Fried memes and hysterical gibberish suffocate the internet nowadays. Every platform is thronged in digital chaos: psychedelic and surreal Instagram Reel art; X users cracking jokes about “gigachads”; an 8-year-old influencer nicknamed the Rizzler. The deranged nonsense dominating the web recently led the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary to name “brain rot” its word of the year.
While brain rot can refer to harm, like the way screen addiction can wither attention spans, it can also be humorous and fun, like mega-distorted images and edits. A new browser-based game, Stimulation Clicker, turns brain rot into a joyous pastime while also satirizing how awful it can feel to mainline the web.
Stimulation Clicker revolves around a simple concept: Tap a button to get a “Stimulation,” the game’s form of currency. Players use Stimulations to buy upgrades, which are all internet ephemera: gameplay from the mobile hit Subway Surfers; a mukbang A.S.M.R. clip; a hydraulic press crushing clay.
These videos begin to fill up the screen and rack up passive Stimulations (so you do not even have to click the button), which let you buy even more expensive and powerful upgrades. By the end, tens of thousands of Stimulations accrue every second as the screen judders with clips, lights and sounds.
“I wanted to capture the experience of being terminally online,” said the game’s creator, Neal Agarwal. “Everything is vying for your attention. It almost causes a feeling of vertigo, where you become nauseous. You’re not even sure what’s important to you anymore.”
Agarwal has made a variety of browser-based oddities and has said his list of game ideas has reached 1,500 and is still growing. But Stimulation Clicker was extra meaningful for Agarwal, 27, who said he was basically “patient zero” for screen addiction. He grew up obsessed with internet forums and Scratch, the kiddie-oriented, block-based coding platform that got him into game production.
Stimulation Clicker, which took four months to develop, was inspired by Cookie Clicker, the idle tapping game, and Upgrade Complete, which pioneered the meta idea of upgrading the game itself as you are playing.
What makes Stimulation Clicker thrill is how cheekily accurate and intricate the gameplay is. One upgrade allows players to stack Stimulations by completing Duolingo questions; another gives players a fictional email inbox that comes complete with fraud messages. Late in the game, players can multiply their Stimulations by riskily investing in stocks and crypto coins.
Agarwal teased he had even more ideas that did not make it in, like a dating app that would let players swipe on suitors. He also wanted to let people participate in remote jobs and take imaginary Zoom meetings.
While no definitive science shows that the internet rots brains, one expert, Dr. Meredith Gansner, said it was possible that excessive internet use could alter one’s cognitive functioning.
“A phenomenon called ‘mental fatigue’ exists, characterized by drowsiness and feeling like one’s brain is perhaps less capable at processing information than before,” said Dr. Gansner, who works in psychiatry at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. “Mental fatigue is often described after bouts of intense cognitive engagement, so long periods of internet use involving rapid-fire digital stimuli and information overload could qualify.”
Stimulation Clicker offers a hypercharged microdose of this kind of fatigue, letting players speedrun their way to a brain-breaking amount of content. (The popular streamer Ludwig provided a 10-minute clip of him doing squats, eating a sandwich and basically gesticulating at nothing.) The game feels true to how digital disarray can overwhelm the psyche, making it feel like a thousand tabs are running in your mind at once.
Luckily, light is at the end of the tunnel.
Once your screen is drowned in stimuli, you can purchase the Ocean, which teleports you to a placid, water-soaked horizon. It’s the end. Agarwal knew he could have kept Stimulation Clicker going forever since the upgrade system is mesmerizing. But he did not want to be a hypocrite by hooking people to a game about screen addiction.
“I wanted to capture that feeling of when you finally get out of the brain rot hole,” he said. “How good that initially feels, when everything is suddenly quiet again.”
