over from my old Wordpress blog. I could go through the trouble of reformatting everything with supporting images and italicisation and whatever else, but I don't really have time to do all that unfortunately, and I'd prefer to spend my time writing new things than labouring over the old. So, if anything looks a little weird or messy, that's why. I hope you enjoy it regardless!
Clickolding is a game that is basically impossible to recommend with a straight face. I mean, look at that title. What do you expect this to be other than exactly what it says on the tin? You click a clicker endlessly for the sexual gratification of a creepy guy in a bizarre mask and a bloodied shirt sitting in the cuck chair of a stanky old motel room. You do that 10,000 times, and then the game ends. It’s around 40 minutes to an hour, depending how fast your fingers are.
So how does a game like that have anything to say about…anything? Well, bozo, all art is inherently about something, even when it tries not to be, so jot that down! Besides, Clickolding‘s talkative poster boy is a character with an internal life, struggles, flaws, doubts, and so on, all of which he is basically desperate to share with you. In between his commands to carry out tasks before continuing clicking, he’ll say something strange like “what would my wife say if she saw me here” or something else to that effect. In the time you spend with this guy, you are painted the picture of a deeply ashamed, high insecure, unstable man on the edge of breaking. In many ways, it feels like this activity between you and him is the only thing he has left. It’s a deeply uncomfortable atmosphere to be subjected to.
To tell truth, I hated playing this game, at least for a while. Don’t get me wrong; this was by design, I’m sure. You’re meant to sit there and feel the tedium, after you get used to the eyes burning holes into your own from across the room. This premise is obviously evoking sex work, and captures that experience of being at the beck and call of a complete stranger, no matter how strange the requests, really effectively. I’d be curious to hear from actual current/former sex workers’ experiences with this game, because it’s not a profession I’ve worked in personally so I can’t speak to the emotional accuracy of it. However, if I had to guess, I think this is at least a glimpse into the more uncomfortable parts of that world. For a while, I had assumed that was what this game was ultimately trying to convey; the sensation of being in service to a threatening man with all of the power, who could quite easily use that power against you should he desire it. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling to endure for half an hour, but I understood that it wasn’t supposed to be, and was ready to make my peace with that.
But then, the ending happens, and Clickolding becomes something much more profound.
- SPOILERS AHEAD -
While playing the game, you spend a lot of time either in silence or listening to the mundane ramblings of this weird, sad guy, so you have a lot of free time to let the mind wander. I started thinking about what this game might be saying beyond the obvious sex work allegory. I juggled with the possibility of Clickolding as a metaphor for the relationship between a creator and their audience (or in this case, developer and player). I wondered if maybe the game was a sort of darkly comedic interpretation of the pleasure in guiding someone through your art, and showing off your creations. It felt a bit like that with the game sending me on a guided tour of this tiny motel room, having me interact with every single object, admire the paintings, even do a key searching puzzle briefly.
There’s a line from the man about how he used to click the clicker, but now it isn’t the same, which is why you need to do it for him, and I wondered if that was an expression of the rift between making games as a job and enjoying them as art. As a writer, I often feel like my brain can’t help but notice imperfections in a person’s paragraphing or choice of vocabulary, and it can cause me to connect less with the piece, even if it’s actually quite compelling. Once you know the secret behind the trick, the magic is lost somewhat.
But that highly personal reading never really felt right to me, because the game was still too interested in the player’s participation in this story. I’d get little moments like that, they’d pass me by, and I’d just keep clicking. The only constant seemed to be that you had to follow the man’s orders – the game will not let you click until you carry them out – and then keep on clicking. As you near the end, the man begins to worry about if you judge him for what he does, wonders why you’re doing this too, and all his words seem to indicate that he believes you’re controlling him, not the other way around. When the last couple hundred clicks begin, he pulls out a gun, holds it to his head, and begs you to finish what you’ve started. You do so, despite knowing what will happen once you click that final click. You hesitate near the end, he pleads with you one last time, and you think, ‘well, I’ve come this far, might as well finish the job’. You click, he pulls the trigger, and drops dead to the floor.
Credits roll. A song plays over the names – taking today, by the presumably fictional band Chad and the Shakespeares (Chatting Shakespeares? Not sure lol) – which talks about the end of the world, and how because it’s the end we all might as well throw caution to the wind, make out with each other, confess everything, and be our true selves. Listening to it, I get this bizarre feeling. Life is finite, and I’m sat here in my bed, playing a clicker game to get a video game character off who ended up killing himself anyway. What’s the point? Why do we click?
The credits end, and rather than being booted back to the menu, we remain in the motel room. The man is lying dead on the ground, my hand and the clicker are spattered with blood, and, of course, I can keep clicking. So I do, for a little while. Why not, right? I’ve already done it 10,000 times, what’s a few more? I stop to look around the room, and a voice says in ominous tones, “don’t stop“. Panicked, I launch right back into it. I hit 100 clicks and the painting on the wall moves. 200 and it moves again. It’s rotating, and becoming brighter with every movement. I go to 300, 400, 500…the painting keeps moving and changing. I get the sense that I wasn’t meant to see this. I hit 1000 again and it settles, now a bright white light searing into my eyes.
I climb inside. I’m met by a featureless white void, its sole inhabitant a textureless model of the man, sitting in a familiar chair, with an enormous tally behind him. It’s showing how many clicks I’ve clicked. He talks about how I wasn’t supposed to see this, that it was meant to be just me, the man, the room, and the clicker. He talks about memory, the little impacts of every experience we have had and will ever have, and how we don’t choose what affects us. “There is no innocent contact where a soul is involved“, he says. I don’t think about it too much. I’m too busy clicking. He says I can keep clicking if I like. I can click in this void, or back in the motel room; with this acquaintance, or my own company. It doesn’t matter how you click; the fact that you clicked at all is what’s important.
So why do we click? What compels us to go through such a monotonous task? It surely isn’t for fun or satisfaction; after all, the reward for clicking in this instance is the promise of further aimless clicking. Is it an escape? A way for us to switch off from the rest of the world and just do something mindless for a while? Well, if anything, I wanted more than anything to escape this game for the majority of its runtime, and the constant interruptions and commands made it so I could never really settle into a mindless rhythm. AND YET, here we are, at the end of everything, and still we click.
At a certain point, I think I just wanted to see what would happen. I’m a content whore by nature; I love to try all sorts of games, movies, TV shows, and be surprised by what I find. I don’t seek out fun necessarily…just something engaging; something honest, and Clickolding is nothing if not honest. However, when the game placed me back in the motel and allowed me to keep clicking, I couldn’t help but feel empty. I was clicking, sure, but for what? I think, for as much as I could barely stand to look at that creepy masked guy edging in the corner of this nasty room, his presence gave the task purpose. He provided a mission to follow through on, and gave the clicking a context, however weird it might be. Without him, I was left with nothing. Just myself and a clicker. The figure at the end almost felt like some kind of divine intervention, with God revealing himself at my lowest point to reassure me that life isn’t meaningless because he’s always there, hiding in plain sight, watching me click that clicker. Even alone, I could stand the silence, because somewhere, somehow, I was being witnessed. Somehow, this parody sex game called Clickolding allowed me a context in which I could better understand the appeal of believing in a higher power. If I was alone – truly alone – in this world, what else is there to do but hope for a reality where that is impossible?
Ultimately, Clickolding is a game that purposefully confounds. It presents you with an absurd situation, subverts your expectations of it, then throws an absolutely batshit post-credits sequence in your face like that’s normal. It wants you to feel uncomfortable and confused and wonder why you ever decided to boot it up in the first place. It wants you to ask yourself a deeply important question: why do you click? It doesn’t have an answer for you. That’s for you to figure out.
Me? I click because I know there are others who will hear it, and maybe even click alongside me. The sound, the feeling of watching the number tick slowly up, the sensation of the button under my thumb…that doesn’t go away. Maybe others will get it, and maybe they won’t, but at the very least, it was real.
